Week Three

A third week has gone by! This week has finally seen some fruit being born. I was able to place a small advertisement in Brigada-Today, a weekly newsletter that is mailed to about 10,000. Within two days I had received 15 requests! After that, I had to close the site temporarily (Until Oct. 3) to allow myself time to process them.

Many of the requests were legitimate and specific. It is clear that fulfilling them will directly benefit the one requesting. It is taking anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours to do a good job on each one. Already some have expressed appreciation for this service. May God be praised!

For one request, searching for information on church history in west India, my resources were exhausted. I finally had to write back requesting some specific denominations to look for because nothing specific was showing up. On the other hand, looking for information on the plight Meskhetian Turks was very easy, because all the links were directly related to this subject.

It is becoming clear the web can be a great resource if people can be directed to what they are looking for. Searching is more than just querying Google, although that is usually my starting point. Articles in the Network for Strategic Missions knowledge base prove very useful as does findarticles.com. A third area which has great potential is CompletePlanet. This service indexes 70,000+ databases which can then be queried one by one. Finally, search.msn.com allows the user to specify the region or country where the links come from. It is useful to find information from websites that originate from countries other than the U.S. or Canada. Keeping these resources behind the scenes should allow the requestor to focus on the final product, not on the multitude of links generated by these search engines.

Finally, a friend offered to help with cgi scripting. This should enable the site to more efficiently handle the form data being posted and show the user a success or error page after posting.

Until next week,

Clarence