Today is the long-awaited site upgrade. It’s long-awaited in my books, anyway. I designed this new version of the site several months ago now. It has taken a long time to come to fruition, primarily because I’ve been so busy with the rest of life.

First off, if you are a RSS subscriber, you will probably not notice much of a difference except that you may find that the feed has “reset” meaning that it says there are twenty or more unread items. I do apologize for this; it should just happen this once.

As much as the site has received a visual redesign, there are even bigger changes behind the scenes. I’ve upgraded from Movable Type to Drupal as the backend software. That has given me infinitely more options and abilities.

It was November 1, 2003 when I decided I’d commit to blogging every day for a full year. I was getting lazy with blogging and had given it little effort in the weeks leading up to that day. I figured I should either commit to doing it on a very regular basis or give it up altogether. A year later I had managed to blog every day and thought it would be good to renew the commitment. I’ve done that every year and here we are, six years later. I suppose the 2193 days in the counter down at the bottom of the site must reflect those six years plus the couple of leap years that have gone by in the meantime.

Though this site dates back to September of 2002, I pretty much think of November 1, 2003 as the day it really began. It was the day that I really fell in love with writing and the day I realized that blogging would be the primary way I’d express myself in writing. I continue to blog daily simply because it is my way of carrying on the commitment. I have always thought that if I start taking the occasional day off, I’ll soon taking off far more than the occasional day. On those days when I’m feeling dry and tired and beat up, it is only my commitment to blog on a daily basis that motivates me to sit down and write. It has been an amazing discipline in this way. I’ve stuck with blogging much longer and with much greater commitment than any previous hobby. And I don’t intend to give it up anytime soon.

It seems appropriate today to thank you, the readers, who continue to visit the site. I am exceedingly grateful, humbled and surprised that you continue to do so. Some of you have been dropping by since before November 1, 2003 and I’m glad to count many of you as friends. I’ve been honored to meet so many of you at churches and conferences and all sorts of other places.

Today seemed like a good time to mention that, as of tomorrow, I will be launching a second blog. I expect that things here at Challies.com will remain pretty much the same. But as of tomorrow I will launch a new site in a new location based around a whole new idea. It will not be a daily site, like this one, but may turn out to be near-daily. Check in tomorrow and I’ll give you about 10 million reasons that you might want to check out that site as well.

Until then, enjoy the rest of your Lord’s Day!

It must be a year or two now since I first began running a bit of advertising on my web site. Initially I did so because the costs of running the site were increasing and advertising offered a means of offsetting those costs. As time has gone on, it has continued to cover the infrastructure costs and has also been able to go toward some of the books I buy to review and, when it exceeds that, to support my family. It has proven a real blessing to us in many ways. And, I hope, it has allowed you, the readers, to get your eyes on some worthwhile products. I’ve always sought to be careful with whom I allow to advertise, only allowing those whose products I find biblical. To be honest, I’ve always hoped that somehow along the way I’ll find a model that will allow me to dedicate much more time to writing in general (and the blog in particular) and while advertising has certainly not approached this level, it’s shown me that at some point it may be a far-off possibility.

I say all this because I want to alert you to something new. I am going to run a trial of a slightly different approach to advertising. To this point advertising has consisted of the banner ads in the right sidebar and the banner at the bottom of the RSS feed. I’ve often had several advertisers posting ads at the same time. And it has generally worked out quite well. But I am always trying to look ahead a little bit, to find other models that may work. In the coming weeks a couple of advertisers will begin a trial program in which they will be the exclusive sponsor of the site for a week at a time. There will be just one banner ad in the site’s sidebar in a given week, but a larger one that we’re accustomed to. There will be one banner ad in the RSS feed. And here’s what’s new: the advertiser will also provide a single “sponsored post” over the course of the week. In other words, at some point during the week there will be an article on the site that will be written by the advertiser and directed to you, the reader. It will be clearly marked as a sponsored post so there is no concern, I hope, that it will seem under-handed. This program will only be offered to advertisers who are interested in letting you know about products that are good—biblically sound and appealing to the kind of person who reads this blog.

The purpose of these sponsored posts is to alert you of interesting products but also, hopefully, to build a bit of a bridge between the companies or ministries and the readers. As I’ve traveled around over the past few years, and as I’ve gotten to know the men and women behind the scenes at ministries and conferences and publishers and so on, I’ve so often been impressed by their desire to serve God in the vocation he has given them. And I think through these posts we can probably do a bit to put a human face on the books, the conferences, and any other product.

Or perhaps not. I am always concerned that advertising will somehow cheapen the rest of what I do on this site. But we’re going to give it a shot regardless. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks and we’ll learn as we go. Feel free to offer feedback if and when you think it would be useful to me.

