Blogger - What software do you use to capture social media content, etc for use in your posts?
Ichabod - I borrowed this method from WELS - I copy and paste.
Thanks Greg. Your blog captures always look so good - I though you might have some super-secret method :)
As you've said in the past, many things have a short life on the web. If you don't capture them, they seem to not be there when you look again.
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GJ - Google Blogger had a software called Blog This! - and that made copying and crediting easy. However, that went poof so I fell back on the method I learned from Ski-and-Glende's sermon preparation - copy and paste. I simply highlight text and photos with the mouse, control-c, and then control-v in my blank blog space. I post the link, or embed the link in the title, trying to make it very clear where the verbatim quotation begins and ends.
I learned early that Lutheran bloggers erase the evidence very quickly once they are quoted or mentioned on Ichabod. Pictures often last only temporarily with copy and paste, so if I want the picture to be there always, I copy those graphics into my extensive file, then I copy the actual picture. Otherwise, links change and the picture becomes a big blank square - no location found.
Blogs open to great fanfare and close quietly, with everything erased. That is another reason to copy their best material. I use labels so that every post from that blog can be followed by clicking on the label list.
I enjoy promoting good and bad blogs. Few blogs last long. Having a blog is like having an alligator for a pet - it requires regular feeding. For that reason I have stopped blogging the Moline and Sassy blogs, unless there are special reasons. I simply copy Sassy posts here to her blog, because her foster mother likes to keep up with "the smartest dog we ever took care of."
News organizations welcome copying their stories - with the link taking readers back to the source. It is their right to demand only partial quotation, but regular news sources have never asked that. Yale Alumni Magazine is a separate enterprise, so they want only limited quoting. ChurchMouse is a great blog that does not want the complete copy and paste; it is also one of the few that tempt me to copy everything - but I resist.
Research on Ichabod
I have posted so many articles, -13,600 - that finding them again is a chore. If I want to reclaim a graphic or link to an old article, I use Google to google them. Google owns Blogger, so posts enter the database at once.
That is good for me and bad for apostate Lutherans. Almost any search for a Lutheran topic will yield posts and graphics from Ichabod. I have heard complaints about this effect from all over. That happened again when I created three blogs for the local Evangelical college, to get them involved in social media. The newly assigned blogger complained that my blogs owned the topics and graphics, so I said, "OK. Then out-publish me."
Numbers
I noticed, from looking, that the college blogs were beyond 30,000 views already, which is pretty good for free media attention. The map showed that people all over the world were reading it.
Ichabod registers more than 4.3 million total views now. The recent big day had 8,300 views and the monthly total is around 60,000 views. I seem to have the only blog with a counter showing the numbers, even though I never intended to reach more than a few dozen people.
Impact
Faithfulness to the Word of God is directly related to the impact of a blog. Most efforts simply recirculate current bromides and repudiate Luther at every opportunity. Some - like SpenerQuest - are handy as toxic waste dumps. Whenever I want something entertaining to copy and paste, I click on LutherQuest (sic).
Practice Is Everything
I have learned so much from blogging for eight years that I could never teach all my hints to new bloggers. The most important one is "practice," or as the Germans say, "Practice is everything."
"Writing makes a precise mind." That bit of wisdom is quite valuable in theology. Being challenged is good for study. Making a point in writing is far more difficult that simply speaking about it. That is why so few pastors write out their sermons today. The ministers think they can get up and blab for 15 minutes, finding it easier to parrot what someone else has already committed to video or audio.
WELS advocates plagiarism of sermons and protects those who copy from false teachers. But of course, how does one discipline a known false teacher who saves himself time by copying from another false teacher?
