The good folks over at Biblioblog have added Nerdlets to their list of Biblical Studies Blogs. Sure we’re just “related blogs” (under the “techie” category) for now, but maybe someday we’ll be upgraded!

Every month Biblioblog posts the Top 50 BiblioBlogs based on their specified constraints.

A blog is included in the rankings if it contains substantial content related to biblical studies or closely related fields, evidences a scholarly approach to biblical studies (not requiring academic qualifications, but excluding blogs with mainly homiletic or devotional content, unscholarly approaches, or a primarily theological focus), and is currently active and posting.

Ranking is based on information supplied by Alexa for the current month. Blogs are ordered by the monthly traffic rankings provided by Alexa, a website which provides traffic rankings for each website or blog. In the occasional event that only the 3-monthly results are available in any particular month (not the monthly results), we will use the 3-monthly results as a proxy for the monthly results.

The Inspiration for almost everything about Nerdlets...

I have found this to be a great site to find new content—perhaps youre favorite author or professor has a site you don’t know about—so check out the complete list. For a competing list try here.

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Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been. I am spending a lot of concentrated time right now on my dissertation, among other things, and as a result have not been able to publish as much as I would like on Nerdlets.org. More posts are coming, and I hope to return to my previous level of productivity soon.

one of my photos. Check out my flickr page for more

In the mean time, you can find me in other areas of the internet. I’m on twitter, friendfeed, and flickr to name a few (friendfeed is my new favorite because it aggregates everything). It’s easier and quicker to interact with those sites than it is to write full-fledged blog posts, so I have been more active there lately. I would love to interact with you there, as well as here!

Next on tap for nerdlets.org (time permitting): new (open-domain) ebook for the Greek New Testament (Tischendorf or Westcott), keeping up your Greek over the summer, managing contacts, backing up your computer, securing your home from internet dangers, update on the OpenScriptures project and related sites (Ressurgence Greek, etc.).

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What’s the greatest gift you can give your true love this Valentine’s Day? The gift of Firefox of course! Your significant other will swoon when s/he realizes how interested you are in network security, browser extensibility, and open-source goodness.

Need more details?

There is a new geeky way to say how much you love that special one while spreading the word about Firefox with this totally anti-romantic but funny e-card developed by Mozilla Community Marketing team and Brinkhurst Design. However, if you are in a relationship and your significant other doesn’t know you’re into Firefox, I think it’s time of some serious talk. Have fun!

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A pixelated Christmas Tree. Probably EGA.

Merry Christmas from Nerdlets.org.

The ornament was given to me when I was eleven, shortly after my first BASIC program. My nerdiness manifested itself at a young age…

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Your Nerdlets are now conversationally super-powered. Comments are now threaded (you can reply to other people’s comments), easier to manage, easier to subscribe to, and better all around.

This is a long post, so let me give you the bottom line: Nerdlets.org values your comments, and hopes that you will participate in the ongoing discussion that happens here. I want to know how you are using computing technology, particularly if you are using it for the direct benifit of Christ’s kingdom. The new commenting system is designed to facilitate community involvement. It also allows you to promote yourself and your own ideas: the more you participate in the discussion here the more you can draw positive attention to yourself, and to your blog, website, or social service. Read on to find out how!

Blogging is Supposed to be Social

Blogging is supposed to be a social medium. For a variety of reasons, the social aspect of blogging has dwindled in the last couple of years. Partly this is because of limitations in most blogging software, and these limitations are gradually being fixed (Wordpress 2.7, for example, will feature basic threading of comments). Another factor is the rise of more directly social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Personally I think we can restore community to the Blog, and to that end I have installed IntenseDebate. Recently acquired by the folks at WordPress, IntenseDebate brings a variety of social features to any Blog.

Features of IntenseDebate

You will notice that the basic commenting interface is still simple to use and intuitive, and anybody can post regardless of whether or not you have an account with Nerdlets or IntenseDebate

Yet there are some interesting new features available to those willing to create an account with IntenseDebate (which is very easy to do: just click the box says create an accound).

