Friday Is For Friends: Blake Huggins.

It’s Friday For Friends time. Where I highlight a friend of mine in my RSS reader who I think you should be aware of. This week I’d like to direct your attention to the one and only Blake Huggins.

Blake’s recent post about metaphors and the kingdom of God is good as his thoughts on historicity and Scripture (part 3 of the series). And although it’s been sitting on my desktop for about a month, (haven’t found a chance to read it just yet) his senior thesis from school promises to be incredibly provocative in the best sense of the word. With a title like, Resisting the Empire & Practicing Nonviolence in a Post-9/11 World: Unmasking the Myth of Redemptive Violence & Exposing the Domination System, how are you going to go wrong.

I’ve gotten to know Blake primarily via the comments on my site where he often has some of the most insightful and provoking follow-ups expounding and developing my unintelligent, disconnected thoughts. Oftentimes after reading his well-articulated comments, I’m half tempted to just ditch my post and put his comments in it’s place.

Anyway check out Blake’s site and don’t forget about Troy Bronsink, Julie Clawson, Dave Lowitzki, or Jemilia Kwon

Adium.

Again . . . proper disclaimer . . . I’m prone to exaggeration. But Adium is just about the coolest download I’ve ever put on my computer. And naturally it’s only Mac only (jab). It’s basically an open-source chat client that allows you to incorporate all of your accounts into one instead of having them spread out. Granted I only use iChat and Gmail. But to have them both in one spot has been extremely helpful.

The fun part is that it’s not only extremely functional . . . but it’s amazingly fun to use and customize. There are plug-ins and downloads for everything . . . themes, icons, skins, colors, etc. The options are limitless. Every color and every icon can be changed in a matter of seconds. I ended up with what’s below.

If you’re a Mac user . . . and have more chat accounts than just iChat, give Adium a spin for 1 day and you’ll be hooked.

Recent Designs.

Red Cowboy Designs is at it again (although my site is still in the middle of getting overhauled).

It’s been a while since I’ve updated any of my recent work on here but it’s been busy and I haven’t really had a chance to stop. I’ve got some more I’ll post on here soon but don’t want to overload you here or slow down your browser.

Just one of the posters for a series that was used at Catalyst by DASH in their alt/worship space.

Some promotional rave cards for DASH Day.

More of the same.

A quick little splash landing page I did for OffTheMap for the Jim & Casper Go To Church book & DVD.

We redid the OffTheMap website to streamline their content and to turn into more of a hub for all of their websites which include DoableEvangelism (which used the same template), Church Rater, Conversation at the Edge, The eBay Atheist, Justice & Compassion, and OTM Live. If you haven’t been by OffTheMap in a while you really need to swing by one of their sites and check out some of the rather interesting things they’re doing to subvert the traditional understandings of “evangelism”.

The new website for Youth For Christ Geneva for my friend Josh Case. The site is on the back of a new content management system that I will now be offering as a web option for clients via CowboyManager.com (more info and tutorials on this to come).

Nick on Prayer.

Nick is blogging content and has some great thoughts on prayer. Read this as backdrop for my coming thoughts on deism.

YourStreet & Hyperlocal News.

Here’s a cool new site I found last night that has some potential functionality. It’s called YourStreet. If you’re like me, you don’t read the paper anymore and rely almost exclusively on web media for your daily news. But most sites that I read our national and international. There aren’t many local alternatives without having to go to the main Atlanta site and go about 7 levels deep to your specific county and then city before you can even start to find the news that is pertinent to your local community.

The site is basically a mash-up of Google Maps and an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map.

Again, this is in the same vein of what I discussed last week with geotags and metadata. So instead of me going to the news now . . . the news comes to me contextually and locally. If you don’t get fired up about this . . . then as my old Baptist preacher would say . . . your wood is wet.

As you can see below it pulls the news from your specific location and you can even pull the RSS feed from your specific location. I’m not sure how well this will work in more rural areas. It looks like the news is even kind of sparse for my area.

But you can see the way in which the web is changing. And how tagging information with metadata is creating a whole new web.