Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On the 18th June 2022 I ran the Mote Park parkun which was the 3rd event held at the venue, my 83rd parkrun and 18th different course I'd attended. I use the massively helpful 5K Achievements App for keeping record of my parkrun activities, planning future visits and accessing course event page information to understand more about various routes and how to get to the event. This resource is usually updated once a week, bringing enhancements to the app and updating the library of courses. On a recent update to the app a new purple icon appeared on the map feature and a new parkrun for Kent was born. Mote Park by all accounts had been attempting to start a parkrun for a number of years without much success. I'm not entirely sure what had changed, nor why. But I was enthused to see that a new event was coming to Kent and I was keen to attend as soon as possible. What wasn't clear however was when the inaugural event would take place. I suspected that it would start on Jubilee...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

Last week I took a look at a website ( www.kings-medway.co.uk ) which belongs to a church run by my Uncle Matthew and are doing some wonderful work for their local community. I pointed out that perhaps the website could function better and look more professional. More importantly, it should show off some of that great work that is happening on a daily basis and be more accessible for the local people of Medway and beyond. Whilst discussions are very much at preliminary stages as to the concept of the new website, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to look around at other church websites, get some inspiration and look at what people have done well, what type of content is being displayed and what pitfalls to avoid. As design is always so subjective, it should be stated that those that I’ve not particularly liked might well be by others. It should also be worth remembering that someone, or a group of people have put the time and effort to make these websites work, an...

One of the great uses of the web is the way in which you can keep track of your family tree. There are hundreds of sites dedicated to the art of ancestory, including Ancestry.co.uk and Genes Reunited . There is now a (fairly) new site to add to your Genealogy favourites - Geni. Once registered, unlike some sites, free of charge you will be able to quickly and very easily start compiling your family tree and seeing just what relationship a distant relative is to you. Not only can you quickly compile a very complicated tree you can invite your relatives to join and add to your tree using their email address in the hope that someone can help out with that missing family link, you can add photographs and personal history about that person and all sorts of other information that you may not think necessary. I have only really used the site for a couple of hours and already I have 118 people added to my tree, and I have only gone as far as my grand-parents (on both sides)! Granted, the Bir...

It has been nearly a year since I started up my blog and as yet have not even posted 50 entries. There are hardcore people out there who blog, once, twice, maybe more in a day. Getting hold of a decent blog, like this one (!) is hard to find, that's why there are feedburners and feed readers so that you can search under blogs that you may or may not find interesting. One of the biggest blog topics is football, or across the pond Soccer as it is know. There are litterally millions of blogs worth reading on a daily basis. I use the Google Reader plugin on my personalised Google homepage, so that when a new blog entry in written I can read it from my homepage without having to remember to navigate to their site. Here are some links to some of the best footballing blogs I have come across so far: Brian Moores Head An online version of the old Gils fanzine, has been mentioned in my blogs before, but seeing as we are on the subject... Culture of Soccer An American blog, but has lo...