1. Reply to comments. You can now reply to someone else’s comment, or start a fresh thread. This essentially turns each Blog Post into a forum. No more “@username’ syntax. Because comments are now hierarchical they are now more conversational.
2. Subscribe to comments. You can now easily subscribe to the comments for a particular post.
3. Email Notification. If you post a comment and someone replies to your comment you can choose to be notified by email.
4. Rate comments. Nerdlets is now a community. Anyone can rate the helpfulness of other people’s comments. The higher your rank the more prestigious you are, and the more prestigious you are the more people will trust what you have to say. This can help drive traffic to your own blog (I always notice a spike on Nerdlets after I post a comment on someone else’s blog) and increase your reputation in the online world.
5. Comment across blogs. You can use your IntenseDebate account with any blog that has IntenseDebate installed. Your comments are recorded by IntenseDebate, and your rank is retained throughout, again promoting new conversations and helping you to increase your online reputation.
6. OpenID. If you are worried about having yet another user name and password, IntenseDebate supports OpenID. The best part: you probably already have an OpenID account (go here to see why).  OpenID allows you to securely sign into a multitude of different online services by means of a unique URL and is supported by a number of internet companies, including Google (if you have a blogspot blog), Yahoo, Flickr, and Technorati.
7. Better Nerdlets Navigation. IntenseDebate provide a couple of widgets that help increase the usefulness of this site. Most recent comments are show in the sidebar, for example, as are the most popular posts. If enough people sign up with IntenseDebate I can also add a widget that ranks readers by the helpfulness of their comments (which is determined by the aforementioned rating system). This is yet another way you can draw attention to yourself (and your own blog or website) by participating in Nerdlets.
8. You can find more information here.

Conclusions

The bottom line: your participation on Nerdlets.org not only benifits this site, it now benifits you! I hope that this will increase our ability to dialog about the intersection of Christianity, theology, and computer technology.

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1. Follow Me on Twitter
2. Web 2.0 and Teaching
3. ESV Banners

If you use Firefox and browse this site with the excellent Zotero extension, you will now notice Zotero reference links in your address bar. Anytime I reference a book in a post you will now be able to add it to your Zotero database. Similarly, any post can be added to your Zotero database.

Don’t have Zotero? Click on the link above!

Related posts:

1. Zotero: An Introduction, now with SBL support
2. Big Leaps with Zotero
3. Zotero 1.5 Preview Released

I am excited to announce that Nerdlets is now at its own domain! Check out that beautifull address bar! Oh, the nerdlets.org goodness.

Don’t worry, nothing else has changed. If you are subscribed, your old subscription should still work perfectly. If you haven’t subscribed, now would be a great time! If you have this site bookmarked, feel free to up date it to the current location, but it’s not really necessary (your old bookmark will redirect you here).

As an aside, this is my 100th post. Thanks for your loyalty!

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My subscriber list has gotten long enough that I can no longer guess who is subscribed to this blog. More importantly, I have a lot of post ideas, with little notion of what to prioritize. So, I am instituting my first user poll: what Operating System do you use? You will find the poll in the first sidebar (scroll down a little). You can select more than one operating system. Please vote! And, if you have any other opinions on the direction you would like to see this blog take, please leave a comment to this post.

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This blog highlights the variety of useful resources, both online and in-print, that pastors, amateur theologians, and academics can use to help develop and spread their own ideas for the advancement of God’s Kingdom. Posts are designed to help Christians harness the power of computing and the online world for research and proclamation. but also include book recommendations, political topics, and my own musings on theology and culture. I have called these posts nerdlets because the interest in them arises from the mind of a nerd, a nerd obsessively interested in three topics: Christianity, culture, and computing. The nerd in question is currently a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia PA and can be contacted at tommy@nerdlets.org.

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