This blog has been abandoned.
It may get revived if I find something to say.
No, there never was a part 2 of my dreadlock guide.
Dreamhost adds Wordpress 2.5 as One-Click Install
Logging into my Wordpress installation today it notified me of the release of Wordpress 2.5, and provided links to where I could download the files. As I had installed from Dreamhost’s One-Click Install panel, I went their first to see if they had the update ready, and amazingly they have. Lone time dreamhost customers know that you can wait a chile for update to be created for their system, but this time they nailed it in under 24 hours.
One click later on the Dreamhost panel and this blog was being updated, 4 minutes later it was done, and when logging into my blog all that I needed to do was update my database (not hard – it said I needed to and to click the button – I did, and it was updated.)
Cheers to Dreamhost.
Dreamhost adds Joomla 1.5 as one click install
For all the dreamhost lovers out there, you will be pleased to know that they have just updated their one click install of joomla to version 1.5. I had just finished installing it manually for a church website I put together, and was about to blog the finer details and then they updated. I wish I had waited (and then I would have had an easy update feature) – but then again Dreamhost hadn’t mentioned a release date. I am also happy I was forced to manually install software for the first time (not anywhere near as scary as I had thought).
If you are looking for a host for your joomla install, and wouldn’t say no to more storage and bandwidth than you will ever use aswell as being able to host an unlimited number of domains – check out dreamhost today.
Bootcamp 1.2 Released, and drivers packaged much nicer.
For those like myself running XP on their macbooks, the release of Bootcamp 1.2 just made things a lot nicer. Previously all the drivers were packaged as one installer, which gave you no choices as to what was installed. Not a problem if you were happy to go with the defaults. I don’t like the defaults however, specifically the video drivers. I have for a long time used modified video drivers with lots more options than the default offering.
A little update on my life…
I thought I would post some photos of my break, seeing as I posted this address in the Christ Church newsletter. To make it worthy of your clicking, the following is for your enjoyment: This Christmas/New Year season I went to Rye, courtesy of Ros’ parents generosity. It allowed me to do one of my favourite activities: .JPG "Rockpooling")
poking baby starfish.
Annoying winmail.dat attachments – a two minute fix
Recently I’ve been receiving more and more emails that, instead of having normal attachments, have a file called winmail.dat. This is apparently Microsoft thinking they don’t have to conform to standards, and can send things in whatever format they like instead of a format that can be read by all mail clients.
Luckily there are quick ways to extract the files from winmail.dat.
The secure way is with a little program called TNEF. It’s free and can be downloaded from here.
Alternatively if it’s not that private, a guy called Balázs Bárány has made a nice little page that lets your winmail.dat file, and then let you download the files that are hidden within. It can be found here. I just went through the process in 25 seconds. Not a bad fix until Microsoft plays nice with their mail standards.
Amazon For Small Group Leaders
Read my Amazon Guide for Aussies to figure out how much you will save, and by clicking on them from my page and buying them you support a church plant! Here is the list I would make if I had enough power to make some reading compulsory. We all know the helpfulness of the one-page description that introduces books of the Bible in Study Bibles. The below are an expansion of that one page.
They are not meant to be read in one sitting. In fact, you probably will only read 1 chapter of the first two books in the first month. Here is an example of how I would use it:
1. So I’m starting a series on Matthew in my small group. I would read Matthew. I would probably write down all my questions before turning to the first book – "How to read the Bible Book by Book". This gives me 8 pages about the book of Matthew, about it’s author, it’s time of writing, where it was written, who is he writing it to etc… Most importantly it will alert me to things I need to look out for.
2.A few chapters into Matthew I’d find some parables, and want to know what bits are important. Is everything in a parable true? Is it just the lesson that’s important? Are there always parallels between the characters and real life, that we should try and decode? The second book has a chapter on this genre called "parable" – and it gives me the keys to understand which bits are important and which are not.
3. Lastly whenever I came across a term I had no idea about, I’d open the New Bible Dictionary, which is exactly what is sounds like, a dictionary but of Bible words. Done. To understand trickier bits I’d need to turn to a commentary, and I’ll post a list of good ones soon.
A quality domain host thats free
After years of going from free host to free host, I’m using a professional level domain host in the US, that costs US$95.40 a year, but if you refer someone you get paid US$97. Each time. Potentially this is a good way of making money. I have only referred one person so far, but that’s enough each year to take care of the cost of having a hosting service that is a so good. You can put unlimited domains on it, and you get a free dot.com when you start. Want more?…
Adding SAFESEARCH to Google’s Site Search
You can read the posting directly before this one to see some of the dangers of using Google’s Search Box on your website, and this is especially true of Churches. On Google’s page with the code for puting a great little search box on your website, they give you three options.
- Google Free web search
- Google Free SafeSearch
- Google Free web search with site search
I want number 4, which doesn’t exist, but its easy to make it yourself…
Dangers of using the Google search box – Anglicans helping you meet hundreds of bicurious singles.
Google’s search bar on you site makes a lot of sense. It’s powerful and only takes a few lines of code. But as I observed on the Anglican Media Melbourne Website (http://www.media.anglican.com.au/), sometimes it actually works against you. I had a request for information on "what the church says about sexuality"? I remember there being some sort of "official" statement somewhere, and after chasing link around for a little while ended up at the abolvementioned site. Aha! A google search box. No doubt that will help me find any statement thats been released. So I plugged in "sexuality" an hit go, searching only the Anglican Media Website. That should be safe! Unfortunately it doesn’t just return results from the website, but also sponsored links. Here was what I got: