• All my Christian, church and faith-related entries will go here;
• posts related to software design and development, hardware and other technology will go here, and
• other stuff into a catchall here.

New blog entries will still be announced via twitter & facebook.

Several reasons, but the precipitator was that this blog has been around for about 3 years and I’ve messed with it so much it was starting to do some very weird things – pieces of admin pages going walkabout; cache acting strangely; stuff like that. So I started fresh, exported everything to the appropriate new blog, and away we go…

Happy reading!

Mike 'Roots' Killiany

For the past week I’ve been thinking along the lines of what he calls removing ‘partitions’ as well – I’ve been calling them ‘white elephants’ – I think every church has these. They are things that meant a great deal at some point in the church’s history, but now it’s time to review their worth. The elephant can be rules and regulations, traditions, memorials, plans laid down in the past by someone revered and now gone – there’s no limit to the invasion of the white elephant.

(The term comes from a gift that was given long ago in the Far East. An albino elephant was extremely rare and thus considered holy and in turn had to be treated with extreme care. A ruler would give one to another ruler or one of his wealthy subjects, ostensibly as a generous gift, but in reality as a means of imposing a penalty. The recipient would have to spend large sums of money to house, feed and generally care for this huge beast – which, because it was holy, made no contribution to the recipient whatsoever.)

The leaders of a church are called to a ministry that will forever change. Their church’s congregation, its interests, its giving and above all the culture that surrounds it… everything is guaranteed to change. Leaders must constantly re-evaluate the choices made in previous years – do those choices still apply, or should they be adjusted or even completely removed? If they really ARE white elephants, then they need to be disposed of. They have become resource drains or ministry blockers – we do not have the luxury of wasting the resources Christ gives us for His tasks.

Removing the elephant can be rough – some toes are going to be stepped on (which, for a large elephant, can hurt!) – but then the church is free to clean out the stall, reassign the elephant keepers and get on with the job at hand.

• The schedule assumes 9 hours of transmission – there’s 8.62 hours of raw footage already. I must say I’m a little surprised, since there are some 75 speakers, and who ever heard of anybody that ever got up into a pulpit to speak for less than the allotted time! My guess would have been for 75*9/60 = 11.25 hours – but they’ve got the files.
• Some 7,000 people have signed up to watch. And if I’m any indication, that only includes the signer-uppers, not all the additional people who are going to show up by invitation to watch.
• There will be some live cut-ins at the top and bottom of each hour – sounds like the Catalyst conference is going to do some advertising then.
• There is no schedule for the day yet – they may push one out during the day. This is a bit disappointing – while I want to find new people to listen to, I’d also like to know when people I’ve heard of (but never actually heard) will be on.
• It will be pushed at streaming quality (500 Kbps), not at satellite quality for most people.
• Recordings will be posted after the conference.

I’ll probably be blogging the conference here at Praise Christian Fellowship in CT – let me know in the comments if you’d like to join us.

Twitter Username – by TechDebug/Lantrix

This converts any Twitter ‘@username’ string on your blog post to a link to ‘http://Twitter.com/username’, so that readers can follow that user or read their feed. This is running here, (temporarily, and will probably be deactivated because of the …)

Downside: It only works in the main post – not on comments or in the sidebar, which is disappointing – why wouldn’t the blogger want all occurrences identified and linked?

Twitip-ID – by Andy Bailey

This WP tool allows the blogger to add a Twitter field to the comment form, so the commenter can be reached that way.

Downside: Ever since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded.

TwitterSplit and TwitterSplitter

When you twitter an interesting link to something, you send that URL as <your URL?interesting link>. When a user clicks on the URL you sent, it shows the interesting link in a frame with your banner on top.

Downside: Since I hate iframes and see it as just another cheap advertising trick, I can’t really recommend this one. But it’s a clever idea.

Twittar

Some people have a Gravatar – an icon that many types of blog engines support. For those that don’t have a Gravatar but do have Twitter, this plug-in pulls the avatar from their Twitter account (actually, it gives precedence to the Twitter avatar).

Downsides: Again, since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded. Also, according to the comments on the site, it apparently loads slowly.

Bird Feeder – by Andrew Jaswa

When TwitterUpdater died (when I switched to WP 2.7), I found this plugin to send a Twitter message whenever a new post was published. Rock solid – does just one thing very well.

