I’m sorry that Gentle Wisdom was not available for about an hour last night. My hosting company explained this:
Unfortunately our servers were subject to a DDOS attack which caused the error that you were experiencing relating to your mailboxes not receiving mail and websites not displaying. This issue only lasted for approximately an hour as to which services were then restored.
We apologise for the delay and any inconvenience that this may have caused.
My blogroll was woefully inadequate. I have now replaced it with a set of links selected and imported from Google Reader. These are most of the blogs I read which are updated fairly regular and which I think are of general interest to my readers. If anyone thinks they have been omitted by mistake, they can ask to be added, but I make no promises to do so.
With this post I mark 1000 posts here at Gentle Wisdom, including those originally published at its predecessor Speaker of Truth, some of which were first published with the dreadful Blogger and later imported into WordPress. In addition to these posts there are currently 16 pages on this site, accessible from the menu below the header picture, and more than 10,000 comments. By the way, the numbers in the post and page URLs are misleading: they are not post numbers.
I have reached this landmark nearly six years since my first post introducing myself, and nearly five years after I started blogging regularly in June 2006. I have also posted 131 times at Better Bibles Blog, starting in July 2005, also a few times at qaya thoughts, at TNIV Truth and at the now closed Complegalitarian.
I was interested to re-read my very first blog post, at BBB in 2005, in which I rejected the advice not to marry in the 1984 NIV’s version of 1 Corinthians 7:1. At the time that rejection was only in theory; it was only in October 2009 that I decisively went against this advice. For that matter, so did the NIV translation team: they much improved their wording at this point in their 2011 update.
This milestone seems an appropriate opportunity to offer some musings about my blogging experience. As my regular readers will know, this has been a rather on and off matter. From June 2010 to February 2011 I posted only eight times, and I was thinking what no doubt some of my readers were thinking, that this blog had run out of steam and would soon expire completely.
Then in March this year, as I announced rather tentatively at the time, I effectively relaunched Gentle Wisdom, with the intention to build “more of a resource site” and to “make some money for my efforts”.
Well, I have done quite well in attracting readers, especially to my post on David Wilkerson’s earthquake prophecy.
I have made some money from Google Adsense, but not as much as I had hoped. Indeed I have not yet received any because I am still a little short of the £60 total required for a first payment.
And I haven’t got very far yet with the resource site project. I wrote my first few pages in my Follow Jesus section, but still have a list of several more to write. And so far I have managed only one post in the Life Today section, We British need not have bad teeth: The American way.
The problem is that I am not disciplined enough as a writer. I am far too easily distracted by various pressing things around me. Most of my blog posts are reactions to current events, or to what I read on other blogs and on Facebook, Twitter etc. That may not be a bad thing, but it does make me look like a fun blogger. Yesterday Christian author Frank Viola tweeted:
I find blogging to be fun. But writing books is bleeding.
Indeed. Writing serious content for this site is also “bleeding”, or as I would put it, “draining”. But I do want to do it. So watch this space to see how well I succeed.
My apologies for a small problem on this blog yesterday. For several hours the layout of the blog was broken, although the material was all accessible I think.
This problem was reported to me by several readers. But when I first looked at it, when I was home briefly between two trips out, I thought it had fixed itself – but apparently it was only fixed in my open Firefox window. When I got back home late in the evening I discovered that the problem was still there. I tracked it down to a problem with the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache, which (if any of you are interested in the technical details) was apparently trying to “minify” and cache my CSS but was redirecting users to a non-existent CSS file. Neither clearing all caches nor an upgrade to the latest version of W3 Total Cache fixed the problem. Disabling the “minify” feature did.
But my problems have been nothing compared to those of fellow bloggers who have stayed in the dark ages, which I left four years ago, and continue to blog with Blogger. Despite the best efforts of Google, its owner, Blogger still has serious problems. And it has now been out of service for something like twelve hours, and many posts which my dark age blogging friends had published have disappeared. The Blogger team is promising to restore them, but nothing has happened yet. One of those blogging friends, Philip Ritchie, has referred in a tweet to
The great Blogger crisis of 2011.
Last time there was a major glitch with Blogger, for about 25 minutes on 17th March, the team admitted that
The problem was caused by human error. … we will try harder to make Blogger a more reliable service.
Well, Google certainly need to do better with Blogger if they expect the public to have any confidence in their recently announced Chrome laptops, which will depend completely for their operation on online services rather like Blogger.
