A week has gone by since I created a draft of a website and bookmarked a lot of missions related sites. I received a copy of some web authoring software and transferred my site to it. I have published it, but internetmissionsresearch.com is not working yet.
In addition, I found that the online bookmarks I created (called spurls as the name of the bookmarking website is called spurl.net) had been accidently deleted. Fortunately they have been restored, as I had spent all day Monday inputting them. I will have to check to see if I can download the complete spurl file, including comments, tags and descriptions.
The advantage in using spurl.net is that I can create an account for someone requesting research, then put all related links into that account. When finished, I can email the resulting bookmark file, or better, simply give them the username and password for that spurl account. The beauty of this online bookmarking service is that tags, descriptions, and comments can be added to each link.
The spurls can be displayed in a window to the left of the browser, or they can be viewed full-screen. The user can then take the spurl account and continue to add to it as necessary. If they don't want a spurl account, then I can simply create a topical spurl account, use it as links are found and then email them the resulting bookmark file. Hopefully comments, descriptions and tags will be preserved in the downloaded bookmark.htm file.
In the web authoring software I was able to add a webform on the home (request) page that uses the the computer's email program to send the request. This isn't quite what I was hoping for, as not all browser's will use the same email program, i.e. it might not work on some computers.
The alternative is to use a more complicated solution, which might include sending a email to confirm the email being entered. I would prefer to stay away from this if possible. In the future, it might be advantageous to have a user create an account, then start a "ticket" when submitting a request, so that follow up could be done using that same "ticket." I am guessing some programming will have to be done to make this work.
By the end of the day, I have added a few more spurls (bookmarks) to my account and looked at quite a few websites. I have found some good ones (clm.org) and some not so good ones (which will remain unlisted). CLM (the Christian Leadership Ministries of Campus Crusade for Christ) have created a number of websites. LeaderU.com is one. It is directed to the university community and includes articles by Christian professors on a variety of topics of interest to the inquiring mind.
In addition, they have had positive results with doing evangelism on the internet and distinguish between "brochure" type websites which provide information about an organization and websites which provide quality content which will be of interest to those investigating more closely the claims of Christ.
On this point, I found that some websites have multiple goals which might be better served by running two sites. One wanted to reach the unreached, but then claimed to mobilize others to use the internet for that means. You can't have it both ways. Reaching the unreached requires a site dedicated to that purpose, while mobilizing others has an entirely different set of criteria.
The distinction between mobilizing and reaching is important for my site. That is, the original intent was to do reasearch for who are doing or are interested in mission work. But a similar model could be used to serve those investigating Christianity or those seeking to grow in their faith. The problem is that incredible resources would have to be employed to serve this groups.
But they could be well served. The abundance of good resources makes it important to direct this group to the sites that will best meet their needs. University student? LeaderU.com is the logical choice. New christian attending church? Denomination specific resources might be the way to go.
Providing authorative sources the user can trust can make the difference in them "settling down" and learning and them continuing to surf the internet looking for the "best" information.
But that is a question for another day.
For now, there is still an wealth of internet missions resources. If a personalized service can help sift through the web and bring people that much closer to Christ, then it will have been worth it.
Until next week,
Clarence
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Welcome!
Hi,
Welcome to my new weblog! I am excited to be here. About five or six years ago I tried saving comments on various topics to the web, but that didn't go very far because I was using a static directory structure. This method is much more flexible.
I first got the idea about doing research on the internet for the cause of missions about a month ago. I was wondering what I could do to further the cause of missions. I was good at and enjoyed research because of my training. I had access to the internet and I was interested somehow in being involved in missions. Somehow the three came together in my mind and the idea was born.
The first thing I did was to type "missions" into Google and to start paging through the results. There were many and I got up to about page 22. By that time I had quite a long list of missions sites, some of which have turned out to be quite good. I simply copied the links into Word, roughly cateqorized them and wrote a brief description for most.
The second stage came after returning from two weeks of my vacation. I had four weeks and reserved the last one for "study". I talked with my wife a little about my idea and she seemed interested, providing that I not leave my job to pursue it!