Downside (minimal): Doesn’t deal with all the events that TwitterUpdater did, but then I don’t use the other events either.

Tweetbacks – by Dan Zarrella

This tool is in beta right now. It works a bit like a pingback or traceback for your blog. Install it, and when someone references your URL in their Twitter, that Twitter will show up above your comment section.

Downside: The js code is hosted on Dan’s site, and things are getting very slow. So…

Quak Back – by Jeremy Hilton

…took the original code, improved the speed and made it run on the blog’s server. Then…

TweetSuite – by Dan Zarella

… turns the TweetBacks concept into server-side calls, along with a raft of other Twitter tools. An excellent concept, which I suspect will be improved and expanded over the next month or so. This one is now running on this blog – I’ve turned off Bird Feeder since that functionality is included here.

There’s a large listing of other Twitter clients and applications here (it’s not complete – it doesn’t have some of the ones in this post, for instance, but it’s a lot more complete than my little list!), so I won’t try building anymore lists – although if I find something I really love, I may document it at some time.

I checked for auto-updaters, in the hope that this would be a no-brainer. Version 2.7 apparently now has one built in, but I had to get to that version first. There is an automatic upgrader plugin (‘wpau’) that is now retired. It officially supported versions from 1.5.2 up to 2.6.1; it unofficially supports through 2.7 … sometimes. Of the 16 comments I looked at: 7 people loved the wpau (although one of them subsequently failed when using 2.7’s updater, and another succeeded by skipping the backup step). 8 people failed with wpau and one person said to do the upgrade manually. It’s hard to see the group being more evenly split!

In the end, I took the painful safe route – I backed up the DB, then the other files, and then followed the steps in the detailed documentation. One minor note: The list of compatible plugins is a long way short of complete. This wasn’t a problem though; I turned on all the other plugins one by one and they all worked fine. I came out all right in the end, with one minor problem: There are three new security variables to be placed in the config file. Installing these meant that I couldn’t log on as the admin, even when I deleted my cookies. So I took the variables back out and everything was OK. There are no instructions for how to get around this issue; stay tuned for the resolution.

Running a quick cross-platform test, I also noticed that Outbrain doesn’t work in Opera, although it is fine in Firefox 3.0 and IE7. Running the error console on Opera showed a lot of width, height and null errors from the page, 3 or 4 of which were from Outbrain (and another 3 or 4 from Amazon) and none of which looked significant. (Interestingly, turning on the FF error console showed a completely different set of errors.)

So: not too bad a trip; nothing major encountered, and the blog is up and running on the latest platform version. And henceforth – automatic updates.

[Update Jan 12, 2009: Found out that Twitter Updater doesn't work anymore, so I have to put out the Twitters by hand. On the good side, I've successfully followed the instructions to set up threaded comments - not that I have that many comments to begin with...]

[Update Jan 13, 2009: Bumped into TwitterPress which supposedly does the auto-notification thingy, so I was going to try that with the next post. However, when I saved this comment, it sent out a tweet. Turns out it works by sending out a Twitter not for the initial publishing of a post but for any update, as long as it hasn't twittered about the post before. So if I update a post (like this one), it Twitters about it (once). Also, although it says it will put out the permalink, it actually puts out the deprecated post ID. So that had to go. I've installed Birdfeeder instead - that seems to be working properly.]

1. Free!
2. Shows the visits on the map
3. Tracks visits for at least a month
4. Counts the total visits
5. Zooms in or identifies towns clearly
6. Widget thumbnail image scales well in the sidebar
7. Doesn’t distract the user from the blog post

ClustrMaps.com is good on #s 1, 2, 3, 4 & 7. The free version doesn’t zoom in at all, and you get no idea of whether people are repeat visitors; it scales horribly. the thumbnail image is not designed to be scaled to other widths.

Whos.among.us is good on #s 1, 2, 6 & 7 – no information is provided about #3, but it’s been running for at least 3 weeks. It doesn’t count total visits, just how many are there at the same time – pretty useless for people who are happy to see a couple hundred visits a month – all I ever see from them is ‘1’. It does tell me how many visits I’ve received from a given city (so it’s obviously keeping track of the visit count!), but because it doesn’t zoom in, I can’t be sure I’m seeing all the cities – they’re overlaying each other. It scales well in the sidebar.

