Larry Baxter, a deacon, webminister, greeter, and backup drummer at Calvary Baptist Church in West Lafayette, IN. has a book review of The Blogging Church on his blog Step Up to the Call. Check it out Book Review – “The Blogging Church”.
He also has five other posts on blogging and ministry including 2 parts on Why Should a Christian Blog.
Spent a little time playing with the blog set-up this evening.
What are you doing, right now?
That question is asked and answered by my first addition, Twitter. This is a really cool social networking tool. It basically lets me tell you what I’m doing at any particular moment. You’ll see the Twitter News box in the first right hand column. I can post updates to my Twitter News when I can’t blog. I can do the posts from my cell phone, from an IM program (limited selection I think), or from the Twitter site. I’m using the Twitter sidebar widget for Word Press from Velvet Unraveled.
Imieniny
I’ve added a PHP script to list the current name day. Name days, in Polish ‘Imieniny’ are the days on which a particular saints are commemorated. In Poland the “name-day” is important and is typically celebrated like birthdays are celebrated in other countries. In Poland only your closest relatives celebrate your birthday. The Imieniny PHP script is from Adam Brucki. I updated it for UTF-8 compliance and tweaked the output. If I get ambitious, I’ll create a widget out of it.
In short order the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 was a tad more complicated than expected.
I followed the instructions for upgrading exactly. My upgrades tend to fail on the last step – running the upgrade.php. The called for database updates fail completely.
The blog was back and operational, but there were errors. I printed out the errors generated from upgrade.php and did the updates to the database manually using phpMyAdmin. It was a little slow going, but I have enough of a background so that the SQL statements were not insurmountable. Of course I had to dabble while I was in there, and I took the opportunity to delete tables leftover from old plugins.
Everything else appeared to work fine, but my blogroll (links) were a mess. Most did not get labeled (categorized) so I had to do that manually. Once that was done the blogroll was duplicated, with all the links in their respective categories AND in the whichever category was listed first, effectively doubling the links. I tried all sorts of strategies, read the codex, and a bunch of posted help topics. All I could find was info on the php coding changes necessary to display links. Since I use widgets I looked through the links code in the widgets plugin. The code looked fine (hey, what do I know anyway…). I tried toggling various other plugins to no avail.
I got the idea that it was the way the theme (I’ve been using WP-Andreas01 1.3) was handling the links. I really didn’t want to change themes, mostly because of the work I have to do to reset widget order and the back-end coding I’ll have to do to fix my database pages, but I figured I’d invested about 4 hours already so I went ahead.
I had a nice Web 2.0 style theme, Subtle by Glued Ideas. I selected it and everything looked peachy.
In retrospect it was a great experience. I think the blog looks far better under the new theme, less choppy.
From Andy G. – a Polonian colleague from days past in Buffalo, Broadway-Fillmore Alive! Lots of great events, photos, and videos. The YouTube of Corpus Christi Church is nice as is the video slide show from the East Side’s Corpus Christi procession.
From Heather via the Polish American Forum, Passion 4 Poland. Nice design and most importantly great interviews.
I just finished upgrading this blog to Word Press 2.0.7 It was effortless.
The greatest amount of time was spent backing up the old structure, files, and data (and no, one should never, ever, skip this).
I had two errors in the process.
The thing that pushed me to upgrade?
I’m hosted by Yahoo. Yahoo web hosting makes a big deal about automatically upgrading people’s Word Press blogs to the latest version. My version was sitting at 2.0.2 for the longest time. The Word Press support forums answered that one… service not as advertised.
I’m of the opinion that any upgraded software version with security issue improvements should be installed, but hey, I don’t run multi-million dollar server farms.
One of my cousins passed away yesterday and I’ll be going out to Buffalo for couple of days for the wake and funeral.
I’m going to take the laptop with me, but don’t know what connectivity will be like. I expect blogging will be lite.
Please say a prayer for the repose of my cousin Joan and for her husband, children, grandchildren, family and friends.
Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord and may the perpetual light shine upon her.
May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.
Wieczne odpoczynek racz jej dać Panie, a światłość wiekuista niechaj jej świeci.
Niech odpoczywają w pokoju. Amen
Not sure if anyone has been following the controversy over a Microsoft marketing ploy but here’s the short story. Microsoft sent certain bloggers an Acer Ferrari laptop (worth about $3k) with Windows Vista – absolutely free, some with, some without strings.
The blogsphere is all abuzz over the move. Media and some bloggers have blasted the bloggers who received the laptops as unethical PR people or journalists – because they got a marketing gimic with the Ferrari name pasted on it.
Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks PR has a wrap-up in Microsoft PR Sparks a Blogstorm of Support and Outrage. Check it out.
Anyway, in my opinion, this dust-up is really nothing of concern. Top end bloggers have little need for free stuff. Free stuff is a nice perq, but has very little influence over anything. If a person can be bought for $3,000 then that propensity would have shown a lot sooner (along with their crack habit).
Bloggers range is style and in professionalism. Bloggers covering the daily antics of their cat(s) don’t really fancy themselves as journalists, but some of the high end serious bloggers do. Blogging has to do with defining yourself. While a $3,000 laptop might buy the admiration of your local cat blogger (or crack addict) – it really doesn’t do much for anyone who could drop that change on a new laptop anytime.
Microsoft got what it wanted, exposure and controversy. The rest of us can yawn and go back to sleep, Mac OS X Leopard will be out in the spring.
Oh, and pay no attention to that man with the Ferrari in the corner.
Bóg z nami -- Kto przeciw nam?
Global Voices – Poland
