I borrowed this article from Resurgence and adapted it a little, great reasons for going with a feed reader. Personally, I use NetNewsWire (for Macs) because it syncs with my iPhone nicely, but Google Reader is also an excellent choice.

Four Reasons You Should Get a Feed Reader

Mike Anderson

1. You never miss a blog post from your favorite sites.

Once you subscribe to a feed, your feed reader will make sure that
you see every new post from that feed. Whether you want to read your
websites once a week, once a day, or every ten minutes, any unread
items will be saved for you.

2. You can scan a ton of articles quickly.

When using a feed reader, you can quickly filter through the
articles that you don't want to read. When surfing the web, you have to
shuffle through different interfaces, type in web addresses, and surf
bookmarks. This takes a ton of time. It’s much better to have the
content you want delivered to you than to have to go find it every time
you get online.

3. Stew-pot learning.

One of the great side-effects of using a feed reader is that you begin to learn about various memes in a stew-pot fashion. You'll learn new ideas over time, and understand the relationships between them.

4. You can save articles for later.

Feed readers allow you to save articles to read for later. In Google Reader,
you can put a star next to items you like and come back later to read
them in full. You can also tag articles and search for them later.

What is an RSS Feed?

What is Google Reader?

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Earlier this week, I launched the totally revamped Bikers' Church website. The entire site is done on a wordpress server. There are two types of WordPress. WordPress.com is a online blogging service. Before I moved my blog to typepad, I used that format. WordPress.org is a program you download and install on your own server. It is highly configurable. There is a learning curve to it, but once you get the hang of it, there really is no better way to go. I'm very happy with the new site and hope to keep it much more active now that I've made changes. I may even move my blog over to it at some point.

Anyway, check out the new site: www.bikerschurch.com

I know I haven't been blogging consistently the past couple of weeks. I seem to go through seasons of getting out posts and not focusing on it as much. Don't worry … some changes are coming!

In the mean time, set up a Twitter account and follow me there!

Seth Godin has a great blog post today that I want to copy here … something to think about:

Death of the personal blog?

So, I ran my blog through typeanalyzer and this is what it told me about my blog:

Our Assistant Pastor, Marty, is a little nervous about technology. The following video is a little example of him in action. This video was taken when he had hair.

Many of you prefer to receive this blog through an RSS reader. It's a great way to be automatically notified of new posts. However, in an effort to clean a few things up, I'm needing to change the feed for the blog.
If you have subscribed under the old feed, (www.feeds.feedburner.com/BikersChurchWeblog), I'm going to ask you to take a minute and change the subscription to (www.feeds.feedburner.com/robdale).
I will send another short post once I've made the change so that you are able to confirm the new subscription.

Now, for some of you, that paragraph was in another language. What the heck is an RSS feed? Well, no fear. I also have a way for you to now subscribe to the blog, if you want to receive notifications of new blog entries. On the right hand side, right at the top, is an option to subscribe via email. When you do that, you will receive an email each morning IF I've updated the blog the day before.

Of course, you could do it the "old" way and just check the blog site every day. But using a subscription is far easier in making sure you never miss a post.

I use two primary social networking tools: Facebook and Twitter.

To be honest, I'm rarely on Facebook anymore. I basically go on to check email that may have been sent to my account. That's about it. My status updates on Facebook via Twitter, so it seems like I'm on Facebook a few times a day.

Still, I think a Facebook profile is good to have. You can view mine here. Once again, it gives people a little insight into who you are. It makes people feel connected to you. As a pastor, that's never a bad thing.

Twitter
My main focus these days is Twitter. What is twitter? It's micro-blogging. You are limited to 140 characters per post. It's designed as a quick way to update people on what you are doing. You share everything from what you might be doing at a particular moment, to a cool site you just checked out.

Why on earth would you want to do that? Good question.

Seth Godin, in his book, Tribes, explains Twitter this way:

The value of social networking for ministry was explained to me this way:

Jesus lived with twelve people. I mean he lived with them. He ate, slept, and lived life with these people. They watched how he did the mundane. They learned how he responded in every situation.

Tools like Twitter help us lead the same way. The people we pastor have the opportunity to "watch" us live life through our tweets. They know you spent the night watching a movie, or they laughed when you sent the quick picture of the funny thing you saw while at the park. In a very technological way, they are living life with you.

Twitter is a phenomenal tool for mentoring daily life.

But it's not just a one way street. I have found myself connecting with other ministers and people from around the world. People I've never met, and yet, in a small way, I feel like I know them a little. I laugh at some of their observations, and I pray for some of their expressed needs and struggles. And yet, if we were in the same room, we might walk right past each other without even realizing it!

How to Begin
When it comes to Facebook, you start out by signing up for an account. Once you've done that, you allow Facebook to search your address book for people who have signed up already. You'll be amazed at how many friends you already know on Facebook.

