M&M, with respect why is the ranking important to you ?

I only ask, because it doesn't seem to matter much whether you are #1 or #10 in the ranks of Christian blogs.

Don't want to be offensive or threatening, but as a non-Christian (and check my blog to see where I'm coming from)it seems to me that the purpose of blogging is to engage your opposition in debate, and therefore advance your argument.

I like your postings on Earth day, and think that the green church, socialistic and godless, is hypocritical lies and liars disguising Marxism. I therefore target the twats.

It seems to me, again with respect, that this is where the real debate is, not schisms within the church, but opposing greens (and radical Islam, almost forgot)...

Recent blog post: Africa, Africa...

I am not offended :-) but please let me clarify that the rankings are absolutely not about schisms within the church, they are about celebrating how well Christians are faring within the blogosphere and about bringing Christians together. I love that there are a range of Christians ranking well.

You are right, though, that it doesn't really matter whether we rank or not. We began blogging nearly 3 years ago and like every blog when we started we didn't even have 1 other blog linking to us and we had no idea for ages if anyone was even reading us but still we blogged anyway.

Blogging, as I am sure you appreciate, takes effort to keep up and at times interferes with your life as you balance blogging with the other things you do. Sometimes you have to knock it on the head because other things are more important. Nevertheless, we blog anyway because we enjoy it and like you said we want to engage the arguments and contribute to the conversation.

The first time I ran the Christian blog rankings (by searching for words like Christian and Theology amongst Tumeke’s stats) I really did it as an exercise to see how many NZ Christian blogs were out there. I knew about NZ Conservative and TBR and Beretta but that was about it but then I found all these other Christian blogs. When I posted the first Christian blog ranking, the feedback I got from other bloggers was really positive and I was asked by several people to run the rankings every month.

When HalfDone began doing rankings he ranked Christian blogs that Tumeke does not (and some people think his formula is better because it doesn’t reward volume, it focuses more on visitors which speaks to quality) so I began pulling the Christians out of that that list too.

As a result of doing this exercise we have now discovered a whole pile of Christian blogs we would probably never have discovered – we link to most of them in our side bar (the plan is to link to all that feature on the rankings but updating takes time… must update the blogroll) but the best part is that these Christian blogs are now finding each other; I really enjoy this aspect and I don’t think any of us kiwi Christian bloggers had any idea there were so many of us!

The way I see it is that by doing this exercise we not only draw attention to the fact that Christians not only have something to say in the blogosphere but they are holding their own when compared to secular bloggers which means that not just Christians are interested in their views but that they have a following much wider than that. Christians are heavily stereo-typed and pigeon-holed in our society; sometimes this is justified, I won’t pretend there are not people who live up to those classifications in the church but in many instances it is not and more importantly I do not believe that Christian theology supports these classifications. Most of the Christian blogs that make the rankings are outside the stereotypes – especially the ones at the top of the rankings. We think that this is very cool that these blogs are doing this well and that this should be celebrated; so, far from the top 10 being a competition, it is recognition of the achievements of other Christians and it is an attempt to highlight this fact to the secular blogosphere.

I don’t there is anything wrong with recognising achievement. We have this silly tall poppy thing in New Zealand culture and from that stems this silly thing where we all pretend we are not fussed when we do well, that we really don’t care; the reality is we that all feel good when we do well and we achieve and there is nothing wrong with that feeling. (Pride and rubbing people’s noses in it is a different kettle of fish.)

I nearly deleted the “we are stoked” from the line “A change in the number 1 spot - we are stoked!” but then I thought, how silly. Every other time I have posted a top 10 list or report I have congratulated the blog in the number 1 spot. This time we are sitting in the number 1 spot so I couldn’t congratulate myself but I wasn’t going to pretend to not feel stoked because of some silly cultural convention. We worked really hard last month and put a lot of heart and soul and effort into some of our posts and to discover that people were that interested in them that they visited in droves and linked to them and re-posted them to the extent we rose that high on the rankings was neat.

I find it interesting that the Christian bloggers never ranked anywhere near as well as they do now back when you began ranking them.

I wonder if the reason they are all getting more traffic is the fact that you group them all here and people come here and see the listings and then discover them.

Either way it is all good because there are now several I visit regularly and reall enjoy that I didn't know about until you linked to them in the top 10.

It's just been pointed out that I've made an error which I have now fixed - the last three places you've got here are sadly wrong (well, that's the major problem).

I just can't wait for this week to be over!!!

That sucks. It also affected who made the top 100 and who did not. I have updated the list accordingly - thanks for letting me know.

Let's hope Alexa doesn't decide to totally revamp itself the day you do the stats again in the near future!

