One day about three years ago, while reviewing statistics for his website pizza.sandwich.net, Dan Jones noticed a spike in hits from Australia. Curious, he posted a note on his site asking how his new-found visitors were finding his blog, which he writes from his home in Ottawa, Ontario.
Evidently, a radio show host in Australia mentioned a game that Jones created for his site called the Pokemon Name Generator. Type in your name and favourite colour, and the game creates a name and identity for you based on the once-popular children’s show.
Jones concedes that it is a random joke. “I don’t even know a whole lot about Pokemon.”
The joke reflects Jones’ quirky sense of humour. However, spend a little time exploring his blog and one instead finds that Jones’ interests are decidedly spiritual, and his opinions reflective of his devotion to the Bahá’í Faith.
Earlier in the month, he shared his thoughts about the fasting period that Bahá’ís go through every year for nineteen days. Prior to that, he posted several entries on his pilgrimage to the Bahá’í holy land in Haifa, Israel, including a poem about his experience.
Jones’ blog is one of a growing number of sites started by Bahá’ís who are keen to share their beliefs and opinions with fellow residents and web surfers around the world.
In Jones’ hometown of Ottawa, there are about half a dozen Bahá’ís who maintain blogs, a high proportion for a still relatively small community of about 1000.
Writer and English teacher James Howden runs www.jameshowden.com, which weaves Bahá’í commentary in with his musings on teaching, sports, and his quest to learn the guitar.
Amateur photographer Louis Brunet runs a “photoblog,” at www.elbi.smugmug.com, which documents Bahá’í events in the Ottawa area.
Music student Lorraine Hétu recently started her own blog, lorrainehetu.blogspot.com, in which she approaches Bahá’í-related themes through musical analogies.
Perhaps the most popular of them, though, is martinsquest.com, maintained by Martin Braithwaite.
Braithwaite, who moved to Ottawa from his hometown of Florida in 2001, created his blog to allow him to keep friends back home updated on his life. The site now attracts about 1000 visitors a month and offers daily doses of information about Bahá’í community life in the Ottawa area, all infused with Braithwaite’s peculiar sensibility, which can perhaps best be described as playful.
In addition to notices of community events, photos of recent social gatherings, and his reflections on life as a Bahá’í, Braithwaite also enjoys breaking news of engagements among Bahá’ís in the area, a subject that his site has become something of an authority on.
“Those sorts of announcements are nice,” says Braithwaite. “And I do that largely because it drives a lot of traffic to the site. So if you don’t know who’s engaged, you should check the site. So it’s sort of a Bahá’í tabloid in some ways.”
Referring to his site as a “tabloid” may seem a little odd, especially in the context of a religion whose Founder prohibited gossip, as Bahá’u’lláh did, being as it is so inimical to the religion’s central principle of unity. But Braithwaite is aware of the irony and understands the challenge he faces as a Bahá’í writing in a medium as slippery as the internet.
With gossip and divisiveness so rife on the World Wide Web, Braithwaite says it has been a learning process figuring out what is and is not appropriate content for a blog. It has taken him a few years to find a voice that is fresh and engaging and yet still true to the principles he has learnt from the Bahá’í Faith. So announcing something as seemingly innocent as a couple’s engagement, he has found, requires a bit of forethought.
“Everything that goes on there gets thorough permission,” Braithwaite says. “Even beyond that, the standard now is that it needs to get people’s enthusiastic support to go on there. It’s not just a matter of, ‘Are you okay with it,’ but rather, ‘Would it make you happier if it was posted there?’”
This operating standard has apparently not hurt the blog’s popularity. The site attracts a good number of local residents interested in finding out about Bahá’í-related events in Ottawa and even draws a regular international readership each week.
The success of martinsquest.com also helped nurture the development of some of the other blogs maintained by Bahá’ís in Ottawa. Vafa Hasemi started his blog after being encouraged by Braithwaite. His site’s slogan, “Boldly going where no quest has gone before,” is a playful response to martinsquest.com.
The writers are, in fact, all friends and have benefited from each other’s enthusiasm for the medium. Their camaraderie is, according to Dan Jones, one of the reasons why their blogs survived those critical first months when many bloggers lose their enthusiasm and let their sites fizzle out.
“Back in the day, we would all post announcements for various events on each of our websites,” recalls Jones, “and we were almost vying to outdo each other sometimes. We just worked well together, and I think it created an atmosphere where we were able to try anything and see how it worked.”
Jones himself started blogging about as long ago as Braithwaite. He, too, started his blog more to keep in touch with friends and family than to reach out to anonymous web surfers.
Having moved to Quebec for a year in 2002 to help in the development of the Bahá’í community there, Jones started the blog to let his friends back home know what he was doing from day to day.
It evolved from there, and pizza.sandwich.net – or “doberman pizza,” as he has titled it – has become today a collection of news items about the Bahá’í Faith, reports of events that take place in Ottawa, and Jones’ personal reflections on his life as a Bahá’í.
Part of what spurred him to persevere with the blog was the absence of much reliable information about the Bahá’í Faith on the internet.
“In 2001, it wasn’t very easy to find a whole lot of high-quality Bahá’í content on the web,” he says. “If you searched the internet for ‘Bahá’í blog,’ you’d basically find random nonsense. At that time, blogging wasn’t really big.
“Today, it’s really starting to pick up. Now you see a lot of different people with websites about just about anything really. And there are more Bahá’ís becoming involved on the internet and posting stuff.”
Jones himself did everything he could to help fill the void. In addition to pizza.sandwich.net, he maintains two other blogs. One of them, jeunessebahaie.blogspot.com, contains Bahá’í-related news items in French. The other, childrensclasses.blogspot.com, documents his experience teaching Bahá’í children’s classes every week.
“In anything that I blog, I try to be as clear as possible,” says Jones of his approach to writing. “Instead of posting personal stuff and things that would only have relevance to me, I try to post more well thought out material and things that would be interesting and applicable to everyone else.”
As for how his site ended up with the curious moniker “doberman pizza,” that, Jones confesses, is just another random joke.