In some desperation, I’ve tried NeoPlanet – a widget that spins. It’s also free and that’s where the good bits about it stop. It shows the visiting locations, but doesn’t count them; doesn’t zoom in on them; doesn’t identify states or cities; doesn’t stop spinning, and doesn’t scale at all in the sidebar. So it’s only good on #s 1 & 2 – again, no idea about #3, and regarding #7 the spinning is way too intense! In fairness, this site also provides NeoEarth, which displays a static map of the world – but like GeoVisite below, the free version only tracks data for 24 hours.

I found another one today called GeoVisite. It’s free; counts all visits; zooms in several levels; identifies countries; pre-fitted to the sidebar; very modifiable. Beautiful world maps to choose from. Just one problem: it only holds 24 hours of info. Gack! So: #s 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6 are good; There’s some distraction (#7); #2 is the deal-breaker. I sent them an email to confirm.

I also discovered FeedJit today. #s 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 good; #3 still something of a problem. it has a map widget that shows the last 100 users, regardless of time period, and when you click to get the large map, it shows the last 1,000 users. (FeedJit also has a widget that shows info about the most recent users.)

So the best-looking widget is undoubtedly GeoVisite, but unless they can fix the 24-hour issue, I’ll stay with ClustrMaps. Meanwhile, I’ll leave the others up – maybe you should vote in the comments…!

[After the response in the comments (below) from the folks at ClustrMaps.com, I've gone through this post and corrected a couple of things - notably the spelling of their name and site (the link was correct, since I grabbed it from the address bar). Also, they were also quite correct in noting that I was talking about the scaling of the thumbnail image in #6, not the data within the thumbnail or the data on their page after you click through the widget. It's also appropriate to note that I scaled the first two maps (that I was playing with a few weeks earlier)to fit the sidebar and not the last two (that I added as I was searching for maps for this post), so - at least for now - I'll undo the scaling on all of the maps. But the OCD in me does like to fill the whole width of the sidebar!

Lastly, anyone who takes the trouble to leave such a gracious comment deserves decent consideration about adjectives as well. I find that when I'm writing a post I focus in on the point in question and all things become relative to that focus. Scales 'horribly' was one such adjective that I've changed, but I'll leave it up here as a reminder to myself that words on a blog need more care than those in a conversation. In fairness to the other providers, I've gone through and moderated a couple of other words as well...swg]

For the blog he also created a “Scripturizer” that works with WordPress. So apparently did two other people (and I’m cutting/pasting from Scott’s web page here):

MeanDean from Heal Your Church Website has been thinking of starting a SourceForge project on scripturizer, to centralise development in various programming languages. Glen Davis from Chi Alpha Fellowship @ Standford has also implemented an independent version in PHP, which also includes other improvements. Hopefully all the developments will roll into one soon.

So it looks like Dean is the keeper of the code at this point, and you can go here to download it if you run a WordPress blog. This supports a sizeable list of versions and you can choose from any of them:

• AMP (Amplified Version)
• ASV (American Standard Version)
• CEV (Contemporary English Version)
• DARBY (Darby Translation)
• ESV (English Standard Version)
• HCSB (Holman Christian Standard Bible)
• KJ21 (21st Century King James Version)
• KJV (King James Version)
• LXX (Septuagint Greek Old Testament)
• MSG (The Message Bible)
• NA26 (Nestle-Aland 26th edition Greek New Testament)
• NASB (New American Standard Bible)
• NET (New English Translation)
• NIRV (New International Reader’s Version)
• NIV (New International Version)
• NIV-UK (New International Version – United Kingdom)
• NKJV (New King James version)
• NLT (New Living Translation)
• NRSV (New Revised Standard Version)
• WE (Worldwide English New Testament)
• WYC (Wycliffe New Testament)
• YLT (Young’s Literal Translation)

I’ve just moved over from the NASV to the ESV about a year ago, so ESV is the version of choice on this site usually.

In order to have ESV Scripture show up in-line, you need to turn on what’s called the ‘IP keyless option’, which is good for 500 hits/day. With this feature, you find the ‘+/-‘ button to expand text inline. Without it, you have to leave the site and click through to the ESV site.

Sometimes technology can be so sweet.