Entries Tagged 'Blog' ↓

During this transitional time in our lives, it might be a good time to recast the vision for this blog. This blog started out as a place for us to post summaries of our sermons (in late 2004) and it has broadened over the years.

The current tagline of our blog is: Life. Leadership. God’s Mission. The purpose of this blog is to provide a resource in these areas — for the people we serve and lead and for anyone around the world who may happen to land on our site by way of a search engine.

In order to live out this purpose, we’ll sometimes write about what’s going in our lives — as long as our experience can be a helpful resource and influence others for God.

We also want to be a resource for leaders. So, we’ll sometimes write about movies as long as that movie has a particularly strong life and/or leadership lesson (see Randy’s post, Movies for Leaders; there’s also a Movies category, where you can view all the movies we’ve written about). We’ll also occasionally write about leadership books that we’ve read (see the Books category).

Since the beginning of 2007, we’ve sought to be a resource for people considering adoption, particularly international adoption (see the Adoption category). That’s one of the main reasons we continue to share details about Ethan’s transition (of course, we also know that our friends/readers like to see how Ethan is doing).

It still amazes us that the biggest day in the history of this blog (in terms of visits) was “gotcha day,” the day Ethan joined our family, February 12, 2008, when this blog had 531 visits! (FWIW, some of our biggest days since our time in Korea have been in the days since the announcement of our relocation last Sunday, hitting/surpassing 200 a couple times.)

While our blog will continue to change and evolve in the future, we expect the basic purpose to remain the same: to be a resource for others!

Bloggers may find this post interesting (or not). It may also be interesting to some of our other readers, but for others of you, it’ll just be boring.

Back in mid-January, we moved our blog from Typepad to a Wordpress-powered site (hosted at Dreamhost), which we wrote about here.

Wordpress updated their software earlier this week, so in the near future, we will be upgrading to the new version (2.5). Actually, if it wasn’t for dissertation work this week, it would’ve already been done!

Normally, we wouldn’t even mention the upgrade (you may not notice much difference), but we are for a couple reasons …

1. This will be our first upgrade, so we’re not exactly sure how it will go.
2. Also, we may be changing the way we post photos/images on the blog, which may take us some time to get that part of the process working properly.

We don’t expect any real downtime for the blog; the actual upgrade should be fairly easy (Dreamhost has a one-click installer, so the actual upgrade shouldn’t take very long).

But changing the way our blog handles photos will be a chore.

Bottom-line: The blog *should* be available (barring complications), but the photos may not appear until we get the new process sorted out.

When will the upgrade take place? It depends on dissertation work, Ethan’s sleep schedule, and my energy level. I should be able to do it sometime after we mail our defense drafts on Monday (with God’s help!), if not before. Unless I decide to wait for the release of 2.5.1 to fix the bugs found in 2.5.
Well, for what it’s worth, we’re very pleased with Wordpress and we’re looking forward to checking out version 2.5, which looks to be a pretty significant upgrade.

We did a couple things pretty regularly while we were in Korea: 1) check the blog for new comments, and 2) check our blog statistics.

We enjoyed reading the comments; it gave us a real sense that we were not alone while we were in Korea. And judging by some of the comments we’ve received, it helped others feel as if they were with us, too.

By checking our statistics, we’d knew how many “hits” or views our blog received each day. As you can see in the image here, our statistics really started climbing when we went to Korea and spiked on the days we met Ethan and brought him home. Not surprisingly, the blog’s biggest day was “gotcha day,” February 12 when the blog received 531 views.

To put that into perspective, our old blog (willis.blogs.com) received about 10,000 hits from January 2007 to January 2008 (about 30/day). This new blog (williswired.com) has received more than 3,600 in about a month (125/day).

As we said before, we blogged in Korea for a couple reasons: 1) to help friends and family experience this part of our journey with us, and 2) to be a resource for other adoptive families who may come across our blog (our blog statistics reveal that people come to our blog through Web searches related to adoption). At some point in the near future, we plan to post some lessons learned along the way that may be helpful to other adoptive families (especially those adopting from Korea).

Thanks for making this a more meaningul ride for us!

Here are a few things that may help you make the most of this blog …

Comments
You can read and/or write comments on any post we write on this blog. Simply click on the comments link at the bottom of each individual post. If there are no comments, it’ll say “0 Comments.” If there is 1 comment, it’ll say “1 Comment,” and so forth.

At the moment, there is also a listing in the sidebar of the most recent comments that have been posted anywhere on the blog. You can click on post titles (after the commenter’s name) to go directly to a particular comment. There were about 70 comments on the posts we wrote while we were in Korea. If you haven’t read the comments yet, we encourage you to go back and read through them.

If you would like to write a comment on any post, simply click on the comments link at the bottom of the post you want to comment on, fill out the form at the end of the post (your name, email address which won’t be shown publicly, and write your comment in the text box provided; if you have your own website, you can type it in the URL box, which will turn your name into a link to your site).

ShareThis
Also, you may have noticed the ShareThis link at the bottom of each post. After clicking on the link, readers can share the post with others by way one or more of the social bookmarking sites listed. Or, you can click on the “Send” tab to email the link (of the post) to someone. It’s an easy way to share any of the content on this blog.

Recent Visitors
Finally, there’s a map in the sidebar that posts a dot of the general location of the 100 most recent visitors to the blog. It’s interesting to see in what parts of the world people find this blog!

Search
To search this blog, type in the search box in the sidebar. This is especially helpful if you remember reading something but can’t remember exactly where it is. Just type in a key word or phrase.

If you have questions about these features, or anything else about this blog, this would be a good place to ask. Just write a comment on this post!

After toying around with the idea of moving our blog from Typepad (formerly: willis.blogs.com) to a Wordpress-powered site (hosted by Dreamhost) for a while, we made a sudden decision to make the move today. We’ve been Typepad users for a few years now but have decided to move our blog to a Wordpress-powered site.

We were concerned about the process of exporting all of our posts from Typepad to Wordpress, but it was fairly painless. There will be some broken (internal) links around the blog for a while (till we get a chance to clean them up).

While we were mostly happy with Typepad, Wordpress will give us complete control of the site; it will also cost a good bit less. Actually, Wordpress is a free download, but we will pay for hosting at Dreamhost. BTW, there is a free hosted version of Wordpress at Wordpress.com for those who want to blog without dealing with the technical side.

Unfortunately, we will lose some links posted around the Web to our old blog like this one posted at Zondervan.com where they linked to my review of Andy Stanley’s “Making Vision Stick” (here’s the new link), but we believe the move will be worth it in the long run. [EDIT: Zondervan.com updated their link! ]

So, welcome to our new digs on the Web!