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Internety, bloggy, softwarey stuff

Several readers have written to me and have noted that they enjoy the new blog design. Thank you. The theme is from Theme Sheep. Of course like the sheep reference – we are the sheep of His pasture (Psalm 100:1-3 or Psalm 95:6-9).

Fr. Jason opines on the state of the PNCC on the Internet. St. Stanislaus Cathedral has done a wonderful job on their redesign. It is really beautiful, and offers all the great interactivity necessary for parishioners and seekers. I believe it is based on Joomla, which like WordPress is all about providing content.

As I tell the pastors and parishes I work with, people want to know you. They want to know you as pastor, teacher, community, fellow workers, and companions. The only way to do that is to show who you are, how you know Jesus, and how you teach Him. How do you celebrate Him, and each other as part of Him? It doesn’t take a ton of work, only being who you are and telling your story. Think of the video I posted from Sta. Sunniva Parish in Norway… Who are they? Would you want to be part of that community?

Some cool stuff for your iPad, iPod, iPhone from Twitter friends, DivineOffice and Just 1 Word:

Just 1 Word has a new mobile app for various platforms so that you can read the Bible anytime, anywhere on your mobile device. Various versions of the Bible are available and the apps are suitable for the iPad, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Divine Office’s app provides an audio version of the Liturgy of the Hours, including scripture readings, psalms and prayers for the Hours of each day. The app automatically downloads the day’s audio Liturgy as well as the Liturgy for the days following to your iPhone or iPod Touch over-the-air.

I believe music and chants are also included. I will update as I find out more. Of course, this is the Roman Catholic usage of the Hours. Note to my fellow PNCC members, when I pray the Hours, I make substitutions for any prayers mentioning the Bishop of Rome.

Everything Else, , ,

Site updates

I installed two new plug-ins – and hopefully they will add to vastness of my technology 😉

The first is the Lifesteam plug-in. You can view my Lifestream page here.

Lifestream allows me to share my scrobbled songs from Last.fm, interesting RSS feed items I would like to share — without having to write a whole post about them, my Tweets, Flickr additions, postings and assorted other gagetty fun.

The second addition is SMS Text Message from SemperFi. You will find a test messaging sign-up in my sidebar. I will use this plug-in to send out text messages for upcoming PNCC events and happenings. For the most part these will concentrate on events in New York’s Capital Region and Diocesan wide events. Feel free to sign-up if your interested in getting texted — and no, I won’t be texting you day and night. Any information you provide to enable this service is covered under my existing privacy policy.

Thank you to the WordPress plug-in developers who built these. They work as expected and without issue. Your efforts are appreciated.

Everything Else,

Blogging updates

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 this afternoon. I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (and have used it for the last 4 updates). That went very smoothly.

On accessing the blog, it appears that my host, Dreamhost, has been having a multitude of problem on the particular server cluster upon which I am hosted. At times, over the past two weeks, the blog has been inaccessible. Hopefully they will have everything moved to a new server soon….

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Changed servers

About a week or so ago I decided to finally drop Yahoo! as my hosting company.

There were a few instances where I had to patch WordPress to make it work on Yahoo!. In addition I was getting more and more displeased with the responsiveness of their servers.

It was taking forever to load my site. Because of the slow load times I was loosing readers like crazy. My average visitors per day was cut in half.

As of December 19 I’ve been hosted on DreamHost.

After the normal cutover issues, like switching my DNS, things have been going well. Dreamhost did make the switch easy. They had easy one-click installs for things like WordPress, they use phpMyAdmin, and they have all sorts of other one-click installs for other wonderful options.

Best of all, their price is better and their server settings do not disable native WordPress stuff.

The Dreamhost servers have been running fast and my stats are picking back up (thank you to my dedicated readers).

That was until today. Dreamhost experienced a prolonged blackout on a set of servers, mine included.

I apologize if you were unable to get to my website earlier today. All seems to be resolved now.

Everything Else, , ,

WordPress theme

As some may have noticed, I’ve switched WordPress themes a few times lately.

I’m trying to work out the right mix. Thanks to the Young Fogey who noted the particularly slow load times with the current theme. The articles column and sidebars should be a white background with black text. Links are in green and blockquotes are in a pinkish color.

I do like this theme. I worked on it a little. I also removed some of the JavaScript stuff from the sidebar which improves load times (it wasn’t necessary stuff anyway).

I will continue to tinker a bit to see if I can improve it further. I appreciate your patience with my tinkering…

I tested my load times in various browsers (unscientifically). I received the best results in IE and Safari. Opera was a close second. Firefox and Flock were the slowest 🙁 . Also note that I am using the latest version of each.

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WordPress update

I updated to WordPress 2.3. It went pretty well, with one exception.

My host, Yahoo!, does not allow .htaccess files. It developed a plug-in to provide for pretty permalinks. Without using their plug-in WordPress’ permalinks options (besides default) do not work. The problem is described in the WordPress help forums.

For the time being I have disabled my pretty permalinks.

We will see if Yahoo fixes this in short order – but I have my doubts. Many of their promises about automatically updating WordPress were never kept…

I will also play with their plug-in, and see if I can fix it.

Sorry for any problems related to my permalinks. If I cannot resolve this I will be seeking another host. Things should not be this difficult, with workarounds and plug-ins to handle things most folks just handle.

Update:

Mark Jaquith of Mark on WordPress discusses WordPress 2.3 Canonical URLs and the problems they may cause.

He has a one line plug-in that disables canonical URL redirection.

I installed the plug-in and reactivated the Yahoo! plug-in. Everything works now. I will use this until Yahoo corrects its issues – or until I move to a different provider.

Everything Else, ,

WordPress fun (and widgets too)

The latest version of WordPress is out. I’ll be doing the upgrade to WordPress 2.2 in the next few hours.

Along with other great improvements, the latest version of WordPress support widgets right out-of-the-box. The gurus at WordPress are on an enhanced roll-out cycle. Stay tuned for more great innovations.

In honor of the release:

I’ve upgraded my release of the Imieniny widget plug-in to beta 0.1.

I am also releasing a new widget, the Gadu-Gadu widget plug-in. The widget is for folks who use (or would like to use) the Gadu-Gadu IM client.

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