Thanks, readers (or, at least, clickers)!

Blogger tells me that this blog has reached a milestone, that being over 500,000 page views. I know how the Internet works -- most of these visits probably did not result in anyone actually reading a post. But that's more than I deserve, no matter what a "page view" means. 

Many of these views were of one of the "significant posts" listed on the right. Feel free to visit any or all of them.

Thanks to all of you, whoever you are! To God be any glory.

Comments now screened -- sorry

I'm sorry. I know how annoying it is to have to type in something like


Xpdqef  742

when you can only half read the letters and numbers, in order to make a comment, because most of the blogs I comment on require this. But I'm just getting too many spam comments.

So I've turned word recognition on. (Again)

Thanks for reading (and commenting).

Please prove you're not a robot

The above is a clearer than usual "Please prove you're not a robot" picture. For the very few who may read this, and don't know what this is about, Blogger users (I'm one) can elect to ask for verification before a reader's comment will be accepted. I don't do that, but the result is some spam comments in my e-mail on most days. I can understand those who do use this system.

Am I really a robot? Well, now, I don't think so, but that might be hard to prove, in this day and time. First, we have to agree on a test. The Turing test is a famous test, introduced by Alan Turing, which was designed to test to see if a computer could fake responses to questions and statements well enough to fool someone interacting with it, who couldn't see who, or what, was producing the responses.

ELIZA, a computer program, produced about 15 years after Turing's proposal, seemed, at least in some cases, to pass the test, posing as a therapist, or a good listener.

You can check out an implementation of ELIZA here.

Note that Blogger has chosen to test for visual recognition, in trying to screen out spam comments, rather than allowing typed entries. Does that mean that Blogger can't tell the difference? Perhaps.

Computers are getting more sophisticated. Will they ever be able to completely fool us, on the phone, e-mailing, on Facebook, as movie stars or elected officials? I don't know. We live in interesting times.

Thanks for reading. I'm not a robot. I hope you aren't.

This blog is available through twitterfeed

This blog is now available through twitterfeed, as "Sun and Shield blog." Someone asked for this. I hope it works.

How to keep up with blogs, news, etc.

There is more than one way to do this. Some people check the blog site every so often. Some blogs send an e-mail when a new post is available. Some bloggers post on Facebook when they have a new post.

But there's another, and, for many, a better way. Use the blog's RSS feed, and subscribe to it by some RSS reader. (I use Google Reader, but there are many other ways.)

All this is explained well in a post from Gizmo's Freeware (which site I subscribe to, by the way.)

What makes a blog Christian?

I received this comment recently (on this post) from another blogger. I am pleased to read her work on a regular basis, and often comment on it, and I suspect that she is my most faithful reader and commenter.

Weekend Fisher wrote... I've found myself wondering: What are the criteria for a Christian blog? And, What are the criteria for a Christian sermon?

I have some thoughts on it myself, but my question to you is: Would you have parallel criteria for those, compared to the ones you have for novels? Would the requirements be higher / lower for blogs? Sermons?

For example, I consider your blog a Christian blog -- and I've read blogs by pastors and theology professors that I do not consider Christian blogs.

I'd be much obliged if you'd share your thoughts.

Take care & God bless

Anne / WF

First, I am grateful for the question, and the assessment. I try to produce a Christian blog. But "what makes it one?" is a good question. (I'll try to deal with sermons in a separate post, later.)

One aspect of being a Christian blog is, I hope, found in my "Guidelines for this Blog," published nearly seven years ago. I hadn't read that in quite a while, but I still think I'm trying to follow these guidelines. The first one is the most important: "I hope to glorify God with this blog." That is the most important criterion. A Christian blog must glorify God. I understand that no objective measure of whether or not I do so is possible. God knows, and understands, my motives, and what, if anything, is accomplished by a blog, or a blog post. A Christian blog should have, as its fundamental purpose, to glorify God. Does every post need to do that? No. An occasional political post, recipe, photos of the family dog, or setting forth the blogger's side of an academic, theological, or philosophical dispute would also be acceptable, and need not take away from the main purpose, it seems to me. A personal blog -- one that's about aspects of the blogger's daily life -- can glorify God, and I have seen some that do.

