Hey folks.

I often hear from friends and family that we put so much stuff online that it’s confusing to find it all.

There’s ZackRiesland.com and TheRieslands.com… photos on picasa and photos on flickr. Videos on youtube… then there’s twitter…

…hard to explain twitter…

So, in the interest of consolidation, I wrote a new blog to try to put everything together.

I’m still working out the kinks, but from now on, ZackRiesland.com and TheRieslands.com will both get you there, and while you’re at it, I’d love our feedback!

So if you have any bookmarks or RSS feeds laying around that point to zackriesland.wordpress.com or therieslands.wordpress.com, please update them accordingly!

Oh, and if you happen to be a blogger and you have a link to us on your blogroll, would you double-check it?

Thanks!

We’re at 24,909…

Come on!

I’m not cool enough to have an iPhone or a data plan on my cell phone, but I still use it to capture fun stuff.

Here are a few photos I’ve taken recently.

*Apparently the Driscoll family is diversify in case the whole Mars Hill thing doesn’t work out…

**Katie and Anthony bought this outfit for our son!

***yes that’s a moldy bagel… it did that in just two days!

****yes, there is something called ‘but paste’, and apparently I have to learn what it’s for

*****Steph and I had an awesome Saturday afternoon date last weekend!

Hey all you power-blogger/design-gifted/tech-savy folks:

I’m planning some serious changes to this blog over the next couple of weeks. I want to combine ZackRiesland.com and TheRieslands.com into one blog, and move it to a private host, where I’ll have a lot more control over how it looks and what I can display.

I know there are a bazillion wordpress templates that offer different features and such, and it can be kind of overwhelming trying to choose one.

Steph is strongly against a white background because she says it hurts her eyes. Do you agree?

Do you think 2-column or 3-column is easier on the eyes?

Do you know of any good themes or plugins I should know about?

Give me some tips!

Last week I posted about Matt and Tricia and their upcoming movie to Thailand. Like I said in the post, they need to raise about $5,000 for their travel expenses, and they’re leaving really soon.

In the comments, Tricia shared some great news that they scored a ‘buddy pass’, which reduced the cost of the trip by half, but here’s what she wrote on their blog a couple of days ago:

Unfortunately, the buddy passes that our friends gave us turned out not to be the best route. Because they only got us so far, only one time, it ended up actually being more economical to actually purchase two round trip tickets. We got a pretty good price for one: $1,571.67. So, that brings our support needs back up to about $4,500. So far, we’ve gotten about $500.

In the last blog post I noted that if everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis would give 20 bucks, we could get them there. So far, two people have responded, and I have $40 that I’m going to send to the Flaglers, but I know we can do so much better than that! Let’s take a cue from Anne Jackson and show what lots of people can do when they do what they can!

“…please send us some neighbors”

If you walk out to the end of our driveway and look east, you’ll see this:

If you turn around and look west, you’ll see this:

I swear, I don’t understand what it is… We both bathe regularly, we keep our grass cut, and I only pee in the back yard every once in a while…

But it’s seriously been depressing me lately how empty our side of the street is. There’s a great house right next door to us for sale! Come be our neighbors!

No? Ok. But please pray for God to send us some awesome neighbors! I know He will… eventually.

-Thanks

I just noticed that we’re at about 24,200 hits since I moved this blog over to wordpress.

That means that sometime in the next couple of days we’ll hit 25,000!

Thanks for the love!

I posted another round of photos from my time in Uzbekistan (Read the original post here about where these are coming from). As I said before, I will gladly sell these to you in any format for any price, and all profits will go to supporting the Kingdom of Jesus in Central Asia.

See the rest of them on my flickr feed here.

Calvary Chapel of Raleigh Podcast

A task that has been on my to-do list for months is to set up a podcast for our church body.

I just know that I’m ten times more likely to listen to a teaching if it’s already on my iPod because iTunes put it there when I sync’d up, and I have a feeling that many other folks are the same way.

I also know that it’s a great way to make our pastor’s teaching available to those who might never otherwise find us. I often listens to pastors from around the world who I’ve never met, just because I found their podcast.

But I was always intimidated by the technicality of it. The first thing that iTunes asks you for when you go to setup a podcast is the XML document. “What XML document?”

But I found a great tutorial and it turned out to be pretty easy!

So click here to see our new podcast on iTunes, and if you’re looking for some teaching to listen to, why don’t you subscribe?

(Oh, and if you want to hear the teachings but you just don’t want to use iTunes, they’re all available on the website here)

I’ve spent the past several early mornings working on a new website/blog for the youth at our church body.

(this would be why my own blog hasn’t seen much action)

This is my first real experiment with a privately-hosted wordpress blog and podcasting and whole nine yards, so I’d love to have your feedback.

Got any tips on cool plugins?

Got any ideas to make this better?

Got feedback on our teaching (keep in mind we’re teaching teenagers)?

Please go visit and let me know!

Thanks!