It’s amazing how one post, one event and one link can change the life and direction of a blog. That is what seems to be happening here at Gentle Wisdom.
One post: On 17th March, soon after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and based on a link from a Facebook friend, I posted David Wilkerson prophecy: earthquakes in Japan and USA. This clearly touched a nerve, as it quickly became one of my most popular posts ever. It attracted over 800 visitors in its first four days, as I wrote in Why the fascination with prophecy?, with a peak of 526 views on 19th. For the next month this article continued to be viewed around 100 times each day for more than a month, being the most read post at Gentle Wisdom on all but about two of these days. Most of the visitors came from Google searches for “david wilkerson prophecy” and similar.
One event: Late on 27th April the news came in that David Wilkerson had been killed in a road accident. This led to an immediate surge in viewing of my post about Wilkerson’s prophecies, again mostly from the same Google search. There were 2,743 page views on 28th April, and the total page views for the site on that day, 3,692, was the second highest ever on this blog. But by 4th May the views of that post were down to 338. My post In memory of David Wilkerson was much less read, presumably because it was one of many similar ones in the blogosphere.
One link: Then suddenly on the evening of 6th May, here in England, I noticed a sudden increase in viewing figures for the blog. Indeed for several hours I was receiving around 1000 views per hour, so more than 20 times my recent average of about that number each day. And nearly all of these hits were views of the same post on David Wilkerson’s prophecies. I discovered that the reason was that two prominent links to that post had appeared on the front page of Jeff Rense’s well known site rense.com. Rense is well known, and described by Wikipedia, as “an American conspiracy theorist and radio talk-show host”. Now I welcome this link from rense.com, but please note that it came as a surprise to me and that I do not endorse the site. Anyway, because of that one link this blog received 6,790 page views on 6th May, of which 5,839 were of the David Wilkerson prophecy post, thus going well past the previous record for one day, just over 4,000 on one day in March 2008, after I linked “Benedict” with “Antichrist”. Today, 7th May, the rate of new views has dropped off, but already by lunchtime a new record has been set of over 7,000 page views.
In early April I warned Jim West that I would be threatening his #1 spot in the biblioblogger rankings. I didn’t get there in the April rankings, although I did make it into the top 50, at #47. But if my page views continue to surge as they have done recently, I will certainly be much higher in May, and Jim should at least be looking over his shoulder.
A few weeks ago I rather briefly met Martin Trench, who was a visiting speaker at my church. Martin is a Scotsman who is now a “Lead Pastor” in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and he writes a blog Thinking Aloud, at his church’s website. He is therefore a neighbour of another British-born blogger pastor I follow, Tim Chesterton, now blogging at Faith, Folk and Charity. Perhaps this post will serve to introduce these two.
Probably Martin’s greatest claim to fame, which I mentioned in a comment here, is that he is the co-author of a book Victorious Eschatology: A Partial Preterist View
Martin’s post today, Ever feel like a hypocrite?, may not have the same far-reaching effect, but it certainly had an effect on me, especially in the light of my posts about Rob Bell’s alleged blasphemy and about not touching the Lord’s anointed. Martin opens his post with “I do”, to the question in the title. Here are parts of how he continues, with his original emphasis:
I do not like to see people judging other people, and I tend to be pretty free from judgmental attitudes myself …….. with one exception. I tend to judge judgmental people. I know it sounds ludicrous, but I tend to judge their level of Christianity by the fact that they go about judging other people’s Christianity. …
I don’t get into theological debates with people whose minds are closed …. with one exception. I just can’t seem to help getting into debates with people in order to inform them that getting into debates is a waste of time!
I know that it sounds self-righteous of me, but I can’t stand seeing or hearing people being self-righteous.
But, none of that brings me any happiness or peace. I don’t feel better after “sorting out” a nasty, judgmental, hater – because I know that it hasn’t made any difference to them. I should really feel compassion for them, because (no matter how popular or famous or widely quoted they are) if they have a closed mind and refuse to ever see the possibility that there may be merit in another point of view, and if they have to defend their point of view by attacking other people, then I can only conclude that they are an un-evolved soul … Maybe even that’s judgmental, but I can remember when my faith was as stunted and withered as that, and I eventually grew beyond that. …
So, for my own happiness, I am now trying to avoid pointing out to haters and judgers and heresy-hunters and debaters that they may be missing the point of what Jesus was all about. I am going to let it go and not even read their posts.