I spent some time this morning writing an article for a magazine. They had requested a 600-word article on “What is the greatest hindrance to the gospel today?” I’ve found that articles like this pose a special kind of challenge to me. While I take time to write every day, far more often than not I am writing about what I want to write about. I set my own topics and write about whatever interests me that day. Writing for magazines, on the other hand, forces me to be a little bit more disciplined and forces me to think in whole different ways. It is a good discipline, I think, and a good challenge.

It occurred to me this morning that it might be fun to solicit article ideas from the people who read this site. I do receive occasional suggestions from readers who find their way to the contact form, but never have I actually asked for you to send me potential topics. So here I go, trying something new. If you can think of something that I could or should write about (an article, a series, etc), if you have a question you feel I could answer, simply fill out this form (RSS readers may need to actually visit the site) and send your suggestion(s) my way. Obviously I cannot promise to respond to all of them, but I will attempt to write articles or responses to at least some of them. Note that the email and “how many words” fields are entirely optional.

In the past months the server that hosts this site has been dragging a little bit. It has gone down a few times and has begin consuming too many resources. And so I’ve decided to move to a new server with a host that is dedicated to supporting Movabletype, the software that runs behind the scenes here. While I was going through all the trouble of moving to the new server, I decided to rebuild the site’s templates from the ground-up (or nearly so) and to tinker just a little bit with the site’s features and design. I also upgraded to the latest version of the software.

And so by this morning most of you should be seeing the site on its new server. I, on the other hand, am still waiting for the changes to “take” and continue to see the old site.

There are a few new features on this site you may like to know about:

At long last I changed around the top banner. Gone is the lonely winter tree. As much as I love the image, I think a year was long enough for it to be there. In its place is a chair. Yup, a chair. This will, of course, be utterly irrelevant to those of you who read via RSS!

You can now create an account on the site. This will be useful to those of you who comment regularly. The account will mean you can sign in and not have to continually enter your username, email address, and so on. It also gives you the ability to track your old comments, to track other people’s comments, etc. The page where you do all of this is still be perfected, so you’ll have to give me some time in that regard.

The front page has been simplified a little bit (since it was getting a bit cluttered). I removed much of what was there and replaced it with a poll/survey and ActionStream (which tracks what I do in other places on the web—Digg, Twitter, and so on). I removed A La Carte from the sidebar and it is now in the same time line as the other posts.

There are quite a few other changes that are sufficiently insignificant that they are probably not worth mentioning.

Beyond these changes, I expect things to continue here pretty much as they have for the past six years.

It is a rainy Saturday afternoon here in the Toronto area. I’m supposed to be heading out to coach a baseball practice at 2 PM but it’s looking rather doubtful at the moment. It seems like the kids are going to head into their first game with only one practice under their proverbial belts. It should be an interesting game to say the least. I’d guess at least 2 out of every 3 outs will come via the strikeout as the kids try to adjust to a pitching machine set at around 40 to 45 MPH.

Last month saw more visitors to this site than any other in the site’s history and readers took in over a quarter million pages. For the first time a long while (I’m a bad blogger, I know) I spent a few minutes trying to see what all those people were reading. I culled a list of the top ten articles from the last week, many of which are representative of the top articles from the last month. It is interesting to me to see how those book reviews continue to be read. Here’s the list:

• Book Review of “The Shack”
• BiblemanBook Review of “The Secret”
• Together for the Gospel Roundup
• Book Review of “Escape”
• Hearing and Heeding God’s Word
• Together for the Gospel Archives
• Book Review of “Do Hard Things”
• Book Review of “The Courage to Be Protestant
• Saturday Miscellania

We’ve got a double birthday in the family today, with Michaela celebrating the big number 2 and Aileen celebrating a birthday significantly higher than 2. Aileen is spending much of the day helping paint a neighbor’s house. But she’ll be back before too long and we’ll be doing what we can to make this a special day for her.

Enjoy your weekend!

It has been a busy weekend…and it’s only Saturday afternoon. Yesterday evening I took my son and one of our young neighbors to a hobby show where an old friend was working. We had fun watching the planes, trains and automobiles on display. We got home late and then spent the morning preparing for my daughter’s birthday party. We’ve just returned from building a craft and celebrating her birthday at a nearby store. Now the kids are playing with new toys, the baby is napping, and I’m catching up on email and blogging.

Early this morning I made some mostly-unnoticeable but important changes to this site. I finally went ahead and upgraded the site’s hosting, so it’s now on a faster and better server. I’ve said goodbye to budget hosting forever, I hope. I also upgraded to the latest version of the Movabletype software that runs this site. It was quite a smooth move, but there are bound to be bugs here and there. So I apologize in advance if you run into any strange problems when using the site.

