A day late (but not a dollar short) I'm done with the magazine article - "7 Steps to Successful Community Ministry." Look for it in April. By the way, my March article - "3 Keys of Effective Youth Ministry to the Digital Generation" (or something like that) - should be out soon. I'll give you a link when I have one. Neither article is brilliant prose by any means, but I think they have some helpful advice in them, at least....

Well, it's magazine article writing time again and, of course, I am once again sorry I procrastinated. Writing about your own organization is not so exciting. It's like working after you come home from work. But I know that I need to do my research tonight so I can put some flesh on the bones of my outline and submit the copy in by tomorrow. I firmly believe that writers' block is nearly always caused by a lack of information, at least for people who are basically competent writers. This knowledge helps me to attack the problem at its source and stop dithering about word choice when what I actually need is conceptual clarification....

In the past few months, I've been excited to work more with the "nitty-gritty" of our websites: HTML, PHP, and JSP (primarily staying away from the latter so as not to break it). I'm still no programmer, but at least I have a vague idea of what does what now. Computer programming is based on a few simple concepts. Once you have a grasp of functions, variables, operators, conditionals, loops, arrays, error checking, and includes, you've pretty much covered the territory. All the rest is application....

[A]s Secretary of State Colin L. Powell put it on Thursday: ''We have been successful in Iraq. There is a new dynamic in that part of the world.''...

to listen to Dr. Dog's "Keep a Friend." Last.fm has the full track. Now is it just me or does this sound like mid- to late-period Beatles? Truly some of the best pop songwriting (and arranging) in a while....