Thanks to all the wonderful people who stopped by my blog or Facebook page this year. Our conversations have been such a gift.
Some years back I stopped writing for national websites like Huffington Post and Common Dreams. Something felt wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Earlier in my ministry I realized that, if I was not very careful, the task of giving weekly sermons could put my mind on auto-pilot. I would be just pumping out words instead of sharing actual insights. I made a promise to myself early on that if Sunday morning ever came around, and I had nothing to say, I wouldn’t waste peoples’ time by delivering a sermon. Instead, I would have the courage to just admit I had nothing to say that morning.
I have realized that I had that same concern with writing. Peoples’ time is the most important possession they have. To waste another’s time is the worst kind of theft. I realized instead of writing longer essays on schedule, what what I really wanted to do is share insights and have a conversation. You have made that possible this year and I am deeply grateful.
I may go back to more public writing at some point, but this blog and this page have been a wonderful home base for getting thoughts together. Thanks for the conversation.
Jim,
I enjoy following your blog posts, but I seem to be missing all the dialogue you have on FB, which would greatly enrich it for those of us who are not on FB. I oppose FB in principle for so blatantly breaking down healthy concerns for privacy in our society, but that’s a discussion for another time. At any rate, I was wondering whether there is any way the dialogue that mostly seems to occur on FB regarding your posts could automatically be exported to your original blog site where I read and comment on your posts, and the comments put directly on your blog site could be fed into the FB discussion, thus unifying the discussion streams and restoring the pre-FB blog experience for those of us who object to FB, while not losing the large FB following you have. 12/28/13, 09:03 CST
Bob, That’s a good point. I know how to link WordPress to Facebook but not vv. Do you know how to do that?
Jim,
Sorry. We’ll have to rely on someone who knows more about these things than we do. I hope we’re talking about a 2-way link, not the common “FB subsumes all” link in which everything goes into FB, but nothing comes out of it. I have a concept, but no knowledge of how to implement it. My concept would involve a bot that monitors your posts and resulting comments and synchronizes them in all the places needed. My guess is that FB actively prevents that type of thing to ensure that it can maintain its incredible dominance of the social network space. 12/29/13, 07:57 CST
Bob, I trust your knowledge much more than my own, but I’ll see what I can find out.
Jim, I looked over the WordPress website forum and found this link. I know nothing at all about how it works, but here is the URL:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/
The whole forum post is here:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/facebook-comments-sync-with-wordpress
Hope this helps!
Mike, that is very helpful thank you so much.