A Belated Celebration of the Birth of New Church Thought

New Church Thought was born January 8th, 2008 and so is now over a year old and has passed 100 posts. I want to take this random day in March when I have some extra time to celebrate that and get some feedback on my blog.

When it was born I wrote,

The goal of New Church Thought is to collect good passages, good sermons, good articles, good posts, and good news, and to present them in short posts.

I explained it more in the welcome post. I think it all still applies. What I'm trying to figure out is whether I could accomplish this better by changing some things.

First, here are 2 changes I've made recently:

1. Recently I embedded some videos in my blog rather than just linking to them. I'm considering doing this with images as well.

2. I added two gadgets to the right side-bar so that you can now Follow and/or Subscribe to my blog. Please do! :)

Here are some changes I'm considering:

1. More posts and less detail. - My approach in a typical post has been to provide a short sentence about why I like something (it's interesting, fun, good, great, etc.) and then quote as much of it as I can to try to get you to read it yourself before I go past my 300 word limit (which I am breaking just this once). There are two ways I could change this:

a) If I spend less time looking through what I read or heard for the best parts to quote it would take me less time to post about it and so I would probably update my blog more frequently but the posts would be much shorter and less detailed. (e.g. “An interesting sermon by Rev. Louis King about how the infinite God can be present with us.”)

b) Instead of spending as much time as I do quoting things I could spend more time describing my response to them. (e.g. “I heard an interesting sermon by Rev. Louis King about how the infinite God can be present with us yesterday. I admit that my mind wandered off during it a couple of times—perhaps due to my state or perhaps because it lacked an obvious direction and progression. On the whole, though, I found it a good reminder of 2 basic truths: that I don't have to identify all the thoughts and feelings that I experience as myself and that the Lord is always present in my life, even when it's hard.”)

2. Remove my face from the header. - I can't decide whether to remove my face from the header or not. It looks a little goofy to me but I'm used to it by now and I can't think of a different image to put there.

3. Add a blog roll/other links. - Most blogs have a long list of other blogs and web sites on their sidebar. I'm thinking I'll add one of those but I'm worried that it might make things too cluttered.

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Please leave a comment if you have feedback on any of these or any other thoughts about what would improve New Church Thought or make it something that you would enjoy visiting regularly.

Thanks.

Malcolm

P.S.

Along with every other blogger in the world I would love to have more people comment and contribute to the blog so... please feel free to comment and let me know if you're interested in contributing. Want to share a cool passage that you just read? Want to comment on a good sermon you just heard? Want to ask a question that you haven't heard a good answer to yet? Email me and I'll post it for you. Or, if you're interested in contributing regularly, I'll probably offer to give you the ability to post for yourself.