Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

The Blogging Church goes digital

How cool is this? The Blogging Church is now available for Amazon's Kindle! If you have one of those slick wireless reading machines, you can purchase The Blogging Church for $9.99 and be reading it in about a minute.

It's a fun treat to have a book focused on the digital world available digitally. Almost cool enough for me to justify the $359 cost of the Kindle :)

If you're just tuning in, The Blogging Church is a book I wrote (with Terry Storch) that was published early last year. It made a passionate case for using blogs to share the story of your church or organization with both the committed and the curious and featured a lot of terrific advice from talented bloggers in and out of the church world. One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin wrote some kind words about The Blogging Church on its release: "Brian Bailey makes two things crystal clear in this book: if you've got a church, then you need to spread your story. And if you need to spread your story, blogs are now an essential tool. Time to pay attention!"

If you have a Kindle and happen to buy the book, email me a nice pic of The Blogging Church on the Kindle and I'll be happy to send you an autographed copy of the dead tree version.

Bailey Summer Movie Festival

We Baileys love books, but we also love watching movies. This summer, we thought we'd have fun with a weekly summer movie. Each week we'll choose a guilty movie treat - funny family films to watch with our 12-year old son that are just pure enjoyment. A few are consistent favorites, but we'd also like to include some new ones. It helps if they have a summer theme, but that's not required. What is required is that they be ridiculously entertaining.

Here's a list of movies under consideration so far. Feel free to steal a few for your own summer movie festival, but then share some of your ideas in the comments - we'd love to hear them!

What About Bob? the consummate, absolutely hilarious, summer movie
Cats and Dogs
Kicking and Screaming
Cheaper by the Dozen 2
Funny Farm
School of Rock
Back to the Future
Karate Kid
Holes
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

We usually go for comedies, but we may slip in a summer blockbuster like Transformers or Independence Day. What are we missing?

Sundays without Tim

Today is Sunday and soon Meet the Press will be on with Brian Williams filling in for Tim Russert. I have been watching Meet the Press regularly since Russert took over in 1991 and you could say religiously for the past 10 years. In fact, we do a family list each year of our favorite books, shows, music, etc... and Meet the Press has made my list every time.

This puts me into the category of a political junkie, but when it comes to political television, Meet the Press has been my only fix. I've rarely watched other political shows and I don't know if I've ever felt I was missing anything.

Though thousands of words have been written about Tim Russert's death, I am compelled to add a few of my own. Tim was the best political analyst, reporter, and interviewer I have ever seen. His words were always valuable, well-reasoned, and full of unique insight into the world of politics. When The Today Show would feature a political discussion, I would be largely oblivious until I heard, "Tim Russert joins us from..." That's when I knew it was time to pay attention.

More important that his pure skills were two things: his class and his joy. Tim treated everyone at his table with respect, a lesson in old-fashioned hospitality that unfortunately stands out. No one received a free pass, but no one was treated unfairly either. It was clear that he valued his guests and believed that more often than not, they were determined to do what was best for the country. I was always struck by how Russert ended nearly every interview with a presidential candidate: "Thank you for sharing your views. Stay safe on the campaign trail." Such class.

His love for politics was so clear, as was the joy it brought him. His enthusiasm was infectious. You got the feeling at the end of each week that he wished he could continue the conversation for another hour and absolutely could not wait for the next show. He never took for granted that he was paid so well to do what he'd loved so much. A life filled with full appreciation for the blessings all around you is a truly great life.

Of course, his love of his family, especially his son Luke, and his faith stood out as well. When else has faith been mentioned so much when someone other than a religious leader passes away? I wonder if people would say the same about me. The best thing a death can offer those who are left behind is the chance to reexamine your own life with a fresh perspective. Don't miss Peggy Noonan's thoughts on that very subject.

The simplest thing I can say about Tim Russert is that Meet the Press was the only political show I would consider sharing with Lori and particularly my son Ben. We watched many interviews and debates together as a family during this amazing presidential election. I'm very protective of Ben and Tim was the only person I trusted to give a fair, respectful, patriotic, and passionate introduction to politics. I'm just sad that the time was so short.

Sundays will never be the same in our house. God bless you Tim.

Formatting Backpack pages

If you use Backpack, the organizing web tool and intranet from 37signals, you may sometimes wish you could modify the text on a page to fit a little more information on it. I have a page where I collect code snippets and terminal commands and the default font seems a bit large with so much content. Turns out there's an easy solution to this: simply add a small amount of CSS to the page in the form of a note and you can change the formatting to meet your needs.

