Nerdlets » Webapps and Websites

Getting Things Done (In Prayer)

Tommy — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:33:21 +0000

Now that I am (interim) pastoring at Christ the King PCA I find that I am spending a lot more time in prayer. I also find it difficult to keep track of all that I am praying for, and for how those the situations were resolved.

I started with a pen and paper prayer journal, but I have found that I never have it when I need it, and since I tend to lose things I worry that it might fall into the “wrong hands” if I try to carry it everywhere. So I am now experimenting with a new system. I am treating prayer like I treat other parts of my life—prayer is something that I need to prepare for, that I need to keep track of, and most importantly, that I need to do. It is a (blessed, glorious, holy) task. So, like other tasks, I have begun putting prayer requests into my Remember The Milk (RTM) list. (For an introduction to using RTM for Getting Things Done (GTD), see this.)

: Image via CrunchBase

I have a “Pastoring” list where all prayers get added (along with other churchy things). All prayer requests get tagged with the “@prayer” context tag (I use the @ in RTM to create contexts; if you’re familiar with Getting Things Done that probably makes sense to you, if not try here). If the prayer is about a person, I stick their phone number in a note, and if they have a tag in my system (my wife gets a tag, and so do co-workers and other people I interact with regularly) that tag gets added as well. I also add the date of the prayer request to the note. If the prayer has an expected end date (“pray that my stressful event Friday goes well”) I give it a due date, if it is more open-ended I don’t. I use the notes feature of RTM to keep track of how it all develops. When the prayer is answered, I “complete” the prayer, but I can still go back to it later because RTM will let you see completed tasks—all your answered prayers.

This system is secure (RTM’s servers are super encrypted, and my passwords are super weird and long), it is available to me anywhere (I love my new phone!), and it works almost exactly like most prayer-journaling systems I hear about. The biggest downside is… well, it feels weird. Prayer is such a sacred thing, and pen-and-paper seems more personal/appropriate/holy.But is pen and paper more sacred than bits and pixels?

I have talked to a couple of pastor friends regarding this but have yet to find a system that works for me. Does anyone have any suggestions, pen-and-paper or otherwise? Is there anyone out there who uses technology to keep track of their prayer life? Anyone think that sounds, for lack of a better word, weird? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

A Social Site for Academics

Tommy — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:42:24 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Everyone who’s anyone is familiar with Facebook, and most people probably know about other social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. Well if your in the academy you can add yet another social network to your list: Academia.edu.

Similar to LinkedIn, Academia.edu allows users to establish networks of contacts specializing in their field. You can fill in your credentials, upload papers, add information about the rest of your department (which might be problematic…), and a whole host of other thinks.

The site looks pretty slick, though I noticed a good deal of sluggishness and some less-than-attractive interface problems (text going off-screen, etc). There also seemed to be some privacy bugs to work through. For example, the front page of the site shows you a structural tree of a variety of Universities. It appears that you can add your name anywhere you like, provided you have an email address from that University. That could be problematic as the information included is now not only about you, but also about the University in question. How does the site verify the information entered? Or is that the responsibility of the University? That’s not so much of a problem for LinkedIn–your lies stay on your page–but for something like this fact-checking seems to be more necessary. Since I could not find answers to those questions on the site, I thought it best to refrain from taking part. Perhaps more information will be released soon, or perhaps Nerdlets readers who have taken the plunge can provide some info in the comments.

In short, while this might be promising, but I’m holding off for now.

Dropbox: Part Sync, Part Backup, All Good

Zotero 2.0 Launches (What a Pleasant Surprise!)

Tommy — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:24:45 +0000

Get the latest from Zotero

Zotero has just released the beta of their 2.0 upgrade, and it looks awesome. Here is the announcement.

The most important upgrade is the promised addition of groups and collaboration.

Groups provide a powerful way to share collections with a class, work closely with a colleague on a project, keep track of conversations in your field more broadly, and keep tabs on what people at your institution or in your department are working on. To copy items into any of your groups just drag and drop items from your library into any of your group libraries and subcollections. Below you can see an image of your groups inside Zotero.

Your group can be published as a web page, either public or private. I am really looking forward to trying this out (and reporting back here at Nerdlets). The promise for teaching is extraordinary! It could provide a whole new level of interaction in the classroom, not to mention among colleagues and fellow researchers.

Other features are also in the works:

As we refine this beta release, the Zotero team will roll out its recommendation engine, a storage solution for sharing attached files, more ways to navigate through collections online, and the ability to view feeds from public groups and libraries.

Stay tuned for updates. I look forward to posting a full review and guide in the near future.

You can get the latest release here. I have a quick-start guide posted here.

