Category: Weblogs

  • My blog ate my posts!

    Super quick note regarding missing posts. I don’t know what happened. They were there this morning, lots and lots of comments. Tonight I saw they were gone.

    I was able to report them just now… they were all back dated a bit to try to get them in the right place.

    As for the comments, sadly they are all in the database but not linked to the right post and therefore won’t show up. I am really sad about that because there were so many great thoughts!

    This is total behind the scenes stuff. But I’ll be moving my personal and friend’s blogs to another host soon.

  • Two trends in ministry blogs

    I don’t know about you. But I read a ton of blogs every day. Here are two trends I’m seeing a lot of.

    #1 Senior pastors hyping their new series. Every one of their series is “incredible” or “the most important I’ve ever done.” Call me a cynic but I really doubt it. If you have to hype your own series on your blog something tells me you need to re-examine your churches marketing plan.

    #2 Talking about social networking tools. How to use facebook and twitter. And also, I see a lot of trend jumping as people who want to be hip are pimping out “the new thing” that may take off. I kind of think people do this because they want to be known as the person who was in early on the next facebook or twitter.

  • Top posts of September

    I’m a couple days behind on this, I hope you don’t mind too much.

    #1 Lifeway, you need to change your mind

    #2 Vision, Goal, and Mission Statements

    #3 Lies of Youth Ministry Part One

    #4 DIY Antimetabole

    #5 The McLane buyout plan

    As a bonus, here’s my top 5 posts of all time.

    #1 Goodbye Creepy Guy

    #2 Vision, Goals, and Mission Statements

    #3 Shutting down missingmoney.com

    #4 Lifeway, you need to change your mind

    #5 3 Lies of Church Growth Experts

  • Oops. A little over technology

    It seems my eagerness to spread the word about the YS podcast may have actually hurt our distribution a little. I think the right word is “counterproductive.”

    With the new format for the podcast I thought it would be helpful to cross-publish it a few places. So you may have seen it pop up on Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and Blip. This is fine, and the numbers of viewers of the podcast have been great.

    The factors

    1. Blip.tv. Blip is cool because it has a great interface. As a content publisher I love the fact that I can upload a video, it gets published there… then I can select a bunch of places to crosspost. So I upload at blip and it does all the work for me to send it other places. (Facebook, myspace, twitter, and blogs)

    2. iTunes. Unfortunately, one of the places it sends the podcast is iTunes. And since we already use another way to publish podcast to iTunes the double feed gets both banned! (iTunes fixes the problem, but it is embarrassing and ends up making the show harder to find for th 24 hours it takes.)

    The lessons to learn.

    Being overeager sometimes has negative results. My initial reaction to “put it everywhere” had some negative implications.

    Good content will get found. To the core of my web-being I know this to be true. I know that less channels is better for content than more channels. This was just a case of trying to jump ahead of the curve… and in the end it hasn’t worked out.

  • YS Video Podcast

    Here’s a project that I help lead. We just launched our new weekly podcast at YS. I know the majority of my blog readers are not youth workers… so this may give you a tiny insight into my new gig.

    Also check out the YS Blog. I help put that together as well.

  • Top Five Posts of July

    #1 Goodbye Creepy Guy (here’s why)

    #2 Shutting Down Missingmoney.com

    #3 3 Lies of Church Growth Experts

    #4 $200 Asterisk for the iPhone 3G

    #5 Vision, Goal, and Mission Statements

    The power of google. That’s why most of those top 5 are there. People are searching for something that brings them here…. welcome! And it’s also worth noting that you’ve helped me get one of the highest vote tally’s at this contest. Thanks for reading this month. I can’t wait to journey the next 30 days of my life. It’s gonna be great.

  • Open to suggestions

    skribitIf you only read my blog via RSS, you may want to come to adammclane.com and check out a new widget. 

    For the longest time I’ve pretty much blogged whatever I felt like. Sometimes I rant about stuff, sometimes I post silly things, something I try real hard and post something thoughtful.

    Well, I want to make sure that I give you the opportunity to suggest stuff for me to write about. That’s why I’ve added Skribit. How it works is that you suggest something for me to write about. If you don’t want to create an account, your suggestion is completely anonymous. See a good suggestion? Simply vote it up and put the pressure on me to write about it. 

    Deal?

  • Hunting Trends

    trendingDo you ever wonder why there is always a blogger or a website that is always one step ahead of the news? Have you noticed that some everyone has a friend who is always in the know?

    Don’t be frustrated. I’ll show you how to do that.  

    Ever wonder how they do that? It’s really more of a skill than intuition. Though being Radar O’Reilly from M.A.S.H. is also quite helpful. Here are a couple of websites to watch live trends on the internet.

    So, looking for a quick way to grab cheap traffic to your blog? Simply write about something in the top 5 every day and you’ll draw bucketloads of traffic. It may not be the type of traffic you are looking for… but it is a simple way to attract traffic.

    That’s just for news trends. There are a myriads of trend watching websites that cover things like music, clothing, colors, and pretty much anything else the media cares about. So if you are blogging in a category you would be wise to figure out which website to bookmark. If nothing else, trend watching is fascinating.

  • New Template @ adammclane.com

    new2If you are an RSS subscriber to the blog you’ll want to come check out the site. Tonight I put in a new theme. It’s a look that I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now. The truth of the matter is that I really wanted to make some changes to some of my production sites, but Patti wouldn’t let me. 🙂 So I took it out on my blog!

    Also new to the blog is the monster. My byline is “Crazy enough to want to change the world” and my monster is crazy. If you have a suggested name for the monster please leave a comment! Otherwise, I’d really like to hear reader feedback. As always, you can leave a comment or email mclanea@gmail.com.