Are You Well-Fed?

There's an Atom XML feed available for this blog; you can find an orange "XML" button in the sidebar of most pages. For those who don't know what a feed is: the expression comes from the phrase "RSS feed", used to describe a site newsfeed published in the Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary, as you prefer) format. You can view an RSS (or Atom XML) feed with most common news aggregators, including online aggregators like My Yahoo!.
(There's a longer summary at ION RSS if you're interested.)

All to keep you informed . . . or at least provide an indication that we're still alive.

Par, Of Course.

Here's the writeup of last week's mini-golf event by Nathan Hardt:

Personally, I thought that the batting cages were the most fun out of everything. Earlier in the evening I had also thought that I was a pretty good golfer, but Jordan and Ben [both under 6 –Ed.] now have more holes-in-one on their records than I do. Oh well, I still managed to blast the rest of my team away, and the ice cream was good. Other teams seemed to have the most “interesting” people – it’s a good thing Jonathan was with us, because there probably would have been a fight if he had been with them. (Something about stopping the balls, then counting it as a hole-in-one if it looked like it might have gone in.) My group was undoubtedly the most strictest one; there was no “oh well, take it anyway,” and Jonathan said, “We’re supposed to encourage one another.” (In mini-golf?) I thought that the funniest thing was on of our 6-foot-1 chaperones with a 13-inch putter. There were more non-youth than youth (11-9), [which is par for the course at mini-golf events –Ed]. But really, did you expect different from nine crazy teenagers and their equally crazy chaperones?

A couple pictures are online as well.

Mini-Golf Pictures!

On the course

The trampoline

Mini-Golf

Well, I'd tell you about our aces and duffers, but I don't think you can have either of those in mini-golf. There were several holes-in-one, however - one from a very young person indeed. All told, we had fun playing through the course, doing high jumps and flips on the trampoline, swatting at baseballs in the batting cages, and kicking soccer balls in the . . . soccer-ball-kicking cages.
You people wear me out; I'll have to get someone with real literary drive to write this now!

Tonight's game was also the scene of our official blog launch, and we handed out cards with the URLs of the official A2Y website, the unofficial A2Y forum, and of course, this blog!

To Those Who Have Become Concerned (With Good Reason)

Welcome! It seems you've come across the Acts II Youth Weblog early in its life, probably before this post drifted off the front page. Great! You get to see it grow, expand, and become a useful source of news for anyone who takes the time to visit or add it to their news aggregator.
If you're interested, you can get involved and have some of your own work posted here - see the Writer's Guidelines for information on how to do that.

If you really don't care about that sort of thing, we understand - maybe some day we can even forgive you. ;) And luckily for you, our web server doesn't care that you don't care. So stop by anyway.

Writer's Guidelines

For all those interested in writing about a recent or upcoming youth event: please do! It would be a good idea to ask the youth webmaster (Philip Hanson) whether someone else has already chosen that event to write about (to avoid duplicating the effort), but by all means write. First-hand accounts of youth events, short articles, or miscellaneous announcements should be between 100 and 200 words. That's two or three paragraphs - short and sweet.

Articles may be submitted by emailing them to our youth webmaster.

Not Devoid of Purpose

To start off, I'll give you a short rundown on this blog's purpose. The official youth website is (or possibly by the time you read this, was) nice and all - although getting a little long in the tooth - but it isn't (or wasn't) terribly personal. To remedy that, some of the young people decided to begin the Unofficial A2Y Forum (Unsanctioned, Unruly, and Underfed™). That was great, but there was still something of a gap waiting to be filled - enter weblog.
Here we will strive to bring you news about youth events fresh from the keyboards of the young people themselves, hard at work trying to do enough crazy stuff to be newsworthy. Lord willing, this blog will fulfill its purpose and bring the youth group closer to you even as the youth group draws closer to God . . . right after mini-golf.

"Is there not a cause?" (II Samuel 17:29)