New Blog is up and running!!!

I’m excited to have this new tool to communicate with you. I’ll be using this space to write devotionals and articles, to share updates of what is going on in our ministry, and to post the pictures of the BibleQuest medal winners. My goal is to post regularly, on all kinds of issues, so I encourage you to bookmark the blog page and check it frequently.

With the launch of the new blog, there are a couple of changes in the way we communicate. We no longer have a separate “BibleQuest Court of Honor”. Those pictures will be posted as regular blog posts. You’ll also notice the old guestbook is no longer active. We encourage you to add your comments to the individual posts that interest you.

If you’re not familiar with blogs, you probably need to know about RSS feeds. RSS is a relatively new tool. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. The short explanation is whenever I add a new post to the blog, my RSS feed will broadcast the contents of it out to the internet. If you have subscribed to the blog’s RSS feed, you’ll get a notification that I’ve posted something new, as well as the first few lines of my post.

If you’ve never used an RSS feed, there are several ways you can do this. On most new browsers, you’ll notice an orange broadcast icon in the box where you type the website address, usually on the far right. It looks like this:

If you don’t see that icon, I suggest you upgrade your browser. They’re free, and it’ll make a big difference. You can download Firefox (recommended) here, or the new Internet Exporer here.

The other item that will help you keep up with us is an RSS Feed reader. The easiest is to use Firefox and “Live Bookmarks”. When you subscribe this way, my blog name will appear in your bookmarks bar with the RSS symbol next to it. It looks like this:

Whenever I add a new post, you’ll see a list of my recent posts. It looks like this:

If you like to read a lot of blogs, you can use a more robust system that you can access from any computer with web access. There are several free ways to do this. Once you create an account at any of these services, you can subscribe to any feed and get a notification when there is new content. Two of the more popular services for this are Bloglines and Google Reader.

I know that’s a lot to digest, but if you’re able to take a couple of easy steps, we’ll be able to communicate in a much more efficient, 21st Century manner. I promise it’s painless. I’m looking forward to the conversation! Please, feel free to post comments. We would love to hear from you on a regular basis.

In His Service,

Wes