Nerdlets Makes the Biblioblog List

Tommy — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:00:17 +0000

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.

No related posts.

BibleArc Gets an Upgrade

Tommy — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:08:42 +0000

I’ve mentioned BibleArc before. Apparently it has recently received a major upgrade with some new features, including automatic parsing of Greek words, the inclusion of the Hebrew OT, and enhanced sharing capabilities. Check it out.

Don’t know what arcing is? Check out this video from John Piper on how he uses this tool. If you are interested in arcing and other linguistic concepts as they apply to biblical studies, check out Cotterell’s Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation

Online Reader’s Bible

Tommy — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:52:24 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Mourning the loss of Zhubert? Me too, and I will have an update on the copyright discussions soon, and a new eBook of the GNT as well.

In the mean time there is an excellent new reader’s Bible available that is based on Tischendorf’s Greek New Testament. Check that out here. It features handy footnotes and popups. You will need Google Gears for it to work, but that’s an easy install.

HT: Justin Taylor

Update:David Stark points out that the site also displays the OT, with notes for both Hebrew and Aramaic.

Academic Earth Helps You Educate, or Get an Education

Tommy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:52:58 +0000

Think Hulu, but for nerds. TechCrunch has the scoop:

Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.”

And here is a description from their web site:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

That’s right, lots of lectures to listen to! Every nerdlings dream! The selection is somewhat limited at this point (merely an aggregate of what is already out-there on the web), and there does not appear to be a way for smaller academic organizations to easily participate, but this shows great promise, and in the future could be a great way to “get the word out” about great teachers.

In the mean time, why not learn more about Ancient Greece, the Pluto Problem, or measuring space and time.

A Guide to Using Zotero in Biblical Studies: Collecting, Annotating and Citing Bibliographic Data

New Bible Search Bar for your Blog (from Logos.com)

Tommy — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:51:25 +0000

In addition to their excellent reftagger plugin, which provides blog readers with Bible verse popups whenever they hover over a Biblical reference (try it with Heb. 1:1), Bible.Logos.com is now offering a free Bible Search Bar widget to put in your sidebar. Biblical Bloggers should definitely look into this as it makes things easier for your readers. Logos explains:

If you have biblical content on your website or blog, you’ll definitely want to consider adding the new Bible Search Bar to your sidebar. RefTagger allows your readers to have instant access to the Bible passages that you cite in your post, but what if they want to look up a verse that you don’t mention or launch a search for a word or phrase that you discuss? They could manually navigate to Bible.Logos.com, but the Bible Search Bar makes it even easier for your readers to find what they’re looking for.

The sidebar add-in comes in many shapes and sizes, and should be a convenient addition to any biblical blog. You can get it here. And don’t forget reftagger, if you don’t have it installed already, here.

Troubles for the Open Scriptures Project

Tommy — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:14:11 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

The Open Scriptures Project, which I describe here, has hit a (hopefully temporary) snag. The project is dependent upon James Tauber’s excellent MorphGNT, which is open-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That license should protect derivative projects, but the German Bible Society has called that into question. You can read that here.

Long story short: I am voluntarily withdrawing my recently published eBook, which is based in turn on the Open Scriptures project, until this issue is resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

eBook of the Greek New Testament (UBS4) for the Kindle, iPod, or iPhone

drop.io Gets Streaming and Realtime Media

Tommy — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:05:02 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

The excellent web service drop.io has recently received the most significant added feature upgrade since its launch. From their announcement:

drop.io is now fully realtime enabled. this means realtime rich-media streaming collaboration and chat like never before. in one click set up a drop, invite participants, and seamlessly exchange any media on the fly. With full mobile and third party client support, drop.io is the simplest way to collaborate with exactly whom you want how you want.

Check out the launch site, or get more details. There is also a screencast.

Last week drop.io launched playlist.io, which allows you to stream music (or sermons, or lectures) to whoever you want.

Just a quick note that we just launched a new applet at drop.io called ‘playlist.io’ (http://playlist.io) – it is a dead simple way to post your music to the cloud in 3 clicks, and then stream it basically anywhere you want to play it (home, work, etc) — there is a demo video explaining how to use it at http://drop.io/file/playlistio

using the newly release API base iPhone application ‘droppler’ (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) you can even stream your playlist right to your iphone… there is a bit more at http://drop.io/blog if you are interested.

All in all, drop.io is shaping up to be a very handy way of distributing information. It’s a great place to put sermons, for example, or distribute class or lecture materials (which is one way that I use it). There is also a new app for the iPhone or iPod Touch (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) that integrates with drop.io, which makes all this even more portable!

Web 2.0 and Teaching