With Twitter, the easiest way to get started is to follow a few people for awhile and see what they type. Add me if you'd like! Check out who others are following and add a few to your list.

Promote your Twitter and Facebook profiles on your website. At one of the two churches that I am currently pastoring, they have a line in the bulletin inviting people to check out my blog. My blog then has a link to my Twitter account (actually, if you look at the top left corner of the blog, you'll see my most recent twitter updates).

The key is to see these tools as a way of connecting. It's an easy way for others to get to know you a little more. And trust me, your people want to know you a little more.

Comments?

When I first started blogging, I made the mistake of thinking that my blog was another chance for me to simply tell people what I thought on things. It was a written form of a lecture. I considered putting my sermon notes on the blog. For a season, I would copy the Oil Change on the blog each day. I even had "comments" turned off.

I've changed my mind on why I blog. While many of my posts are still "teaching" in nature, I have allowed my blog to simply be a window into my life. Whatever I may be thinking or feeling may eventually end up in a post. In some ways, that goes against the suggestions of successful bloggers, who argue that you need to keep a very focused purpose to your blog.

I guess my "focused purpose" is to expose a little of my own journey for those who care to read about it. Now, that can see a little self-absorbed, and maybe it is, but this is what I've discovered: people have come to feel they know me a little better because of my blog. I've had people come up to me and ask how my daughter is doing in Costa Rica – people I hardly know, except through a bike rally or two.

Some churches use blogging to keep their members up to date on church events. Others use their blog to promote specific ministries. All are good and valid, but not my purpose.

How I do it
So, how do I blog?

Well, I started out using Google's free utility, Blogger. I quickly moved on to WordPress. It's also a free program and comes in two versions. One is a web-based utility that is decent, and fairly feature-rich. The other is a program that you would load onto your server and run off your own site. The server-version is likely the best blogger program on the market. So, why am I not using it? Because when I first set up my website, I put it on a Windows server instead of a Unix server, and WordPress server requires a Unix server. It would be too much of a hassle to switch now, so I'm out of luck.
I ended up choosing Typepad. While it is a paid program, the features it provides, and the templates it offers are excellent. I certainly love the interface, and also appreciate the iPhone utility that is available.

The most important thing one must keep in mind if they are going to blog is keeping it fresh. A blog needs to be updated at least a couple of times a week. Anything less, and you're probably waisting your time.

Having said all that, I think blogging may be on the way out … and I'll explain why tomorrow.

One of the first types of technology that I embraced was podcasting. We began with an audio podcast of our services, and quickly included a video podcast. At first, both seemed to be daunting tasks. I quickly learned how easy they were to maintain.

Why Podcast
To be honest, my reason for using the podcast has changed over time. At first, I thought it was a way to connect to all kinds of people who might come to the site. And while there are some who will listen (or watch) the services for a few weeks before deciding to attend, I've found that the main purpose of the podcast is for those who connect to the church and miss a week or two. Because I primarily speak in sermon series, when someone misses a week, they miss a lot of the teaching. The podcast keeps them up to date.

How I do it
Let me share the differences with both and then the similarities.

When it came to the audio podcast, we recorded the audio directly into a computer that was receiving a feed from the sound board. Just about any computer sound card has a "line in" and you can easily push the audio from the board into the computer.
We are blessed to have a "sound expert" who happens to work for a number of radio stations in our city running our sound. As a result, we are able to record using professional recording software. However, there is a free program called Audacity that works amazing (and did I mention it's free?).
Our sound guy edits the audio and really cleans it up beautifully, however, it wouldn't be a horrible thing to simply save the audio as an MP3 and use it exactly as it is.
Once the audio is given to me, I import it into iTunes. In iTunes, I add "album artwork" and meta tag data to the file. I then take that MP3 file and upload it to our server.

When it comes to the video, we record into a basic video camera (purchased for under $500). The most important thing to do in order to have decent video is lighting. We bought some simple lights from IKEA for under $30 and set them up with a dimmer. They work fine for what we are trying to achieve.
I import the video into iMovie (Movie Maker for the PC would work also). Again, as I mentioned yesterday, Lynda.com was invaluable in helping me learn the basics of iMovie. I add a few graphics and export the movie. In all, it takes me less than an hour to get the video to the export stage.
Once it's exported, I use a program that is no longer available (Visual Hub) to convert the movie file into two versions: an mp4 and a flv file. The mp4 is used for the podcast, the flv is used on our website. Both are then uploaded to our server.

I use feedburner to host the podcast. It is a free website that helps promote your podcast. I was recently introduced to Vimeo for hosting video – great site and one that I'm utilizing more all the time.

I also installed a media player from Media College for playing the video and audio files on our website. The program is free and not too hard of a learning curve.