nedgable.com

Had a great night last night. A lot of that is thanks to a couple young guys that I work with at Brookwood Church, JC and Josh. They’ve been using blogs and social media to connect with people for years. So, after watching them for a couple of months I decided to join twitter about a year ago and I started blogging about 3 months ago.

The result of all this is that last night I got to meet an incredible group of children and student pastors that I may have never met if it weren’t for social media. We’re in Atlanta for the Orange Conference and last night we joined about 50-60 folks at the Varsity for a “tweet-up.” Not sure I would have known what that was a year ago but I’m glad I do now.

I’ve been attending conferences for years. I usually float in and out. Hang out with my team, learn some great stuff, and that’s about it. But now, coming to the Orange Conference feels more like a reunion. I get to see these guys that I’ve been talking to and sharing ideas with for months. We live literally in every corner of the country but if you were at the varsity last night you’d have probably thought we had all worked together for years. Most off us we’re meeting for the first time but there were inside jokes, shared stories, great ministry conversations, it was great.

So I’m thankful to our young guys for helping me enter the twitter/blogosphere. But in the light of day, I kinda of wonder if I staying up till 3am as they hosted a spontaneous live web show was the smartest move for me. I may be too old to be that cool. That said, I’m looking forward to a great day with my team but caffeine is a priority this morning so I’ll log off for now.

Popularity: 53% [?]

So, you’re thinking about starting a blog? Do you know about: hosting, urls, domain names, plugins, permalinks, php, .htaccess, apachee, index.php, seo, site redirects, mod_rewrites, widgets, ftp, chmod or the difference between 0644 and 0777 (besides 133 ☺) Well, I do, but I’d suggest that you not. Here’s the thing I started this blog a few weeks ago on a whim. Problem is, I hadn’t taken a lot of time to learn the basics. I just bought a domain name slapped it in an old web-host and got going. Fast forward a few weeks, and I’ve spent more hours trying to fix things on the blog than I have witting.

First, I didn’t have a good web host. Then I installed my blog in a sub-domain. This led to a site redirect. So when I tried to improve my seo (search engine optimization) I realized my permalinks were “ugly” but I couldn’t change them ☹ because my .htacces file was in the sub-domain not the root and then…. Sorry about that, I’ll get to the point.

If you want to start blogging, take your time and start right. Spend a little time researching the process. There’s a lot of good information out there and if you take a couple of days to check it out you might save yourself several weeks of heaches and a lot of details you’ll wish you never knew.

BTW… Isn’t this that why children’s ministry is so important. If we can help kids get started right, with a strong spiritual foundation. We can save them from years of frustration and confusion. Then, maybe, they can spend more time living for Jesus instead of fixing problems caused by careless mistakes.

Just a thought ☺

Popularity: 58% [?]

A couple of weeks ago I began blogging with great enthusiasm and anticipation. I loaded up my blog, tweaked my theme and I was ready to go, right? Wrong… as anyone who has visited this site before now already knows, nedgable.com was agonizingly slow. I tried all the recommended Wordpress fixes. I deactivated plugins, tried less graphic intensive themes, and reloaded my site, all for naught. After about a week of trying everything I could think of I finally discovered the problem. It was my web host. I’ve used dreamhost for years with other websites and church blogs and have had very few problems. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve been the victim of several web-attacks and hardware failures lately. Problem is, they can’t seem to get the issues fixed and that leaves their service unreliable at best. So after giving dreamhost some time to resolve their issues, I decided to make a move. After a lot of  blood, sweat and tears, I’ve moved my web hosting and rebuilt my site. Nedgable.com should now back up and running, hopefully with a little less frustration. Special thanks to all of you (or maybe both of you is more appropriate ☺) who put up with the slowness and visited my blog anyway.

Popularity: 30% [?]

After observing from the sidelines for a while I’ve decided to enter the blogging world. I hope in the coming days that this blog will be helpful or at least interesting to you. If it is, there are a couple of guys you should thank.

The first is Pudge Huckaby. Pudge is the CM Pastor at Newspring’s Greenville campus I’ve been reading his blog for a while. He’s got some great insight, but what I really love is his desire to help people in children’s ministry connect. Second is JC Thompson. JC is an amazing young man who serves as our Kid’s Production Director at Brookwood Church. (He’s also single handedly responsible for making me old) JC has wonderful passion and insight and I’m always excited to read what he’s thinking about on his blog.

So, if what you find here is helpful to you then you should thank these guys for inspiring me to jump into the blog world. If on the other hand, you think this blog stinks, you know who to blame.

Popularity: 16% [?]