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!

Alright folks. I’ve been listening to “Wait, Wait: Don’t Tell Me” this morning, and I’ve narrowed down the dumb news stories of the week to two. Now you have to pick: Which is dumber:

A sales supervisor who used waterboarding to motivate his sales team (not a joke).

or

John McCain’s compaign trying to pass off Rachel Ray’s recipes from the Food Network website as “old time McCain family classics”

You choose

Here are your options. When I get ten votes, I’ll use the winner!

What’s your favorite?

“The psychological equivalent of air is ___________________________”.

(I’ll tell you why I’m asking later)

Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington is taking questions (see the video below) that he’ll use as topics for 9 sermons and a book, beginning in January, 2008.

You can go to askanything.marshillchurch.org to view, submit, and vote on questions.

I asked the following questions (there’s a really short length limit, so I didn’t get to word them exactly the way I wanted):

What are your thoughts about the level of criticism between believers, and particularly church leaders? What’s the balance between a desire for Truth and a bad picture of Jesus we paint to the world?

What do you think about the term ‘christian’? Do you think that it has become too stigmatized, and if so, is it worth redeeming or should we change our language?

This weekend at church, I taught about how we are free to serve Jesus because we don’t have to.

…yeah, just take a second and think about that. My texts were Galatians 5 and 1 Peter 2.

I got on a social justice soap-box for just a minute.

According to Compassion International, 19 billion dollars a year could provide for the basic needs of all the poorest children in the world. To put that figure in perspective, this is about half of what Americans spend on dieting programs every year.

I told folks at the church about various opportunities to invest eternally, and this morning I began a list on the website.

What do you think should be on the list?

I’ve been listening to Mark Driscoll a fair bit lately. (I highly recommend that you subscribe to the podcast)

Today I was listening to a teaching about scripture — where it comes from, how to approach it, etc.

Here’s a rough quote:

I listened to several hours of ‘christian’ radio last week. I don’ t do that very often because then I say things that I have to repent of.

He made me chuckle because I understand where he’s coming from.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

I’m re-designing me and Steph’s “we’re newlyweds and this is where we keep our pictures and tell you what’s new in our lives” blog.

The current version is at http://www.therieslands.com. This address points to a blogger account that looks pretty crappy.

Apparently I’m a bad judge of these things. Steph never likes the templates I like.

I moved our stuff over to a wordpress account at http://therieslands.wordpress.com. Once I get it all prettied up, I’ll point therieslands.com to that address.

WordPress makes it really easy to switch between a lot of nice templates, so I want your opinion! Please go take a look and let me know what you think about the current theme, and in a few days I’ll try a new one.

Eventually we’ll settle on the one everybody likes the most :0)