Blogging the Bible

This blog reads like a Cole’s Notes of the Bible. He doesn’t contadict any of the stories. He just lays it out as it is presented, face value, for his readers.

Slate blogs the Bible. – By David Plotz – Slate Magazine
So, the tale of Dinah unsettled me, to say the least. If this story was strutting cheerfully through the back half of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned? I decided I would, for the first time as an adult, read the Bible. And I would blog about it as I went along. For the millions of Jews and Christians who know the Bible intimately, this may seem obscene: Why should an ignoramus write about the stories and lessons that you know by heart and understand well? I don’t intend any kind of insult. My goal is not to find contradictions, mock impossible events, or scoff at hypocrisy. Nor am I quite stupid enough to pretend that Judaism (or Christianity) is just the Bible. Jews are not only the People of the Book but the People of Many Books. There is the rest of the Hebrew Bible—the Prophets and Writings, the vast commentary of the Talmud, the stories of the midrashim, and thousands and thousands of years of other law and story and commentary. This 4,000years’ worth of delving and discussion is totally unfamiliar to me—I can’t hope to compete with its wisdom. Nor is there any shortage of modern advice on how to read the Bible. (Just look up “How to read the Bible” on Amazon.) There are experts to tell you why the Bible is literally true, others to advise you how to analyze it as history, and still others to help you read it as literature. You can learn how to approach it as a Jew, a Catholic, an evangelical Protestant, a feminist, a lawyer, a teenager.

Trying other blogs

Just out of curiousity, I created accounts on some popular blogs. All of which I hated except WordPress.com.

Here are the results of my expiriments:

WordPress.com: http://rekounas.wordpress.com
WordPress.com I liked the interface. Very familiar since I use the WordPress software to run my own blog. Easy to use.
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/rekounas
myspace.jpg
Argh! It took me 20 attempts to get past the creation of the account. Hated all the add stuff and added crap all over the place. Customizing your blogs style is awful. The do not have a list of templates but they do allow you to use your own
css. May I never login there again!
MSN: http://spaces.msn.com/rekounas/
MSN Uh, no thanks. I am assuming this is where all the teens and spammers host their
blogs. Pretty easy to use but lacks any creativity.
Live Journal: http://rekounas.livejournal.com
LiveJournal After fiddling with it a bit, I was able to get a style that I liked. Not too bad, but not my cup of tea. I don’t like the fact that if you are not a
Live Journal user, your comments show up as anonymous.
Blogger: http://rekounas.blogspot.com
Blogger Ah, the ever popular blogger. Interface is ok. I looked at the customization for 2 minutes and decided it would not be something that interests me. A fair amount of templates to choose from. Easy to use but not for me.

Now, if you know how to setup Apache, MySQL, and PHP; I recommend the WordPress.org software. Obviously, this software would have to be hosted either on your own PC or through some hosting service.

It’s pretty easy to maintain and with all the plugin’s it allows a lot of customization.

My blog influence

I saw a post on J-Walk Blog about blog influence. He found a site that measures stuff like that called Bloginfluence.

Here is the formula:
[(blog+posts+web links) + (bloglines subs * 2)] * 1+(Pagerank/10)

Under my new domain www.rekounas.org, I have the following influence:



My influence
[13]

Pretty crappy huh?

My old doman rekounas.myserver.org, I have the following influence:



My influence
[351.6]

Wow! Still shitty I think.