Quick synopsis:
Yup, Kristen has got her blog going again. I know she plans on talking more about our families shift to an organic lifestyle, gardening, shell hunting, and fun stuff for our kids.
Kristen was a pretty successful mom-blogger when that fad was hot. She got burnt out with all the free product people sent us to review so I think she’s going to avoid that this time around.
She and I sat down yesterday to talk about a new look for her blog… let me know what you think. We were looking to create something fresh, open, and elegant. (Yes, the shell is one she found in a neighborhood in Haiti. Only Kristen could find a shell in a path a mile from the ocean amidst all that garbage!)
Most people read my blog via RSS or Facebook these days. (Roughly 50%) So if you are one of those people you won’t notice a few of these changes to my blog. Here’s a few updates, nothing death defying.
I’m always adding and playing with stuff on my blog. This is kind of my test site for all the other sites I manage. So if something looks funky from time-to-time, now you know why.
The last two years has brought a dramatic shift on the axis of the blogging community. With the wide adoption of social media consumption there are a lot fewer daily bloggers and a lot more micro-bloggers.
The net result is a world full of newbies posting things online.
- Use your own images.
- Create your own.
- Use images published under a Creative Commons license, properly cited and linking back, from Flickr. (Share and share alike. If you use CC images, make sure to post some as well!) Just make sure to read the usage rights… typically using an image for commercial purposes is a no-no.
- Buy stock photography from iStockphoto or something similar.
Just like in a sport– there aren’t always dramatic consequences when you breach etiquette. But there are social ramifications! Trust me, people are watching what you do online. They are making judgements about your abilities and character. Just like you try to act polite and use proper etiquette in the physical world… you are responsible for your own actions online.
Have an etiquette question? Leave a comment and I will add to the list as needed.
Missionaries know it. Businesses know it. Documentarians film it. Marketers make money from it. But what is it? It is ethnography.
Ethnography ????? ethnos = people and ??????? graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitativefieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot
necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.It doesn’t matter if you are a youth pastor in a community. An insurance salesman. A high school math teacher. Or a physician. If you want to succeed in a community, you need to take the time to understand how the community works. Understanding ethnography helps you understand how the people think, how the politics of both elected and unelected people control things, and understand how cultural phenomenon dictate community behavior. (Holidays, local business practices, etc)
Here’s the thing. Most doctors, pastors, insurance salesmen, and high school math teachers that fail, do so for cultural reasons and not because they are bad doctors, pastors, salesmen, or teachers. They fail because they failed to grasp the culture they are working in. Yet they blame themselves, their training, or even the people they want to sell to, provide services for, or teach for their failure!
Success at Romeo depends not just on us teaching doctrine and working hard. It depends heavily on us adapting and developing methods to reach our community by first understanding how the community works. Stick with me. Read the rest
Looking through blog posts in 2007, I can see my blog taking a big turn. For years I just blogged about what was going on in my daily life. Occasionally, I tossed in a thought or a principle. But in 2007, posts like this one started to creep up as I found a more comfortable voice.
The biggest advice I have for anyone who wants to get started in blogging is… write, a lot!
One thing I don’t like about an old house is that it is very hard to keep it warm. It’s a combination of a lack of insulation and inadequate duct work. If I had to do this house over again I would have installed radiated heat… but instead we have a blended system of forced air and electric heat. The result is that some areas are warmish while other areas are constantly drafty.
It’s been a joke of visitors that our house is always cold. People say “We’re going to Adam’s house, we need to dress warm.” Or my personal favorite is a friend of mine who says “We McLane their house sometimes.” (Now we’re a verb?) Why? Um, pretty simple… we can’t afford to keep our old house at 72 degrees. Even at 65 during the day and 58 at night, we’re a little worried about energy costs this winter.
As much as we love San Diego, we still miss our house in Romeo. It’s a great place to live and I’m happy to hear that someone is finally living there again. I just hope they figure out a good way to heat it before winter!
Hey, a buddy of mine and I launched a website lately for youth workers to connect up. This is filling the forum void left behind since YS closed their forums back in June.