I've known this was possible for a long time, but finally took the time to figure it out the other day. After a few experiments, I came up with a solution that works great for me. Those of you with actual CSS skills may find much to laugh at with this example - feel free to post improvements. Plus, there is much more that can be done once someone with design skills starts playing with it.

To do this yourself, just create a new note on a page with what you see above (I like to put the note at the bottom). As soon as you save it, refresh the page to see the changes. Feel free to experiment with the font sizes (just change 14px and 12px) and the title colors (color:brown).

Here are two examples, with the standard version first. Check out these ideas if you'd like to explore further. Enjoy!

LoriBailey.com

My wife Lori just relaunched her blog, now available at LoriBailey.com. Even better, the new site begins with a post about her fantastic new professional adventure - working with the talented Life Church team to spread the word about open resources.

It's been an exciting year of change already and we know it's just getting started. Check out her new site and say hello, subscribe to the feed, and if you're a church leader and haven't already, start exploring the numerous and entirely free resources available at open.lifechurch.tv.

Obama is still "stuck at deuce"

Hillary Clinton has won Pennsylvania by at least 10 points and like Punxsutawney Phil has guaranteed another six weeks of campaigning. I thought it would be closer, and hoped it would be close enough to justify her leaving the race. No such luck.

As much as Obama's nomination retains its sense of inevitability, this is not good news for his campaign. At this point in the race, with so much momentum and money on his side, why do a majority of Democratic voters continue to keep Obama at arm's length? State after state has had the opportunity to end the race and each time, the vote has gone to Clinton.

I have to agree with the Clinton camp at this point. There is no reason for her to drop out and her continued success (even built on so much unpleasantness) shows that Obama has some serious weaknesses as a candidate. Unfortunately for the Democrats, after each election the number of voters who say they'll vote for John McCain if their candidate doesn't win goes up.

If you want to understand the state of the never-ending race, look no further than today's column by Maureen Dowd - Wilting Over Waffles. It's a brilliant and entertaining piece. There are so many terrific lines I could quote the whole piece, but I'll limit myself to these two:

Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran?

Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce.

Read the whole column for more. There's even a quote from Dr. Seuss.

Family Reads lands on Alltop

Our fun family project, Family Reads, has found its way to the books category on Alltop! You'll find it at books.alltop.com.

What is Alltop? Alltop is a slick new site from author, serial entrepreneur and certifiably nice guy, Guy Kawasaki. The site selects a number of quality blog and news sources on a given topic and gathers all the content on single, lovely looking page. They have a number of topics already and more are being added all the time. We're thrilled to be included in the books category alongside some great sites.

Here's how Guy and his friends describe Alltop:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.” You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet.

My favorite topics so far are startups, venture capital, politics, twitter, mac, gaming, and of course, books. No matter what your interest, Alltop is a great way to stay on top of a topic, while being introduced to new sites and people. Definitely worth checking out.

You may remember that Guy was also kind enough to contribute a piece to The Blogging Church. I told him that I now owe him two favors (three if he starts playing PackRat). I have a feeling my favors will somehow involve hockey.

How a blog devolves

I love most Hugh MacLeod cartoons, but this is definitely one of my favorites. What better way to sum up the evolution of the typical blog, something I've been guilty of here as well.

Hugh posted the cartoon as his goodbye to Twitter. He deleted his account, believing that his time could be better spent drawing and writing. Less than a week later, he's back (twitter.com/gapingvoid): "Too many people I do business with are also on Twitter. Being off it was impossible. My bad." I'm still working out the balance myself. Nevertheless, thanks for the great cartoon, Hugh!

The real world is the one you choose to live in

Another excellent post on the Signal vs. Noise blog, this one by Jason Fried: Urgency is poisonous. 37signals recently moved to a four-day work week and this post gives an update on just how well it's going.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK.

The comments on the post are particularly interesting. Many argue that the approach isn't possible in most companies, client-driven environments, or the "real world". Here's Jason's response:

Ah, the mythical, absolute “real world.” The real world is the one you choose to live in. Your world is no more real than my world. I’m sorry you’re trapped in yours.

It's a worthwhile conversation about an entirely different way to look at the life of work.

Read the full post.

Click and print on Family Reads

We added a fun, convenient feature on Family Reads today. You can grab a PDF that lists all the books we've reviewed so far (each certified as dependably delightful) and print it to take with you on your next library trip. The list is organized by level, so you can focus on the books for your children. Our thanks to Ben for maintaining the list for us.

You can check out the post here. Also, this is great for any friends or family who may prefer print to the web, so feel free to pass it along. Enjoy!

Download the PDF