The Lighthouse has a new URL and a new website to explore. The theme is by Lemon Productions but the content is largely by DeeAnn Mercier and other staff at The Lighthouse. It has a lot of information about the services that The Lighthouse offers and a lot of resources about human trafficking in Saskatchewan, homelessness in Saskatoon, and a new email newsletter. Make sure you check it out.
I don’t freelance write much (umm, never) but every year I write a Christmas gift guide on what to get for your husband/boyfriend and all of the significant men in your life over at JordonCooper.com. It has become quite popular and I encourage you to wander over and check out my holiday gift suggestions. Let me know what you think over there in the comments.
Basically I use Evernote to keep track of all of the ideas I get, suggestions I get from Jordon, Lee, and others and I take a day and put them into a big long post. Then I get Jordon to format it for me because getting the formatting right is a big deal when you consider how much traffic the post gets and how stressed people are when Christmas shopping.
In case you are wondering, I will be back over there as I write the “What to get for a brother in law post”.
A couple of weeks ago I started to get frustrated with the amount of ads that were being hosted on WordPress and I decided to go back to Blogger. Blogger has changed and improved a lot since I left it and I really enjoy using it for The Cooking Blog and The Cooper Cabin. After talking Jordon into setting me up a blog on Blogger, we realized it was going to be almost impossible to get my content from WordPress imported into Blogger. So instead of leaving everything behind, I checked out Typepad (whose site was so buggy that I couldn’t use it) and instead decided to buy a domain name and move the site to Dreamhost.
Setting up WordPress was in one way easy but then I found out that you have to customize a theme, install plugins, and then get everything setup (why isn’t the API code where it said it would be?). Thanks to Jordon spending several hours getting everything going, I am done and hopefully good for the foreseeable future.
The Hedge Society has a new home, some brand new contributors, curators, writers and an editor that has shamed Jordon for using too many spaces after a period. You can read more about the Hedge Society here.
So to summarize…
A post of mine appeared at Jordon Cooper Outfitters today. I posted about the Rudy Project Ability Sunglasses which I have become quite fond of, partly because they are designed for smaller faces and therefore you avoid the Danica Patrick look of having these massive glasses on a small face.
I have some more posts coming down the pipeline that you will be seeing over the next couple of months and if you have suggestions for the site yourself, drop Jordon Cooper Outfitters a line here.
I redid my About page. It features some more photos of the family and one photo of me abusing the dog. Now you know.
Over the last year or so this guy named Kevin has been leaving a plethora of comments on Jordon’s site. He only comments if Jordon writes anything that doesn’t jive with his idea of what evangelical theology should be. Jordon is tolerant of different viewpoints but Kevin progresses from labelling Jordon and then moves on to calling Jordon childish names, the kind that I expect to hear from a grade two or three classroom. Oddly enough, Mark’s school doesn’t tolerate this kind of stuff. It is really, really odd. He also made a classless comment about Jordon’s diabetes that bothered me a lot, even if it didn’t bother Jordon.
Some friends were over a while ago and likened it to some stranger coming into your living room and telling you how stupid you were. You probably would not invite them back and if repeatedly happened, you would just stop letting them come in. So for the first time since he started blogging, he decided to mark his comments as spam and not deal with them anymore.
Today I was checking my unmoderated comments and I saw this one. Kevin has now resorted to leaving the comments on my blog.
Well Kevin, I’ll pass along the message that you still think Jordon is lame and I’ll see if Akismet works just as well on my blog as it does Jordon’s.
This is one of the joys of publishing a blog folks.
Several years ago someone got very angry at Jordon because he never phoned someone. Jordon’s reply was, I e-mail regularly and I don’t really call anyone anymore. The person was quite upset and ranted and raved about how stupid e-mail is. Now the situation was more complicated than that but Jordon was caught using the wrong kind of communication system than someone else and they took it personally.
I find myself in a similar situation. I publish this blog, contribute over at the cabin weblog, I use Upcoming, Twitter, Dopplr, and Flickr. When you combine all of that content, there is a lot of Wendy out there. You could even combine all of it together on Google’s Homepage if you wanted which would give you things like the weather at the lake and Saskatchewan Roughrider scores if you cared enough. For some that isn’t enough or it isn’t in the right format (e-mail, phone, paper) which causes problems for them. In the end it isn’t personal enough.
At the same time when I get together with people at church, at work, or at the lake who read this stuff, they don’t see the lack of personalization as a problem because we can build on what has been written and move on to other topics or enter into deeper conversations about the ones posted in the “Wendy-verse”. In those ways, the content on the web serves as a catalyst for deeper relationships instead of shallower.
In the end, I tend to think that the problem isn’t the form of communication, it is the lack of relationship that allows you to go any deeper. If you didn’t have a relationship with me and wanted one again, I would think this would be frustrating but at the same time, it isn’t technology that is the problem, it is that we don’t have a relationship and paper, phone, or e-mail won’t change that.
No body likes moderated comments but on my blog I find that I have to. Today after reading my pending comments, the following comments were made.
Wow, that was a lot of fun. In the past I have had prayers that Oliver be seized by Social Services, I was a lesbian, I needed to leave Brandon, I am a horrible student, blah, blah, blah…
All of them come from MTS I.P. addresses. The nastiness is a little more pronounced than normal but it shows up in Twitter, Flickr, via fax and via e-mail. Twitter allows me to block users and Gmail’s spam filtering technology is great. For Flickr and my blog, the problem just goes on and on.
It isn’t that I care that much but I care enough to stop this garbage from appearing on my blog. If you have left comments in the past and I have approved them (I only spam the spam and the stupid ones), your future comments should appear without moderation.
Thanks for understanding.