Anyway, check it out at ymexchange.com
This changed everything. As I look back on the last several years, no event changed my life more than creating Youth Ministry Exchange.
For years the youth ministry world was pretty self-contained. There were a limited number of players and it seemed impossible to get your foot in the door anywhere.
So we created a new door.
Within a month we created massive traffic for our new business. We had some sense that what we were creating was important– but the truth is we had no idea what we were doing. We were even afraid to call it a business. We didn’t have any of the legal stuff done. We never had a business plan. We never spent $1 on marketing. And the two original owners have STILL never met. 3.5 years later I was sitting in an office at Zondervan signing paperwork and waiting for a bank transfer as we sold Youth Ministry Exchange, LLC to Youth Specialties. It’s mind boggling.
How in the world does a guy go from being a no-name youth pastor at a church of 150 to shaking hands and receiving a check from the CEO of a major publishing company in 3.5 years? Simple: Looking at closed doors and building an open one to walk through.
Want my advice? If you have an idea that you are absolutely passionate about… do it. Do it now. The idea and the opportunity are never going to get better than they are today. But invest less than $100. If it’s a good idea it won’t make a difference if you invest $100 trying it out or $100,000. (Donald Trump may be good, but that guy has led his company into bankruptcy three times! Never finance an idea with debt. Pure and simple.)
Again this month we are short financially. Grad school came calling. Preschool came calling. Uncle Sam gets his cut in a few days. A combination of expected and unexpected expenses draws a little more money from savings to checking in a constant game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Life’s expenses are again expensive. Each time this happens to me I start to reminisce about what life could have been like for Kristen and Megan and Paul. Had we stayed on the path of corporate success in Chicago we wouldn’t have this to worry about. The bills always got paid in full. There was always a little extra at the end of the month. We could always surprise someone with a special gift. Vacation? No problem. New tires? How about the best? New clothes? Why not. Yet in the same moments I recall the emptiness I had as I laid in bed at night, longing for my life to be wasted for something more important than getting richer… or more precisely, helping rich people get richer.
It’s 2010. I am still here. I am still wasting my life. And I still love every minute of it.
As many people noted, yesterday my site(s) suffered a pretty ugly malware attack. For Mac users this was pretty benign and transparent, but for PC users the site(s) had a weird pop-up thing that tried to redirect you to another site.
My sincere apologies to anyone who may have had problems.
I still have no clue how my sites were hacked or for what purpose. Since tens of thousands of other sites were hacked at the same time it seems as though someone just sought to disrupt and exploit the internet in general instead of specific sites. There is a hypothesis that the sites were infected at the server level, meaning they wouldn’t have attacked me personally, just any site on a shared server.
I maintain my WordPress sites in the recommended way. All of my WordPress sites are running the latest version, 2.9.2. All of my plug-ins are updated. All of my passwords are “strong.” In other words, I’ve done everything possible to prevent something like this from happening.
All that to say, I’m back to normal. (Or as normal as I get) And thanks for your patience.
If you want to read about the nasty bug my sites had, the solution, and the discussion, here are some links:
Thank you to the amazing WordPress community and especially David at Sucuri.net for writing some code to fix the problem.
You now have the ability to post your comment at adammclane.com onto your Facebook profile. It’s completely optional, and as you can see in the image above, if you do link your comments to your Facebook profile you’ll have the chance to control how you’d like that to look.
Over the past year or so I’ve noticed that a big chunk of the discussion for each post has happened on Facebook. That’s fantastic, but makes it hard for me to keep track of. This is an attempt to try to bridge the blog and Facebook comments together so more people can join the conversation easier.
To test it out, simply leave a comment on this post. When you are done click on the Facebook Connect button.
Facebook will ask you to verify that you’d like to connect, agree to that and you’re done!
From now on when you come to the blog, if you are logged into Facebook, you’ll see your Facebook badge in the upper right hand corner of my blog. When you see that, you’re already logged in and ready to leave a comment– and share the discussion with your friends!
Easy, right? Thanks for giving it a try!