When Bob Smietana, an editor at Covenant Companion, suggested I’d like blogging, I asked him what a “blog” was. No kidding, I had no idea. We were having coffee at Tre Kronor, and he explained how to get it going at blogger.com. So, I walked down the street, over the bridge, up the stairs, and into my office — and in about five minutes, I had a blog. That was one year ago this week. I learned what a blog was.
First, I never knew how much I’d like it. Nor did I anticipate that I’d get this many readers — we get about 3000-4000 hits a day, with about 1600 uniques. It’s been lots of fun, and finding readers of the blog creates the unusual situation that these folks know too much about me! I guess that about 2-3% of the readers offer comments, which always makes me wonder what the readers/lurkers are thinking.

Second, nor did I anticipate how many topics would arise in the blog world. I finally gave up having a set of categories that would cover it all. I just gob things together in the categories, but I don’t want to have a list of 50 categories. I try to do something about the Bible, something about theology/emerging, and then something of a lighter nature every weekday, with Blogs of the Week and maybe a post or two on the weekends. I can’t respond to each and every comment, but I do read them all — and I find the discussion between readers good enough often and I simply watch the discussion rather than offering a comment on everything. I see a post as my idea, and like to hear what you have to say — I’ve had my say, you get yours.
Third, there are so many good blogs, and I won’t even begin to list them because some of them are on my Sidebar. I do have to mention that if we had more in the spirit of Jim Martin or the fun of Steve McCoy or the reporting of Andrew Jones or the pics of Jamie Arpin Ricci, and it is unfair to stop here but I will, we’d be better off. I simply can’t support the fire away and light off bombs that some prefer. I don’t mind the controversial, the edgy, and the expression that sets off discussion, but the attack mentality of some is scary and uncharitable. I want to thank you readers for the quality of discussion we find at this blog. Some have been too aggressive, and I’ve had to write them and ask them to tone it down. Some of them have disappeared from the comments.
Fourth, my major moments of development:
1. Andrew Jones, TSK, pushing his discussion of Carson’s book to my page and that led me to months of reading to figure out what emerging was all about, and the discovery that I am emerging.
2. Dave Anderson building me a new site with WordPress, which has been a godsend for me. Dave has been more understanding of all my goofy questions, which he can translate readily into computer lingo. WordPress permits me to do this: I can write a bundle of posts all at once, set them to appear at a given time, and I don’t know have to know so much of the html and all that gobbledy-gook computerese. As I write this, I’ve got about 10 posts already lined up.
3. Bob Robinson and Steve McCoy and Brother Maynard explaining what blogging is all about, and helping me figure out what such things as technorati and statcounter are.
4. Some folks prefer not to write on the blog as a comment, but do e-mail me questions and suggestions, and some of them lead to posts.