Asides

Comments Are (Almost) Dead

Bold action from the thought-provoking Jeffrey Zeldman, Is This Thing On?

We’re not ready to say “comments are dead” (we’ll leave that for Wired Magazine’s next cover story) but we have noticed the smell, and we’re doing something about it.

Their new comments system, which lets you post replies on Twitter and have them appear inline in their blog post comments section is an elegant (and extremely Twitter-marketing-savvy) approach to solving this problem.

Hope for a Deeper Prayer Life in 2011

I had mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was running dry on inspiration. She told me to run, not walk, to pick up N. T. Wright’s The Lord and His Prayer. When it was finally available in digital format on Google Books, I did.

It’s spectacular.  Wright is refreshingly pastoral, rather than airily instructive. Here’s a clip from the first chapter.

How do you set about praying? From our point of view, there is a fairly obvious order of priorities. We’re usually in some sort of mess, and we want God to get us out of it. Then we’ve usually got some fairly pressing needs, and we want God to supply them. It may strike us at that point that there’s a larger world out there. Again, we probably move from mess to wants: please sort out the Middle East, please feed the hungry, please house the homeless.

But then, once more, it may dawn on us that there’s not just a larger world out there; there’s a larger God out there. He’s not just a celestial cleanerup and sorter-out of our messes and wants. He is God. He is the living God. And he is our Father. If we linger here, we may find our priorities quietly turned inside out. The contents may remain; the order will change. With that change, we move at last from paranoia to prayer; from fuss to faith.

Alissa Wilkinson: Advent is Here

The inimitably eloquent Alissa Wilkinson:

That all said, Advent is here. The new church calendar started on Sunday…I still felt the newness of it, the anticipation. It’s no accident, I don’t think, that the darkness stretches wider and wider across the day until just about Christmas. So much to wait for. So much to yearn for, and anticipate. So much rejoicing to come.

A-Dubs was just featured in this month’s Christianity Today:

http://twitter.com/#!/jstephenlamb/status/11830094439911425

Coming Soon: Reeder for Mac

RSS Is Dead, But Reeder For Mac Makes It A Beautiful Corpse

Of course, users of Reeder on the other platforms will know that it is built on top of Google Reader. You log in with your Google credentials and all of your feeds (and starred items) are transfered over. But Reeder makes the experience look roughly a million times better.

Beautiful desktop app for the Mac that syncs with the (rather fugly-looking) Google Reader.  I found a “Draft 1” version here that downloaded and installed without issue. Highly recommended.

The inside baseball on Conan vs. Leno

The Unsocial Network

Starting to put it together, Jay brought up the other obvious lingering issue. “What happens with Conan?” he said.

“He goes at 12,” Gaspin said. “Everything just moves back.”

“So I wouldn’t get The Tonight Show?” Jay asked.

“No, Conan would keep Tonight,” Gaspin said. Jay stared at him during an extended silence. “Look, we have a tough situation here,” Gaspin finally said. “NBC is in trouble. If you leave or Conan leaves, it gets worse. We really want both of you. We think both of you are big talents.”

I wonder how that all worked out.