Heal Your Church WebSite

Month: May 2002

  • Putty

    One of the free tools I find priceless in helping me backup and restore my sites is a little Telnet/SSH terminal emulator program known as PuTTY: a free Win32 telnet/ssh client.

    Written and maintained by Simon Tatham, this tool allows you to login to your host computer … provided your host provider allows such acess.

    Why not use something else? Because more and more host providers are switching from providing Telnet access to SSH. Why … because one of the ‘S’s in SSH stands for secure … as in encrypted.

    Using this tool, I can get to the linux … from there, I can play with other fun commands I’ll talk about in some very near future posts, like TAR and GREP.

  • Thou Shalt Not Steal …

    Credit for the title of this article goes to Moses, who penned these Words of God in Deuteronomy 5:19.

    What I just did in the above paragraph was give attribution to the author, something that appearently isn’t being done on college papers. Which may explain why my site was recently visited by Plagiarism.org’s SlySearch Crawler.

    According to the FAQ page on their website, they are not looking when I’m the one doing the cheating, rather, and I quote:

    The information we are collecting from the Internet is used solely for the purposes of helping educational institutions compare their students’ writings against the Internet.

    Boy, sure hope I did that right. Their site also shows how to exclude their ‘bot from crawling your site. Which I will do if I ever find out such a tool was use to provide false testimony. NOTE, I’m not saying it SlySearch/Plagiarism.org does, I’m saying if it ever does.

    Wow this is messy stuff.

  • ‘Rael’ Bloggers Requested

    Of course the good peole at the O’Reilly Network are putting together a book on “Essential Blogging.” You can even be part of the public review process.

    But best of all, you can share you can submit to Rael Dornfest, one of their researchers, one of your tales of blogging woes … just read the guidelines at his homespun blog at raelity bytes.

    And yes, you bet I’m going to give the Blosxom blogger app a spin.

  • Optimal Image Sizes

    One of the big problems I see with so many church websites are bloated graphics. Let me make this point very clear. Reducing the height and width attributes of the <IMG> tag does not, I repeat DOES NOT, physically reduce the physical size of the file. Nor does it reduce the size of the image via “color reduction.” We’re talking the minutes versus seconds difference your users suffer to download a 50kb image of your pastor versus one that’s 1/10th the size but still portrays the same subject.

    In other words, if you’re not optimizing images after you scan or digitally snap them, then they’re probably BANDWIDTH pigs. And we all know what the Bible says about what happens when you feed swine to “perls“.

    Problem is, some of you are either on a nothing budget, or don’t know how to reduce an image size for web publishing. No worries, here are two nice online tools you can use to transform your images down to a more user friendly size:

    No go out there and cut-down some of those sinful bandwidth bandwidths down to size!

    If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. Matthew 5:29

  • GNU utilities for Win32

    Okay, I’ll admit it. This links is really for me, but some of you who are running Windows on your personal computers, and hosting your websites on Linux or some *nix variant, might find the Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities useful.

  • How to cron a MySQLDump

    Once again Rachael C. not only yanks the plank outta my eye, but smacks me upside the head for not scripting my backups on a regular basis. And she’s right to do so.

    Here is a link she recommended in a comment in my “make a ready defense” article The recommended tutorial is appropriately entitled How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron.

    Of course, this steals my thunder as I was, and still am, going to give you some PERL that will enumerate all your databases, then dump them, then compress them into a tidy little file good for downloading and such.

    But until I do, do what this article says, and not what I’m not doing.

  • Search me, O God

    and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts … Psalm 139:23

    Okay, a bit over the top, but it sorta describes how we feel sometimes when we come to a site with alot of information, and have to sift through article after article to find what we want. Having a search tool goes a long way to reduce some of that anxiety.

    So somewhere between breakfast with the family, cutting down a neighbor’s tree, cutting the lawn, getting a haircut and mowing the lawn, I managed a few minutes to install a nice little tool from the people at PerlFectSolutions … in fact a very nice tool …
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  • Does Dean have a New Slogan?

    I was minding my own business when someone I know pointed me to Joshua Claybourn’s Home Page, which had a link to my site and a wonderful quote that describes THIS site as a place “where a computer geek collides with religious zealotry.” The ony thing I could possibly resent from that description is that I didn’t think of it first!

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