I’ve made what I hope will be a big improvement in the usability of BlogWatcher. It should now be less complicated to add new subscriptions. Especially for esoteric ones like MySpace. I’m modified it so that, in many cases, you won’t need to try to track down the RSS feed for the site that you want to subscribe to!

To use this new feature, find a page that you’d like to subscribe to. As a sample, maybe you want to subscribe to Wendy’s blog, which is at http://wendy.thebaileys.name/blog/. Just type that into the “user” field on the subscription page (or copy and paste it, which is more likely ) and choose “Best Guess” from the list of subscription types. The system will try it’s best to determine the optimal subscription settings.

This hasn’t undergone a lot of testing yet, so I’m sure there are PLENTY of pages where it won’t work as expected. But I think it will work a majority of the time. And since the biggest problem I see is that people are putting blog URLs instead of feed URLs when they choose the “Generic RSS” option, I think this will make things easier for everybody.

Please report any problems that you encounter, so that I can resolve them.

Today’s readings bring up some interesting points for me.

First, there’s the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing. This has always been something of a troubling passage for me. Jacob, at his mother’s direction, tells some bold-faced, flat out lies. And he seems to be rewarded for it. This has always bothered me. Why didn’t he receive punishment, instead of blessing. But a comment made by Nigel on the main post helped to clarify something for me. Jacob achieved the result that God had planned, but the way he did it resulted in Jacob’s exile from his family for many years. God didn’t punish Jacob. His actions brought with them their own punishment, which I think is generally true of much of what we would call “sin.”

Which segues nicely into the Matthew passage

Jesus caused a scandal among the religious leaders of his day by associating with sinners. He was even called a blasphemer for saying that someone’s sins were forgiven. I rather like that. Mike’s commentary says that Jesus would in fact have been blasphemous, if he weren’t God himself. But I’m not sure I agree. I may be misremembering, but I think I remember another spot where the disciples, who clearly are not God, are told to forgive sin as well. Rather than saying that Jesus’ words and actions were blasphemous (implying against God), I think it more accurate to say that they were in opposition to the religous traditions of the day. An important distinction, in my opinion. I’ll bet most of us could name some present-day religions traditions which perhaps should be challenged, but which may just result in a charge of blasphemy. For instance, and I know many people will disagree with me, I think that the position of “the church” on homosexual individuals is wrong and un Christ-like. Regardless of how you feel about the act of homosexuality, we’re still talking about people here. People who may be sinners, but then, who isn’t? See the Eklektos homepage for a ministry my wife is working on in this regard.