LeakeSpeak

Thanks for stopping by LeakeSpeak; we’re glad for your visit! The tips below are to help you make the most of your time on this blog.

I usually publish new posts to my blog a few times a month, and sometimes a few times a week. My ten most recent posts are always displayed on the home page, www.leakespeak.com. You can read and interact with those posts, or there are a couple of different ways that I will describe below to find older posts.

Comments

This blog is intended to be a dialogue, not a one-way monologue. I think it’s more interesting that way, don’t you? You can join the discussion by clicking the title of a post. At the bottom of the page, share your thoughts, observations, or other feedback on the post or on the comments of other readers in the box that says ‘Leave a Reply’. The more discussion that takes place, the better a blog this is! To leave a comment, you have to have a free account at LeakeSpeak.

To get a free account at LeakeSpeak

Click the ‘Register’ link under the ‘Meta’ heading on the right sidebar of the home page. If you are viewing the page of an individual post, click the ‘logged in’ link under ‘Leave a Reply’, then click ‘Register’. You will be prompted to choose a username and to enter your email address. (NOTE: Your email address is only for the purpose of being mailed a password when you first create your account or if you lose your password later on. I do not use your email address for anything, and I will NEVER give it to a third party.) WordPress, the software this blog uses, will email you a randomly chosen password. With that password, you can login to your account and then change your password to something you can remember easily. With your new account set up, return to the home page and click ‘Login’ under the ‘Meta’ heading. Once you’re logged in you can enter the discussion by leaving comments on blog posts. You can tell WordPress to remember you so that you don’t have to login each time you visit the site.

Subscribe to the feed

Let’s say you don’t want to miss anything that gets published on this blog. The problem is that it’s a pain to constantly visit the website to see if anything new has been posted. The solution to that problem is the feed. A feed is published by many websites that feature frequently updated content (such as news websites or blogs). If you subscribe to the feed, then new content on that site gets sent to you without your having to visit the website for it.

There are many different options for following feeds. You can use a free online service such as Bloglines or the Google Reader (which can be integrated with iGoogle). Also, the most recent versions of popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari have easy-to-use features that allow you to subscribe to feeds and then click a button in the browser to view them. If you are an avid Microsoft Outlook user, you may want to check out the NewsGator Outlook plugin. Services and programs such as these that organize all your feeds in one location so you can easily view new content from your favorite sites are called newsreaders.

To subscribe to LeakeSpeak’s feed using a newsreader, click the feed link.

If newsreaders aren’t for you, you can also sign up to have all new LeakeSpeak posts delivered to you via email.

Categories

Every post on the blog is filed under one or more categories. You can click on a category listed in the right sidebar of the home page to see all posts saved under that category. A post’s category is listed at the top of that post, so if you like the post and want to read others similar to it, you can simply click the link.

Categories are the best way to see exactly the content you want, without having to wade through all the other posts. For example, if you are a friend of our family and want photos and news about us, choose the ‘Family‘ category. If you are not interested in personal tidbits but like talking church planting, then click the ‘Church Planting‘ category. Friends of Global Frontier Missions might want to check out a category like ‘Global Frontier Missions‘ or ‘Ministry Updates‘.

Archives

To read older posts, you can also click the links under the ‘Archives’ heading along the right sidebar of the home page. This shows you all posts that were published during the month you select.

Sharing Content

If you read something on my blog that you would like to share with others, click the ‘ShareThis’ link at the bottom of the post. It gives you the option of emailing the post to friends or sharing it through a number of social network and bookmarking sites, such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, digg, and del.icio.us.

To link to a post on your own website, click the title of the post. Then, copy the address of the post you would like to link to from your browser’s address bar. This link is the link the post will permanent be located at, and is called the permalink. (If you were to just link to the home page of the blog, the post you want to refer others to will eventually not appear on it, because the home page just shows the 10 most recent posts.)