Recent blog post: Does God Exist? Christopher Hitchens v William Lane Craig

How do i get my blog ranked?

Recent blog post: Father's Love Letter to You

The three blog rankings we talk about here, Tumeke, HalfDone and MandM's, all rank New Zealand blogs with a Public Discourse focus. Further, MandM only ranks Christian blogs that appear on the other two so you have to go to each of them and apply to have your blog ranked.

Your blog is Phillipine based and returned no hits when I searched it for "New Zealand" so while Tumeke and HalfDone will rank overseas bloggers they are unlikely to list your site as it does not have a strong New Zealand element to it.

Nice site though :-)

Recent blog post: MandM is the 7th most read Blog in New Zealand

March was my busiest month yet by a huge percentage yet my HalfDone rank dropped by 12 compared to Feb so others must be doing really well.

I see that you fixed the CommentLuv colours, looks good. Was it as simple as altering the hex values?

Recent blog post: • Baby Born With Help of John Key (or not)

I think it is a combo of a lot of blogs having a surge, finally putting Christmas, New Years sluggishness behind them and the fact that each month Scrubbone picks up new blogs to add to the rankings and particularly this month I spotted several that had been around for a while so when he ranked them they came in fairly high up which would have bumped down everyone behind them.

I am so glad you noticed the Comment Luv formatting and like it. It was not as simple as altering hex! That the was coding understatement of the year. LOL!

It has added to my gray hairs and to get it looking this good I could never have done it without Bethyada who if you notice is currently showing up on our profile as I had to give him access to our HTML to sort it.

All the coding for the colour and behaviour of the comment boxes is hidden. Some guidelines are given to change some aspects on the Js-Kit and Comment Luv sites but the instructions assume a lot of knowledge i.e. they don't tell you which bits of punctuation you need to delete to add in your colours and they do not tell you the names of all the parts (each box is made up of a lot more rectangles and areas than it looks here - a lot more!) so you cannot define them in CSS. Even if you can sort that out they then say vague things like "put your code below the script."

Working out how the colours had to be inserted, necessary punctuation, etc. was not too hard and by hunting around various sites that each defined some of the parts and bringing those together we nearly have it complete. I still want a skinny dark border around the pale cream comment text area but this is at least a 3 part thing and we only have the names of one of the parts. I also want to get rid of the border around the avatars that shows up in the leave a comment box and I want the links below comments to show up in my normal link colour and I want the grey borders around the comment form boxes to be dark like my other borders and those stupid pink arrows next to the links to not be pink.... Oh and the comment box itself needs to be at least 3 times higher so you can see how much you have ranted on for before posting [that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ;-)]

That said, I am still totally sold on Comment Luv, it is fantastic! I love that you can see how many times someone has clicked on someone else's link just by mouse-over. I love that you don't have to deal with that ugly, unformatted blogger post screen any more and that you can use avatars and that people can all leave little links everywhere...

It is very good so once I am past the teething stage I will post a how to on Coping in a Technological World and I will share the code and the definitions that Bethyada and I have pieced together.

Recent blog post: Belief without Proof: Is Belief in God Rational if there is no Evidence? Part II

I know more about DIY nuclear weapon construction than I do about CSS (seriously), but what you describe sounds almost as bad as being on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon.

I also noticed your new avatar and the slide show the kids made for your birthday. I must be old: I remember the days when kids scribbled a picture with crayon and paper for Mum's birthday. The digital version does save Mum from asking "What is it" :)

(By the way, I'm not a gun freak or similar)

Recent blog post: • Psychics given government grant

Gun freak LOL! Coding seriously does your head in

- heh! I just realised the border is showing up perfect! Bethyada's work not mine - yay it looks awesome!

I am always playing with which avatar I use for myself. With people like Scalia setting up certain polls and nominating me for blog categories I feel rather self-conscious at times LOL!

Kids tech skills these days seriously surpass ours. I was fairly impressed with Noah's skills on that clip - he is only 7 and he did most of the making, Brittany (8) just helped with locating pictures and spelling the names of my favourite flowers.

Recent blog post: MandM is the 7th most read Blog in New Zealand

I think it is great to know that people are login onto these sites as I am sure they will gain something spiritually which is important in their lives, for more inspiration and guidance would like to recommend this live interview with Dr Gary Chapman. Listen to his advice on love and relationships in a personal, one on one podcast - http://www.bizymoms.com/books/love-is-a-verb/interviews.html
check out his new book "Love is a Verb" beautiful and inspiring true stories –
http://www.bizymoms.com/books/love-is-a-verb/index.html
There is a contest as well to win an autographed copy of his new book “Love is a Verb” and a cash prize of $50.00 -
http://www.bizymoms.com/books/love-is-a-verb/contest.html