This isn’t because I’m trying to sell something or because I get anything from your comments.

Except one thing: a tiny piece of community.

I love the thought that I can post a thought, or something silly or useful that I come across, or a piece of my life…

…and you can respond

…and people can respond to you

And we can all learn from each other and make each other’s day go by a little more enjoyably!

Steph will tell you that one of my pet peeves is when I discover that someone regularly reads about our life, but never comments.

And it happens all the time.

My mom will run into someone at the grocery store, and everything she tries to share, the answer is, “Oh I know. I read it on their website.” And she’ll tell me the next time I see her and I’ll think “Really? They know I have a blog? They know I still exist? I wonder why they never leave a trace.”

If you come around every once in a while to see what’s up, why don’t you check in and let us know you came by? That way, this can be a useful tool that works both ways.

And now, you can even get followup comments via email, so you know what other people are saying.

Check it out!

Hey Kids,

If you consider yourself to be part of the Calvary Chapel of Raleigh community, and you sit in front of a computer on a regular basis, then you should join the Calvary Chapel of Raleigh facebook group. It’s simple, just click here and join!

What’s that? You don’t have a facebook account? Well take off those bell bottoms and join the 21st century! I personally guarantee addiction within one week or your money back… especially since it’s free.

I’ve been doing this blog thing for a couple of years now, and I think I learned a little bit about how traffic works. I know that all I have to do is mention specific political figures or religious leaders, and my blog traffic will go through the roof, but it’s not from people who care about what I’m writing, they just either want to tell me I’m right or wrong for liking a guy, or not liking a guy.

I also found that I can mention things that are hot in the news, and all the little news spiders will find my blog and make it look like my traffic is doing really good.

But when I write about real things, or just everyday life, I don’t see much traffic.

I do, however, know this: On an average day, about 100 folks will make it to this domain, and a handful of others will read via some sort of RSS feed (read about RSS here).

Out of those, about 40% always go to this post, because apparently there isn’t much known about Bell’s Palsey, so people google it and find our posts about Steph’s experience with it.

So here’s the experiment:

I want to know about the remaining 60-or-so people who look at this page on a regular basis. And I want to get those people, specifically, on the blogroll, so that it serves the purpose of a fun social network, instead of a list of awesome ministries and resources, which is about all it is now.

So if that’s you, please leave a comment and let me know, and if you have a blog or a website, I want to link to it, so let me know and I’ll add you to the blogroll.

Also, if you use Twitter, let me know so I can ‘follow’ you. (If you don’t know what Twitter is, read this post — and don’t think it’s only for technology geeks!) When we get a little bit of a community built up, I’ll put an RSS feed with everybody’s updates on the side of this page! And if you don’t use Twitter, then you need to because it’s fun and seriously addictive.

Sound cool?