As we've discussed on recent episodes of TheSwim, we're encouraging all you fish to share the fshbwl with your friends, and, as a way of saying thanks, we're offering some very cool fshbwl schwag if you do it before a large audience.
Rave Cards
As we announced on TheSwim this past week, we now have fshbwl rave cards for you to hand out (see the design below). If you'd like some, simply use the contact form (http://www.fshbwl.com/contact), let us know how many you want, and send us your snail mail address.
The fshbwl blog widget
Since the lauch of the fshbwl people have been asking us for a blog widget. They want to share the fshbwl and it's content with others through their blogs, personal websites, and church websites. Today we introduce our first widget that you can embed in your website to share the fshbwl with others.
Here we have the widget in 2 Styles and unstyled if you want to style it yourself. All of the content is inserted in a CSS friendly manner meaning it's fairly easy for a web designer or developer to style.
To embed either the blue background widget or a widget with no background and a blue title in your site copy the relevant code below and insert it in your site. If you want to change the width or height of the widget at the start of the code where it says <div style="width: 225px; height: 300px; .... change these to the width or height you want to use.
For the blue background widget use:
For the no background color widget use:
If you want the widget to be entirely unstyled so you can do it yourself this is the code snippet for you:
This widget was created with Yahoo! Pipes. You can find more information on this pipe here.
Get the fshbwl widget
Looking for an easy way to follow the fshbwl? The fshbwl widget is here and it provides just that. The fshbwl widget provides easy access to 11 different parts of the fshbwl from the fishfood to the prayers. The fshbwl widget is available for Netvibes, igoogle, Windows Live, Opera, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista.
Click one of these buttons to immediately add it.
A special thanks to Netvibes and Greg Cohn for producing this widget.
The Word is Spreading
Because the fshbwl isn't just our community, but also yours, we wanted to share some exciting ways that the word about the fshbwl is spreading around the globe.
Short RSS Tutorial
If you're like many people you’ve heard about RSS but find the idea that’s been explained to you a little baffling. I often have trouble explaining the idea to someone without showing them what I mean. Case in point, on my recent guest appearance on the Swim podcast I stumbled through trying to explain RSS.
But, I honestly believe, once you get started with RSS you’ll have an almost immediate “ah hah” moment so, let’s get started.
Copyright Concerns
Be it something that goes with our daily articles or a massive collection of them for the 27-Hour Service, we use a whole slew of images at the Fishbowl.
This presents a few issue in the world of copyright laws. You see, before we can post an image on the site, we have to make sure that we have the legal right to do so. This means that we either own the image, or we have permission to use it.
Now, we could aim to own all of our images, either by taking them ourselves or buying all of them from stock photo sites, but this either takes a lot of time or money (although, since time is money, it really boils down to it taking a lot of money). At the Fishbowl, we think there are better uses for the money we do have, and, since this site runs on your donations, this really means that we think there are better ways to spend your money.
This is where Creative Commons comes into play. Because you can just link to their site and find out how it works, here we'll just say that it's a very cool gig that allows us to post images we don't own without breaking copyright laws (assuming we give the artist credit, which we do ... just place your cursor over an image on the site).
So, where do you find Creative Common images? We use flickr because there are millions of photos there that have been placed under the Creative Commons license.
However, one of the challenges in finding these images is that, for every search you do (and we do a lot of them), you have to go into the advanced search settings and click a Creative Commons button. At least this is how we used to search. Now, thanks to a mix of the Firefox web browser, the Greasemonkey plug-in, and this Greasemonkey script, all of our flickr searches are, by default, Creative Commons only.
Happy image searching, and make sure you give artists credit for their work!
A Beginning
It was almost seven years ago that my wife and I had our wedding. It was almost two years ago that I was ordained as a pastor. It was just over 18-months ago that my wife gave birth to our son Robbie. What do all of these events have in common? Quite simply, they're events ... moments ... points in time.
Certainly each is filled with expectation and excitement. True they create memories that we carry on for a lifetime. However, they come and they go, and if the event is all that you pay attention to, you miss out on the life-change that the event brings.
You see, these aren't just events, they're the beginning of a new stage in life that can be far better than what's come before. What's better than a wedding? A marriage. What's better than an ordination? Being a pastor. What's better than a birth? Being a parent. But if all of our energy and life is poured into the events themselves, then we miss out on the better things.
I think the same holds true with the launch of the fshbwl. At one level or another, it's an event that's been 7.5 years in the making, and, for those of us involved in the launch, there's been all kinds of expectation and excitement (as well as some frustration and wondering if the fish had stopped swimming and started floating). Yet, if we stop now, if we're just happy that we have the site up and running, then we're going to miss out on the better things ... a community where people can feel free to ask, discover, and live.
We have big ideas for the fshbwl. From applications that allow you to integrate with Facebook and MySpace, to an entire new section on the site called “localize” that will help you connect with a faith community in your neighborhood (or even start a new one). But if the better thing that comes with the launch of the fshbwl is the community, then where the site goes can't be just our ideas, they have to be yours as well. Please share your thoughts, comments, and ideas as we celebrate this event, and remember, it's really a beginning with the better thing ahead!