Conversely, a blog that is mostly about selling something, glorifying the blog owner, seeking redress for actions that the blogger perceives as hurts to her, or to put forth some partisan political view* is not Christian. A blog that isn't written from a Biblical world view cannot glorify God, as I see it.
*What do you get when you mix religion and politics? Politics."

Do you have to testify or preach in a blog, for it to glorify God? No. Instruction on what the Bible says, for example (Anne does this very well.) glorifies God.

Glorifying God need not be done explicitly. For example, in posting excellent poetry or photographs, a Christian blogger need not say that she is doing this for God's glory. If it's good enough, and has a Biblical world-view, it will do that without having to tell any one that you are doing it. As C. S. Lewis wrote: "What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians about other subjects--with their Christianity latent." (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, pp. 89-103. Quote is from p. 93.) Lewis never saw a blog, but I think this statement applies, if anything, more to blogs than to books. I thus propose a second criterion, namely that a Christian blog should be excellent. It should use language well, use graphics that are appropriate and well-done, and, where appropriate, refer to pertinent recognized sources. It should mostly stay clear of subjects that in which the blogger has no real expertise, or at least it should steer clear of pontification on such subjects.

Excellence, of course, is also subjective. I'm not proposing that every Christian who blogs should try to emulate C. S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, or Billy Graham, but that every Christian who blogs should try to do her best.

I would propose a third guideline, which is important, but especially on posts on controversial matters, namely that the blogger observe the golden rule: treat readers, commenters, and the authors of source material, as you would want to be treated yourself, in the same manner that Christ would treat them. A Christian blogger, then, should answer comments courteously, treat the views of others with respect, and have a humble attitude. Again, this is subjective.

A commenter, who disagreed with me on a particular issue, demanded that I remove a post. I didn't do it, and I suggested that further comments on this particular post, by this person (who says he is a Christian, but had made several long comments, most of them claiming that I must not have read the Bible) would not be welcome. I did not delete any of his comments. I hope I treated the commenter with more respect than he used in treating with me. I saw caving in on this matter as forsaking excellence.

Thanks for asking, Anne!

Sunspots 346

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:  Fox News, and many other entities, report on the discovery of two earth-sized planets, circling a star about 950 light-years from us.

National Public Radio reports that birds living in cities have adjusted the pitch of their songs, so as to be more easily heard by other birds.

Sports: Wired reports on how a type of swimsuit enabled swimmers to set many records.

Politics: National Public Radio reports than, in Oregon, at least, bloggers may not automatically be journalists -- a blogger was assessed a huge fine by a court, for defamation of character.

Image source (public domain)

Sorry -- You have to enter strange letter sequences when commenting

I have had word verification (where a commenter has to enter a more or less random sequence of letters in order to comment) turned off for a month or more. I have decided that I need to turn it back on. Sorry about that, those of you who comment.

I hate to do anything to discourage comments, and word verification does that, but I also hate to deal with "nice site" and other apparently meaningless comments from anonymous users, or spam -- that is, advertisements for products or other web sites.

Please keep reading, and commenting.

You don't have to enter weird letter sequences to comment

Thanks to a tip from Keetha Broyles, who gets far more comments than I, and therefore should know about spam comments, I have turned off the spam-blocking feature that required my few commenters (thanks!) to enter strange sequences of letters. I don't like doing that on other people's blogs, although I understand the reasons for it very well, and I didn't like imposing that on people who wanted to comment. Well, now, no more trying to figure out exactly what those letters are, and typing them in, on this blog.

Why is that? Because, as Keetha points out, Blogger/Blogspot has a spam blocking feature of its own, which blocks nearly all spam automatically.