Fonts and Browsers

I also took the opportunity this morning to change a few of the fonts so that those of you who happen to have Calibri installed will now see that as the primary font (and if not it will default to Georgia—the font it has been for the past few months). If you don’t have that particular font (i.e. if you don’t have Windows Vista or Office 2007) you can download it and a few others by clicking here to get the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. Calibri is Microsoft’s replacement for the somewhat tired Times New Roman font that has been the default Windows font for a long, long time now. It’s a great font.

As I was making a few changes to the site I did some testing in Internet Explorer 6 and have concluded that if you use Internet Explorer 6, it’s time to upgrade to either Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. Both are free and both are worlds better than the older version of the browser. Do yourself a favor and upgrade. You’ll be surprised at how much better things look!

Reformation Day Symposium Winners

Last week’s Reformation Day Symposium was a great success (I thought). When it came right down to it, it was difficult to choose winners. In the end I really chose somewhat randomly as I really didn’t feel there were three posts that stood head and shoulders above the rest. There were plenty of good contributions. Having said that, here are three that I thought merited a bit of recognition. Each of these three people will receive a free print from Reformation Art.

Musings of the Dings - The strategy here worked—brownie points were awarded for including a five-year old in the symposium.

Wiser Time was one of a few people to focus on John Huss. This brief biography of Huss was one of my favorite posts.

Allen Mickle wrote a good post asking and answering “Are Baptists Part of the Protestant Reformation? His brief history of the baptist involvement in the Reformation made a unique contribution.

So congratulations to the three of you. Drop me an email and I’ll get the prizes on their way to you.

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I’ve begun to do a bit of advertising through this site. I have added spots for three 125 x 125 banner ads in the right sidebar and have also opened up a bit of space for some text ads. Though I’m somewhat leery of doing this, I explained last week that the time has come, I think, to attempt to monetize the blog just a little bit. I think it offers a good platform for a variety of advertisers and hope to provide advertisements that will serve the readers.

If you are interested in doing some online advertising through this site, I’d be glad to send you the appropriate information. Simply contact me and I’ll send you a rate sheet and other information.

This blog passes a milestone…

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day I began this web site. In September of 2002, the first month this site was in operation—just a little blog dedicated to sharing pictures of my children with family members who had moved far away—it had two visitors, my mother and my wife. And I thought that was just fine. Just five years later, in September of 2007, the pictures of my family are long gone from the site and I expect nearly 200,000 people to take in at least one of its articles. And that’s fine too. I had no expectations for the site when I first registered the domain challies.com, but had I taken the time to dream a little I’m confident I could never have imagined so many people would make it a part of their lives. I find it profoundly humbling. I did not set out to create a blog that anyone beyond my family would care to read. Having said that, I am grateful that God has seen fit to so bless the site and I now seek to be a faithful steward of the responsibility with which He has entrusted me. It’s been quite the ride. And I suspect it’s only just begun.

When I look back to the history of my blog I can see that the site began to gain a bit of momentum and became much more valuable to me—much more of a pleasure to me—just at the time God graciously taught me that the site is not primarily a forum for me to voice my opinion, as if that is worth anything, but rather that it represents an opportunity to serve the church. It was then that I began to focus attention on directing people to resources beyond the site—to other blogs, to other ministries, and to books, resources and services that can benefit the church. It was then that I began to turn the focus from myself and turned it instead to the church. Long-time readers may note that it was about this time that I turned away from “watch-blogging” and moved instead towards what I hope is a more biblical form of discernment. It has been this desire, the desire to serve God by serving the church, that has led me to invest so much time and effort in this blog.

It’s that desire that keeps me going. And I do intend to keep going. I love blogging and intend to keep it up for the long haul. I love writing. These words, drawn from the Acknowledgments section of the book Women’s Ministry in the Local Church continue to inspire and motivate me. “Writing … is sweet fellowship with the Lord. He instructs me as I write. If no one ever reads it, His purpose has been accomplished in my own soul. I am satisfied. If He is pleased to use it in the lives of others, may He be glorified.”

At least one thing is going to change around here. As traffic to the blog has increased and as my responsibilities to it have grown accordingly (to say nothing of Discerning Reader!), I’ve become increasingly aware of my inability to provide the quality (and to some degree, the quantity) of content I would like to be able to create. At the same time I’ve begun to realize the potential difficulties I face in attempting to balance writing with providing an income to care for my family through my full-time occupation as a self-employed web designer. There are so many things I would like to be able to do, but so little time as I have to dedicate myself primarily to web design.

