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