I was in a small group with Thomas Peters, @applemachome, @aquinasnmore and a few other awesome attendees at this year's CNMC breakout session #2:
Expect a wrap-up post for this year's CNMC sometime tomorrow, or maybe Monday.
Check out my post, Live-Blogging to Drive Traffic, Interest to Organizational Events, on Open Source Catholic. From the post:
The Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America conference is attended by over 6,000 teens every year, and there are many parents, friends, and other teens who wish they could participate as well. We have always posted information after the conference, but in St. Louis, for the past two years, we've started live-blogging and posting to social networks frequently throughout the conference, driving up traffic to our OYM websites.
We had triple the number of visitors this year than we had last year, and the residual traffic for this event is pretty strong, and keeps up interest for the event throughout the year.
Now that I have effectively replaced my laptop with an iPad, I need an easy/quick way to post a photo or two from my iPad to my blog. I use Photogene as a simple Photoshop replacement on the iPad (it actually works pretty well, for being limited to 256 MB of RAM and a 1024x768 display).
I originally tried using an FTP program to transfer the file to my website, into a drop box folder I created, but FTPWrite, one of the very few FTP apps for the iPad, doesn't support uploading from my photo library. Not wanting to pay for any more weak FTP editors until Coda or something equivalent is released for the iPad, I decided to go about this task in a rather unorthodox way. Here's how I post photos to my Drupal site from my iPad:
On your iPad:
Earlier today, I had lunch with a few good (mostly online) friends at Rigazzi's on the Hill (in St. Louis). The food was so-so, the company was great, and the atmosphere in the restaurant was pretty good. It's a little bit tucked away next to Kingshighway, but not too hard to find (plus there's plenty of parking in the area).
I met Snup (from Snup's view from the back pew) for the first time; she seems to have a most excellent plan in place for the rest of her parish visits. She's about 1/10 of the way through all the parishes in St. Louis, and she's chronicling her visits to various parishes on her blog (link above).
I also met (for the second time) Mark Scott Abeln, who takes many excellent pictures and writes for Rome of the West, an excellent blog looking at the historical and architectural heritage of Saint Louis (with an emphasis on its Catholicity).
[UPDATE: I've posted a more comprehensive guide that I intend to keep updated here: St. Louis-area Catholic Bloggers/Websites].
I've come to the realization that many St. Louis-area Catholics have no idea how many excellent blogs are published by other Catholics in the area. Here are the ones I know of - feel free to leave a link to any that I've missed in the comments below.
Obviously the main source of information for Archdiocesan events. I hear they're getting a site upgrade soon... more to come ;-)
A great blog about timely news in the Archdiocese, with a bit of a traditional slant. Often uses colorful and entertaining language when discussing the current state of affairs.
Petty and infantile, that's how I'd sum up the handling of a recent situation on the stltoday.com website (the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch).
Kurt Greenbaum, after getting an anonymous commenter to resign his job [Ars Technica] when he looked up the commenter's IP address and ratted out the commenter to the school for which he worked, posted a little self-congratulatory post on the Post's website, as well as his personal blog.
Excerpt from the post:
I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
I'm not sure if Kurt understands the concept of anonymous posting and spam comments... on this little thing called the 'Internet,' people spam blogs and such with annoying, crass, rude, insensitive, and pointless drivel almost constantly. Even if you require people to be registered users / subscribers, you will get spam. You learn to deal with it. I could care less about the identity of anonymous commenters—and they should know they can always be tracked, to a certain extent—but the idea of selectively calling out certain commenters detracts from the idea of an 'open forum.' I've seen much more insulting and crass comments on the Post's website, so I don't know what got Mr. Greenbaum's feathers in such a kerfuffle.
You'd think the Post, a sanctuary for Catholic-bashing comments and radical vulgarity (in my experience), would either grin and bear the vulgar comment left by an anonymous commenter on the earlier post, or at most delete the comment and move on. Such should be the policy of a large news organization that leaves all their postings open to droves of anonymous commenters (a bad idea anyways, in my book).
I am going to take a break from the blogging community for a small while (at least a month). Please continue to pray for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and keep me and all seminarians in your prayers!
(In the meanwhile, please check out Dawn Eden's blog, The Dawn Patrol, and Jeff Miller's 'The Curt Jester' - they're two of my favorite blogs!).
Well, everyone, here it is.
I am fed up with Xanga, and don't quite like it's 'uncustomizability'. Plus, I can't access it from home. So, lo and behold, I have my own spiffy new blog. I will continue on this blog what I have been doing on my old Xanga blog, but with more pizzaz and style :-).
Please feel free to email me at any time, and I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can. This blog allows much more customizability, and I'm very happy to now be using it instead of my old one.
I wish all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
-Jeff