The Curmudgeon Goes Live

I'm announcing today, keeping with the next evolution of our team blogging, I've released my own blog @ http://blog.theslezak.com/
You can read my release post.

Thanks all!

What's next for The Appian Way?

Today is the third anniversary of this blog, The Appian Way.  It began as an experiment.  Web 2.0 was new to me and my team at Resurrection.  We wanted to learn by doing.  We wanted to find out if this tool would have ministry value.  At first I mainly posted links to other things I read with a couple of sentences of commentary or questions.  The other members of our team posted too, but we quickly noticed that I was writing about 80-85% of the posts; the other three contributors posted the remaining 15-20%.

Over time the blog grew and changed.  It became less of a link blog and more personal.  Brian asserted that the Church (big "C") was failing, from his own struggles with finding a life-giving faith community.  Chuck shared his excitement at the launch of Resurrection West.  I told you my wife lost her best friend to breast cancer. 

I also began to speak about major IT projects and initiatives at Resurrection.  For example, In a long series of posts I talked about our need for a better church management system and then I chronicled our project to select and implement one.  I shared both successes and failures.

And then there were the RoundTables: first South Bend, then Houston, then Kansas City, and finally Oklahoma City.

Over the last few months it became clear that this group blog needed to give way to individual blogs.  Chuck broke away with separate blogs for his trip to Israel and the Methodist General Conference.  Ian had his own blog.  Leo stopped posting long ago.  And I was posting all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with church IT or our team.

At the same time, Matt was pushing me hard to purchase clifguy.com.  It has been available for years and he couldn't believe I hadn't snapped it up.  Acceding to his pressure, I made the purchase, at which point the end of The Appian Way was only a matter of time.

The final piece was Ian setting up a WordPress MU server at our new data center.  I had the domain.  I had the software on a server we control.  The anniversary of this blog seemed like the perfect milestone.  (Brian and Ian are also in the process of setting up blogs on the new server.)

And so I give you my new blog, Clif Guy all the time at clifguy.com. 

Subscribe here.

I'll post in both places for a little bit until I see that most of you have subscribed to the new feed.

I still love the slogan of The Appian Way:  "The Web is the new 'Appian Way' - a technology for spreading the gospel throughout the world - and we get to be some of the builders. How cool is that?"  At clifguy.com I will continue to talk about technology and the gospel.  Please join me there for the next adventure.