In these attitudes I think I am very like Martin. It is very sensible of him to let these things go, especially as a busy pastor. I really should do the same. So if you don’t read anything more here about Rob Bell and Adrian Warnock, don’t take it that I have changed my mind and agree with Adrian. I have just decided to back off, for my own happiness, and also to avoid being seen as a hypocrite for criticising people like Adrian when I have condemned denouncing one’s Christian brothers and sisters.
I don’t know if Jim West meant to do this, but in his post yesterday Ok Houston (WordPress), We Might Have a Problem… (I had the same problem) he revealed his daily WordPress visit statistics for the last month. I can compare them directly with the statistics for this blog. It looks as if Jim has been averaging around 1000 visits per day through March, rather more in the last few days.
Gentle Wisdom cannot yet match Jim on a daily basis. But its daily average number of visits, which was 82 in February, leapt up to 493 in March. Since 17th March, when I published David Wilkerson prophecy: earthquakes in Japan and USA, Gentle Wisdom has had more than 500 visits every day, with a peak of 1356 on 21st March. On 19th, when it had 1181 visits, Jim West clearly had well under 1000, so I edged ahead of him at least briefly.
In September 2009 Gentle Wisdom joined the select (maybe) band of official bibliobloggers. Thirteen months ago it actually made it into the infamous Top 50. But it didn’t hold its position because I wasn’t blogging regularly last year.
Meanwhile Jim West, also known as Zwingli come back to life, has held the #1 spot in the list of biblibloggers for most of its life, except for a short break when his blog was deleted and before he started a new one. He is still there in the latest list published yesterday – its title Oh My Goodness!!! Jim West Lost is an April Fool. Over the years the Alexa rank required to qualify for the Top 50 has inflated (because a lower number indicates a higher position): biblioblog #50 had a rank of 1,397,865 in August 2009 but 863,218 in the latest figures.
As I was blogging very little for nearly a year, it is not surprising that Gentle Wisdom slipped well down the Alexa rankings, to below 7,000,000 on the one month figures from a month ago, just before I started to relaunch this blog. But its one month rank has already risen nearly six million to 1,333,112, and will doubtless continue to rise quickly if my daily number of visits remains above 500. So watch out for Gentle Wisdom in next month’s Top 50.
I can’t help wondering if Gentle Wisdom should really be listed as a biblioblog. After all, most of the posts are not about biblical studies. But then the same is true of Jim West’s writing. Also Jim often posts 20 times a day, mostly very short posts. This suggests that on average only about 50 people read each post. By contrast I had over 15,000 visits in March and 35 new posts in the month, which corresponds to nearly 500 readers per post.
It looks to me as if Jim West is maintaining his #1 position only by blogging large numbers of short posts. If he keeps this up he may maintain his position, just ahead of Joel Watts who has a similar posting pattern. But if Gentle Wisdom only needs to double its number of visits this month, to follow up its sixfold increase last month, then that #1 biblioblogger spot is by no means secure. Watch out, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!
I have set up a mobile version of this Gentle Wisdom site, courtesy of Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress. If you read this blog on a mobile device you should be automatically directed to the mobile version. I haven’t been able to set this up quite as I like because of bugs, or unwanted features, in the plugin. But I hope it is good enough for you to use.
If you have any issues with the mobile site, please report them through my contact page.
This post is just to inform anyone who reads this blog, or its comments, through a feed (RSS or Atom) or a feed reader that the feeds have now been moved to FeedBurner. So you may need to adjust your reader settings. Here are the new addresses:
It is more than three years ago that Adrian Warnock closed his blog to comments. I was very critical of this at the time. My main argument was that a blog without comments lacked any kind of accountability. In fact it was a monologue rather than a blog.
So I am very happy to see that Adrian has now switched comments on again on his blog. He is using a new Facebook comment system, which I guess is open only to Facebook members. We’ll have to see how that works in practice.
I hope Adrian doesn’t have the same problems with comment wars that caused him difficulties back in 2007. I will try to restrain myself from stoking up any such battles. But I do intend to start reading the blog again, and commenting from time to time.
I hope to remain friends with Adrian, and not just in the nominal Facebook sense. After all, I am much less critical of his thinking than I was having read, and reviewed, his excellent book Raised with Christ