I just set up our company websites to use Google Analytics. It’s a free service (of course, it’s Google!) that will track traffic on your website and give you some downright amazing statistics to help you improve your site. Granted, the service is intended for businesses that are trying to get more page views and make more sales. But bloggers can use it as well. It’s kind of fun to know that someone from Singapore visited your blog! :) Just paste a snippet of code on every page of your website (or into your template), and you’re good to go. If you use Blogger, it’s fairly simple. You can go to your layout, add a new HTML page element as a footer, and paste in the code they give you. Enjoy!
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PastorForums.com
I know there are several solid forum sites out there, but I wanted to make you aware of the site our company just launched: PastorForums. Check us out, and help us get started. In case you’re not familiar with our other sites, we also have PastorResources, PastorBookshelf, PastorBlog, and PastorOpenings (coming soon).
RapidShare
Have you ever wanted to email a file to someone but couldn’t because your email server restricts the size of emails that you can send (e.g., Gmail’s max is 10 MB)? I recently came across RapidShare—a free site that will let you upload files (up to 100 MB each) to their server and give you a link that you can share with others. Here’s an example of a file I uploaded and the link that I received: http://rapidshare.com/files/5587830/02_Plantinga.mp3.html. Here’s some additional info that may interest you. I’m sure there are other sites like it, but if you’ve ever found yourself needing something like this, you might want to bookmark it for future reference.
Google Books, Google Scholar, and Amazon Books
There’s a new article at the SBL website entitled “Google Books and Biblical Studies: A Developing Resource.” If you’re not familiar with Google Books, this article will give you a good overview of the potential that Google Books has for research.
Google also has a site called Google Scholar, which, in addition to searching all the books from Google Books, searches lots of major journals like Journal of Biblical Literature, Novum Testamentum, The American Journal of Theology, and Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and other things like Society of Biblical Literature: Seminar Papers. With a couple of these (SBL and NT) you won’t be able to view the hits in the resources themselves, but at least you are taken to the first page of the article so you know where to look it up in the print copy if it looks promising.
I also recently found out that you can search all of Amazon’s searchable books at the same time. Go to A9.com and select “books by Amazon.”
These are valuable resources that you’ll want to bookmark and use.
Create Your Own Search Engine
I recently found out about Google Co-op. It allows you to create your own web search, or as many different searches as you want. In other words, you tell it which websites to search, and it will search just those sites or simply put those sites first. Take all your favorite biblical resources sites, create a search, and then add it to your Google homepage (or bookmark it) and share it with others.
I’ve played around with a few, and I think this has real potential to be very helpful! Try out my Reformed Theology search, and feel free to edit it by adding other Reformed sites. Maybe we could start an MP3 search for sermons and lectures. Lots of potential here. Let me know if you create any.
LibraryThing.com
Well, I finally decided to check out this LibraryThing that I’ve been hearing so much about, and I must say that I’m sold. In fact, after about 15 minutes of playing around with it, I paid the $25 for a lifetime membership. The options are: (1) 200 books for free, (2) unlimited books for $10/year, or (3) unlimited books for life for a one time $25 charge. That decision was a no brainer.
So what does it do? Well, you’ll need to try it out for yourself to really get the feel for it. In short, it allows you online access to a database of your library. But wait, there’s more: you also get access to the library of everone else who has a public listing. In addition, you have access to other users’ comments and reviews of books in your library. You can also discuss books you share with other users and even get connected with someone who may want to swap books with you. I could go on, but you need to check it out for yourself to see how cool it is.
You can view my list of books here. How did I get all those in there, you might be wondering? Well, the books you see there come from four different sources. (This doesn’t include most of the books in my print library.)
Annotated Bibliography of Commentaries
A friend of mine, Samuel Bray, started an annotated bibliography of commentaries at the Wikia Scratchpad. If you’ve come across a good commentary recently, head on over and give a brief evaluation.