Anyone using Blogger/Blogspot for their own blog, who wants to learn more, should go to their Dashboard, and click on the link describing the feature.

I am sorry to report that, in fooling around with this new feature, I managed to permanently delete a dozen or so comments, at least half of which were my own. Oh, well. Lesson learned.

Thanks for reading, and commenting.

I Like the New Blogger Beta (added to)

The Google company owns Blogger. Many of us out here in cyberspace use this program for our blogs. Blogger is an on-line program for creating and managing blog posts. One of its advantages is that it is free. Another is that, being on-line, you can use any computer with web access to post. Recently, one of the bloggers I subscribe to said that she was going to change her blog. Soon after, Blogger asked me, when I logged in to the site, if I would like to switch to the new version. Thinking that Grasshopper had done so, and that if it was good enough for her, it would be for me, I said yes. (Actually, she hasn't changed over yet. Oh, well.)

So what does the new version do for me (and for you, the hypothetical reader)?

Several things I have noticed. Probably some I haven't. This page gives a summary of the new features.

1) I can now enter labels for each post. This one has only one such, namely "Blogging." What's a label? A label is a category. If you, the reader, want to, you can click on the label, and you should quickly see the other posts I have marked with the same label. (Other blogging software has similar capability, and has for a long time.) That's great!

There's a downside -- I have posted roughly 500 posts, and there isn't any easy way to go back and label all the previous ones. I've labelled some of them, but not nearly all. Sorry.

2) There's a lot less need to fiddle with the internal workings of the HTML. There's a page for me where I can just drag and drop to establish the locations of various common features of a blog. I can change fonts and colors easily. In fact, I just changed my default text font to Verdana, which, I believe, is more legible on screen than Arial. Sorry, both of you faithful readers, if all these changes are making you dizzy!

3) I used to rely on another web site to generate my blogroll/list of the subscriptions I want to mention. I no longer have to do that. Blogger does that for me, and does it more easily. I can also name it anything I want to.

4) I can now choose whether to edit drafts (not yet posted musings), posts, or a mixture of the two, and there is more flexibility in getting to earlier posts. In fact, as I recall, I was not able to access more than the last 300 posts at all, in the previous version.

5) The archives now work better. If you really want to know what I was posting about in, say, July 2005, click on the little triangle beside the 2005. The months of 2005 drop down. Then click on the little triangle beside the July. There you are.

6) I can see (you can't) in my list of published posts, how many comments (if any) each received. This is helpful in, for example, deciding whether to delete a post entirely.

7) Added August 31, 2006: I have finally discovered that I no longer have to dig into the past to find the URLs of my old posts, when I want to link to them. The Edit Posts option includes a View, as well as Edit. If I View the post, the URL appears up there in a status bar (or something like that).

It's great! Now if I could just figure out what I should post, and when to write it . . .

Thanks for reading! Any suggestions would be appreciated.

More on Flickr and Blogrolls

Brandy has implemented two Flickr features that I haven't yet, but which strike me as cool.

1) She has included an animated badge, which is a random presentation of combinations of thumbnails of the photos she has stored in Flickr. You'll see this at the left. You have to be a Flickr member, and have photos stored, to do this. If you are, click on the "What is this?" at the bottom of her badge.

2) In this post, she has her name spelled with Flickr photos. You can click on the "Spell with Flickr" link she has provided, and try it yourself, using other letters. If you don't like the photo for, say, a W, you can click on the letter, and Flickr will substitute another photo for you. You don't have to be a Flickr member to do this. Numbers, and some punctuation (at least the ! and the ?) are supported. There may be a length limit.


I have discovered something I didn't know. My Flickr photos weren't coming up in photo searches. I finally e-mailed Flickr tech support, and they responded quickly, and told me that the problem was that I had included some non-photographic material, namely two charts and two line drawings. Flickr restricted my entire account, so that no one could find one of my photos by searching for a keyword, because Flickr wants to major on photos, and most searchers expect to find photos when they search, not charts, line drawings, or textual material. I have changed this, and presumably my account status will be changed.