I feel that God has entrusted me with a unique ministry through my blog (and through Discerning Reader) but increasingly feel unable to give it my very best. There are hundreds of articles I would like to write for the blog and so many ways in which I'd like to support ministries and to support other bloggers, but time fails me to even attempt many of the things I'd so like to do. I receive many important and thoughtful emails, but am often unable to dedicate the time to crafting similarly thoughtful replies. As the release of my book draws near I am receiving increased invitations to speak, to participate in conferences and radio programs and to write for other publications.

So I’ve made the decision that I am going to begin running a few advertisements on the blog. I have been very hesitant to do so in the past, but can see that circumstances are now making it a near-necessity. So in the coming weeks you’ll start to see some ads show up. I hate to do this in some ways, but just feel the time has come. I hope you’ll keep an eye on the ads, clicking them and making this experiment a success!

It is my hope and prayer that this will allow me to dedicate more time and attention to writing content that will serve the church, thus serving the Lord of the church. I’m going to keep writing, praying that God will continue to work in me as I do so. And I hope that He grants grace that I can study His Word and share with you some of what He has been teaching me. So stick around; I think we’re only just getting warmed up around here.

As I wrap up for the day, I know I would be remiss to neglect thanking you, the reader of this site. Your prayers and support and gifts and encouragement have blessed me immeasurably over the years. I’m grateful to count many of you as friends and eagerly anticipate getting to know more of you as time goes on. You are a blessing to me.

SDG.

P.S.- Here’s a picture my friend Peter sent me this morning. He’s obviously getting an early start on celebrating the site’s birthday…

I wrote about my site yesterday and I’m going to do so again today. Please forgive what must appear to be narcissism. I don’t plan on posting about it again for a while after today. But because I added several new features in yesterday’s redesign, I wanted to introduce them to you and show you how they can make your life easier and can make all of your wildest dreams come true. That may be overstating it. But there are some neat features that may help you use this site better and help you enjoy other blogs more as well.

I’ll start with the main page:

There are five things I’ve highlighted here:

1. I know you already know about A La Carte, but I’ve now made it better, I think, by making the titles more descriptive. If you are a blogger, you’ll appreciate the value of having descriptive hyperlinks to your site. You can comment on A La Carte entries and in the very near future I’ll create a proper archive of all of the previous entries.
2. I am going to tentatively add a little bit of advertising to the site. Just a little bit. What I’ve added here is just a link to a pay-per-click kind of program with Westminster Books. I don’t ever anticipate allowing the kind of overwhelmingly in-your-face advertising that a lot of blogs have! But this gives you a way you can support this site and support a good online retailer. And it’s as easy as a click.
3. The Subscribe/Bookmarks/Tools area will let you subscribe to the site via RSS or email, add the site as a favorite at Technorati or Del.icio.us. And, of course, it the font is too small you can adjust it there. If you have never used Technorati, you may enjoy visiting it and perhaps making it a regular stop.
4. The Recent Comments area will show you a list of the most recent comments, showing who made them and the topic of discussion.
5. Finally, the Active Discussion area (which was at the top of the page in the old design) will show you a list of topics that have seen recent discussion. This tells you which topics are generating the most discussion.

Now we’ll turn to the interior pages.

I’ve highlighted five things.

1. These links are a simple way of navigating from one post to the next or previous one. Pretty simple, I admit, but handy if you want to read a few pages or want to catch up with discussion on multiple articles.
2. One of the most interesting aspects of blogging is how one blog influences others and how bloggers interact with each other. This Technorati link is a simple way of seeing what other bloggers are saying about a particular story. If you are a blog reader, you can click this link to read other opinions on the article I’ve written. If you have a blog of your own and link to an article I’ve written, it should automagically appear here and allow people to navigate from my site to your own.
3. I’m a latecomer to the tagging game, but have finally added them. Tags allow a simple method of marking the content of a post for later reference and of building relationships between various posts. Clicking on a tag will take you to a search function that will find a list of similarly-tagged stories. Because I’ve only just begun tagging it will take a bit of time for the full power of this feature to become obvious.
4. The Related Entries area uses a database search to come up with stories that are somehow related to this one. It is a bit hit-and-miss at times, but typically does pretty well with coming up with related entries. So if the current article interests you, you can click on the tags or on the related entries to read more.
5. If you are a user of social media, you can now link any article to just about any social media platform. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the RSS or email feed, you can do so here.

And one bonus feature: the “Submit” button should now be disabled as soon as you post a comment, meaning that we’ll see fewer double posts. The server is still a bit slow but at least we should no longer have multitudes of repeated comments!

So there are ten features, some new and some merely redesigned, that I hope will make browsing this site more enjoyable. Tomorrow we’ll return to more normal programming.