Author Archives: Ryan Markel

You May Now Debate Intensely

I’ve just managed to switch my commenting system from the standard WordPress system to IntenseDebate as a little bit of a testing platform. It’s a very interesting idea—and one also shared by Disqus, which is a system I looked at for a while and never implemented—for standardizing comments and helping blogs to network together even while on different hosts.

I’m interested to see how it works, but you can already see it in action here. Please feel free to leave a comment on the post of your choosing to both experience it for yourself and assist me in taking a look and seeing how it works from the admin side.

If all goes well, I plan on recommending IntenseDebate to anyone I know and/or assist with a WordPress self-hosted blog.

links for 2008-10-30

links for 2008-10-27

  • One Lutheran…Ablog!™
    Rev. Paul Beisel makes the move to WordPress. As the lion's share of Lutheran bloggers seem to trend towards Blogger, I'd like to take a pingback to congratulate Rev. Beisel upon his discovery of WordPress. If there are any Lutheran bloggers who would like to make the move to the more powerful and extensible self-hosted WordPress, I will be happy to lease you some hosting and work with you to get your blog up and running. I'll help with custom domains, with plugin installation and maintenance, with upgrading WordPress when a new version is released, and in installing themes, all for a very reasonable monthly fee. Contact me or leave a comment if you're interested.
    (tags: wordpress lutheran blog hosting)

links for 2008-10-25

"Management often works to maintain the status quo…"

“Management often works to maintain the status quo, to deliver average products to average people. In a stable environment, this is exactly the right strategy. Build reliability and predictability, cut costs, and make a profit.

Traditional marketing, the marketing of push, understands this. The most stable thing to do is push a standard product to a standard audience and succeed with discounts or distribution.

But for tribes, average can mean mediocre…

The end result of this is that many people spend all day trying to defend what they do, trying to sell what they’ve always sold, and trying to prevent their organizations from being devoured by the forces of the new. It must be wearing them out. Defending mediocrity is exhausting.”–Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us