Hey all you power-blogger/design-gifted/tech-savy folks:

I’m planning some serious changes to this blog over the next couple of weeks. I want to combine ZackRiesland.com and TheRieslands.com into one blog, and move it to a private host, where I’ll have a lot more control over how it looks and what I can display.

I know there are a bazillion wordpress templates that offer different features and such, and it can be kind of overwhelming trying to choose one.

Steph is strongly against a white background because she says it hurts her eyes. Do you agree?

Do you think 2-column or 3-column is easier on the eyes?

Do you know of any good themes or plugins I should know about?

Give me some tips!

I’ve spent the past several early mornings working on a new website/blog for the youth at our church body.

(this would be why my own blog hasn’t seen much action)

This is my first real experiment with a privately-hosted wordpress blog and podcasting and whole nine yards, so I’d love to have your feedback.

Got any tips on cool plugins?

Got any ideas to make this better?

Got feedback on our teaching (keep in mind we’re teaching teenagers)?

Please go visit and let me know!

Thanks!

Did you hear about the new Olympic sport? It’s called ‘Slap Face’. Check it out…

Check out the new Leeland band blog!

Click the image above, or just click here!

Am I the only one who gets this like 3 out of 4 times I try to do something on twitter?

I discovered Voddie Baucham’s blog today. I like how it’s a home-made ‘made on a mac’ iWeb special. I appreciate it when guys who are in ‘full-time’ ministry don’t waste ministry money to look slick.

He has an interesting post about Barack Obama. The title of the post says it all: “Barack Obama: A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing“.

The first sentence is the thesis behind the title:

“Barack Obama is the most pro-abortion candidate ever to run for President.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Voddie has always been right on in my experience. He’s a very wise man who doesn’t point fingers lightly.

What do you think?

Shannon enlightened me yesterday to the fact that my macbook, which I have had for over two years, is capable of doing stop-motion videos. Being the geek that I am, I had to try it out as soon as possible, so I recorded various periods of time hanging out with our new friends Jacob and Catie last night, and posted them on youtube.

This particular video has no real usefulness, but I can see where we can do some really slick stuff with this. My next experiment will be the Foyer at our church for all of Sunday morning.

Any other ideas?

Admittedly, most of us wouldn’t be this honest. But if we were…. well…

I believe the guy on the right represents a LOT of the people we encounter every day.

What do you think?

Hey folks! I was thinking it would be fun to perform a little experiment.

I’ve been doing this blog thing for a couple of years now, and I think I learned a little bit about how traffic works. I know that all I have to do is mention specific political figures or religious leaders, and my blog traffic will go through the roof, but it’s not from people who care about what I’m writing, they just either want to tell me I’m right or wrong for liking a guy, or not liking a guy.

I also found that I can mention things that are hot in the news, and all the little news spiders will find my blog and make it look like my traffic is doing really good.

But when I write about real things, or just everyday life, I don’t see much traffic.

I do, however, know this: On an average day, about 100 folks will make it to this domain, and a handful of others will read via some sort of RSS feed (read about RSS here).

Out of those, about 40% always go to this post, because apparently there isn’t much known about Bell’s Palsey, so people google it and find our posts about Steph’s experience with it.

So here’s the experiment:

I want to know about the remaining 60-or-so people who look at this page on a regular basis. And I want to get those people, specifically, on the blogroll, so that it serves the purpose of a fun social network, instead of a list of awesome ministries and resources, which is about all it is now.

So if that’s you, please leave a comment and let me know, and if you have a blog or a website, I want to link to it, so let me know and I’ll add you to the blogroll.

Also, if you use Twitter, let me know so I can ‘follow’ you. (If you don’t know what Twitter is, read this post — and don’t think it’s only for technology geeks!) When we get a little bit of a community built up, I’ll put an RSS feed with everybody’s updates on the side of this page! And if you don’t use Twitter, then you need to because it’s fun and seriously addictive.

Sound cool?