Week One

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