A week of full-time work can accomplish quite a bit. I was able to follow some of the links found previously and find new ones. I was also able to draft up a website and find a relatively low cost hosting company. I also made some development and research notes.
I found that (a) a lot of the Christian mission websites list resources linking to other sites, (b) some claim to be search engines, (c) few, if any provide fresh searches of the internet using a traditional search engine, (d) a lot (up to 500 times more) information is available in the "deep" web than in the surface web, (e) there is currently no fast or easy way to access this information, (f) there are some excellent resources, such as journals, contained on the deep web, (g) some, but not all, are free.
Following that development, I emailed five people I found to ask them for their comments on the concept and initial website. That was on Friday. On Saturday, I went over my links list and organized it a bit more, then said, "There has to be a better way!" The answer to that was found in an online bookmarking service, with a weblog and with Google Toolbar. I signed up with spurl.net.
Spurl.net is useful because it allows you to bookmark a site by clicking on a button on your internet browser. The result shows up instantly in a bookmarks column on a screen on the left. Features include being able to edit key words, categorize, search and add comments. The bookmarks can be shared with others.
The weblog is what you see here. Using it to develop this research idea should enable others to view and comment on it. It should help this idea to develop in real time.
Finally, the Google Toolbar enables an immediate viewing of the links page rank. This rank is not perfrect, because it is based, among other things on the number of links to a page. But it should be a help to keep on eye on what Google thinks of the page.
That's about it for now. It is almost time to wrap up this part of the process as this day is drawing to a close. If you, after reading this, have any comments, please feel free.
Until then,
God bless,
Clarence
Welcome to my new weblog! I am excited to be here. About five or six years ago I tried saving comments on various topics to the web, but that didn't go very far because I was using a static directory structure. This method is much more flexible.
I first got the idea about doing research on the internet for the cause of missions about a month ago. I was wondering what I could do to further the cause of missions. I was good at and enjoyed research because of my training. I had access to the internet and I was interested somehow in being involved in missions. Somehow the three came together in my mind and the idea was born.
The first thing I did was to type "missions" into Google and to start paging through the results. There were many and I got up to about page 22. By that time I had quite a long list of missions sites, some of which have turned out to be quite good. I simply copied the links into Word, roughly cateqorized them and wrote a brief description for most.
The second stage came after returning from two weeks of my vacation. I had four weeks and reserved the last one for "study". I talked with my wife a little about my idea and she seemed interested, providing that I not leave my job to pursue it!
A week of full-time work can accomplish quite a bit. I was able to follow some of the links found previously and find new ones. I was also able to draft up a website and find a relatively low cost hosting company. I also made some development and research notes.
I found that (a) a lot of the Christian mission websites list resources linking to other sites, (b) some claim to be search engines, (c) few, if any provide fresh searches of the internet using a traditional search engine, (d) a lot (up to 500 times more) information is available in the "deep" web than in the surface web, (e) there is currently no fast or easy way to access this information, (f) there are some excellent resources, such as journals, contained on the deep web, (g) some, but not all, are free.
Following that development, I emailed five people I found to ask them for their comments on the concept and initial website. That was on Friday. On Saturday, I went over my links list and organized it a bit more, then said, "There has to be a better way!" The answer to that was found in an online bookmarking service, with a weblog and with Google Toolbar. I signed up with spurl.net.
Spurl.net is useful because it allows you to bookmark a site by clicking on a button on your internet browser. The result shows up instantly in a bookmarks column on a screen on the left. Features include being able to edit key words, categorize, search and add comments. The bookmarks can be shared with others.
The weblog is what you see here. Using it to develop this research idea should enable others to view and comment on it. It should help this idea to develop in real time.
Finally, the Google Toolbar enables an immediate viewing of the links page rank. This rank is not perfrect, because it is based, among other things on the number of links to a page. But it should be a help to keep on eye on what Google thinks of the page.
That's about it for now. It is almost time to wrap up this part of the process as this day is drawing to a close. If you, after reading this, have any comments, please feel free.
Until then,
God bless,
Clarence
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
