Category: Internet

Had to write some notes for a meeting I have Wednesday, and it chewed up my blog time after work.

See you tomorrow!

I’m looking for an application that will allow me to download the entire contents of a web site in one throw. In the old days, I would have used GoZilla for this purpose, but GoZilla seems to have fallen on hard times.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to download just the pages on a site that contain particular keywords, but the whole site would do.

Can anybody recommend an application that does this that (a) runs on Windows XP, (b) ain’t spyware, and (c) is free- or shareware?

Thanks much, folks!

I just got the final schedule for GodBlogCon 2006, and it turns out that I’ll be speaking on two panels instead of one.

The first panel will be "Bridging the Christian Divide" and will focus on  how Christian bloggers of different stripes (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox) can work together to promote the common good and how they can handle their theological differences.

This panel will take place at 9 a.m. on Friday, October 27th. I’ll be serving as the Catholic representative and will be joined by Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost, James Kushiner of Mere Comments, and moderator Joe Shroeder of Blogotional.

The folks involved in this panel have already been having an e-mail discussion amongst ourselves, and it has become clear that we do not take ourselves with supreme seriousness. Jokes at each others’ espenses are planned, so it should be a lively and entertaining discussion.

The second panel I’m on is a Roundtable Discussion that will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 28th. This panel will focus on how Christians can make sure that their voices are heard in the blogosphere so that they aren’t shut out of the broader social discussion the way they generally have been on Television and in the news media.

Big names who will be attending the conference include Hugh Hewitt and La Shawn Barber. Info on the speakers can be found HERE, along with snazzy pictures of them.

I was particularly interested to see that, right next to my picture, there is a picture of another speaker who is perhaps best known for being the seventh president of the United States. All I can say is . . . wow, he looks a lot younger than I expected.

If you’ll be within spitting distance of Los Angeles during October 26-28, I hope that you’ll join us for GodConBlog 2006. It’d be great if a sizeable Catholic turnout appears. Many of the organizers of the conference are Evangelical, but they’re Catholic friendly, and any time our friends across the confessional aisle reach out to include Catholics in an event, it’s good for us to reciprocate.

MORE INFO HERE.

I just wanted to put up a note of thanks to all those who sent in Bible-related questions after my recent invitation for them–as well as those sending in questions on other topics.

So many folks responded that it’s taking me some time to work through the questions that were sent in, but I wanted to let you know that I’m still working on them and will let you know before your question goes up on the site.

Muchas gracias, mis amigos!

Just a note to let folks know that I’ll be attending and participating in the 2006 Godblog Conference or "GodBlogCon" being held later this month in the Los Angeles area.

The conference is devoted to the subject of religious blogging or "GodBlogs," and bigname participants include Hugh Hewitt and La Shawn Barber, as well as many others.

The convention runs from Thursday, October 26th to Saturday, October 28th and will be held on the campus of Biola University in La Mirada. (For those who may not know, Biola is a coined word meaning "Bible Institute of Los Angeles"–one of the most famous Chirstian schools on the West Coast and important in the history of American Evangelicalism.)

I’ll be participating in the panel "Briding the Christian Divide" on Friday morning at 9 a.m. along with co-panelists coming from Protestant and Orthodox traditions. Specifically, there’ll be

* John Shroeder (moderator; Blog: Blogotional)
* Joe Carter (Family Research Council; Blog: Evangelical Outpost)
* James Kushiner (Touchstone Magazine; Blog: Mere Comments)
* and myself

The purpose of the panel is to discuss how Christians of different traditions can and should interact as they promote the Christian faith through new media venues such as the blogosphere.

I’d really encourage anyone within spitting distance of L.A. to come to the event.

I’d also like to give a shot out to other Catholic bloggers and ask if they could consider promoting the event as well. The different Christian traditions need to work together to promote and preserve Christian culture in America and the world, and the new media tools that are becoming available will be central to that effort. The greater the participation of Catholics there can be in the event, the better for all.

MORE INFO ON THE CON HERE!

So I hope to see you there if you can possibly attend! If you need any further incentive to attend, just remind yourself: It’s what B16 would want you do to.

Need a day off. See y’all tomorrow.

Have fun stormin’ the castle!

(Ooo. There’s an idea. How about a favorite movie quotes combox? Just be sure to keep it clean.)

See the image to the left? It’s a composite of two elements of a screencap that I took from a recent comment in the combox.

I selected these two elements to illustrate a  problem that’s been cropping up of late.

I don’t insist on people using the same name or handle in the combox all the time. They can uncheck the "Remember personal info?" box and comment anonymously if they want.

I don’t mind this as long as it doesn’t cause problems, but lately there’s been a lot of it, which makes it hard for other commenters to respond if we’ve got multiple anonymous posters in a single combox thread.

The comment I took the screencap of is particularly noteworthy in this regard. Here we have one anonymous commenter commenting on another anonymous commenter, and that’s . . . well, that’s just wrong. It’s also going to make it really hard for other commenters to respond to either of them.

You’ll note that if you leave the personal info fields blank that the results reads "Posted by: | ". In typography, that vertical bar ( | ) is called a pipe character, so we could take to calling such anonymous commenters "Pipe," but that really wouldn’t fix the problem since we might have multiple Anons and Pipes running around the same combox.

Therefore, to really solve the problem, I’m going to make a new, unofficial rule, which is this: If you don’t want a particular comment to appear under your usual name or handle, that’s fine, but at least put something in the "Name:" field that will let people refer to you easily.

If the problem doesn’t settle down then I may have to make this an official rule and start deleting comments that don’t follow it in order to prevent confusion, so fair warning.

I want to be flexible about this and let people post without their usual name or handle, but as the number of comments has been growing of late, the problem of multiple Anons has been growing worse.

So: Thanks for your cooperation, and I hope this helps make the combox experience more enjoyable for everyone.

Also, I want to reiterate Rule 1, which is that folks need to be polite in expressing disagreement. We’ve had a number of distinctly non-polite exchanges of late, and I’ve gotten complaints about it, so be nice or you may find your comment ain’t there no more.

Oh, and one other combox note: You may have observed that of late the totals shown for a particular blog post [y’know, the ones that say (0) or (13) or (549) or whatever] have not been updating properly. This is a technical issue that TypePad has been having, and I’m talking to them about it. The upshot of it for practical purposes is that if you see a suspiciously low number of comments for a particular post–such as (0) when the post has been up for a while–there may well be comments there that aren’t reflected in the total.

Lately I’ve been fielding a bunch of canon law questions. I want to make sure that–to the best of my ability–I answer the questions folks are interested in, but it’s struck me that we haven’t had many biblical questions lately, and I’d like to increase the ratio of them that I’m doing, if possible. I’m therefore inviting biblical questions in particular at the time. 

If you have one, feel free to e-mail.

Sorry, guys, but I’m suffering from a pinched nerve in my upper back right now (right in the withers) and it’s keeping me offline, so I’ll be taking a blog day off.

YEE-HAW!

JimmyAkin.Org has now passed the three million mark in the number of hits (page views) it has received since moving to TypePad.

The last time we passed a million mark was in March, so we’ve had another million hits in about six months (a little more).

So thanks and mazel tov to all who helped make this possible, and I hereby declare today JA.O 3 Million Day!