I have seldom used my own blogroll, but just did, and I'm glad I recently added Brandy to it. I use Bloglines to subscribe to RSS feeds, including blogs. Bloglines went down for maintenance. I used my own blog's (I can remember that URL--so far) blogroll to get to Brandy's blog, which URL I didn't remember.

* * * * *

October 6, 2012: After a flurry of spam comments on this post, I am no longer allowing comments on it. In the remote chance that you want to comment on it, please pick another post, and indicate that you really wanted to comment on this one. Thanks.

P. S. I now use Google Reader, rather than Bloglines. I do have a blog roll in my blog. Brandy is no longer an active blogger, as far as I know. Sorry about that.

Guidelines for this blog

personal guidelines for this blog

1) I hope to glorify God with this blog. After that, my main purpose is my own enjoyment. I enjoy finding and organizing information, and researching new things. I enjoy (usually) setting myself the goal of producing something halfway sensible every day, and meeting that goal. I enjoy thinking that someone else occasionally reads what I write. I enjoy interaction with other people on-line.

2) I will try not to let blogging, or reading feeds, interfere with my relationship with God, or with my family, or my job (so long as I have one).

3) I will not embarrass any living human by posting personal information about him or her.
(This doesn't apply to public figures, or to persons, such as other bloggers, who have already provided access to some of their information. It may not apply to people who give explicit permission for personal information, or their images, to be posted, or request that it be.)

4) I will not violate copyright*. Quotations will be brief, and will be attributed accurately. A link to a live web page will be included, if the source is the Internet. If I got it from printed material, I will try to give the publication details, including page number(s), accurately. Public domain material will be used, if possible. I will not quote from modern versions of the Bible, except for occasional brief excerpts, because modern versions are copyrighted. (Parenthesis added May 25, 2009 -- The English Standard Version does allow use in a blog, if properly attributed. I now use it a lot.) Photos and graphics will be my own, or public domain.

5) I will try to post only accurate information. I will welcome comments pointing out errors of fact, English usage errors, and significant omissions.

6) I will respect the views of others, even if we disagree. I will be grateful for any feedback, even if it seems negative or ignorant (Matthew 18), and encourage comments that criticize anything I have said, or show that I haven't made it clear enough. I will try to acknowledge the contributions of others, subject to guideline 3.

7) I will try not to post anything principally for the purpose of attracting attention.

8) I will try to remember that much of what is posted on this blog probably is of little interest to anyone. (I wouldn't have read some of it myself, if I hadn't written it!) However, if others find anything of value, they are welcome to use material posted, so long as they do not try to prevent others from also doing so. In other words, I don't want any one else copyrighting my material--other people should always be able to use it if they want to.

Normally, I won't expect others to ask permission to use my material, but do expect a link to the original, if the use is on-line. If it's in printed media, the URL would be expected. If the use is more than incidental, for example, an extended comment on something I have done, or reproduction of most or all of a post**, I expect a comment or other communication, informing me of this use.

I intend to follow this guideline myself, if using or commenting extensively on something someone else has posted. I will not assume what others have written is there for my use, without some sort of permission, such as that indicated for my material in this post, or explicit permission by e-mail or exchange of comments.

9) I will try to encourage other bloggers, by a positive comment and/or a link.

When there is an opportunity, and I actually know something useful, I will try to help others with technical questions.

Added November 18, 2006: Another person's take on guidelines for a blog, better put than mine (and by a more important blogger) is here.

The material above is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The purpose is stated in guideline 8, above.

*I may have violated guideline 4 in yesterday's post. I don't know if that was a copyrighted picture of my grandparents-in-law. I hope not.

**Compare my post with this one (which was done with my permission, and I appreciate having been asked).