Category: Resource Filled

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.

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.

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:

• Pegasus Online JPEG Wizard
• ZDNet Developer — GIFBot
• myImager.com – Your Everything Online Image Editor

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

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.

This nice little article about Radio UserLand : Multi-Author Weblog Tool comes courtesy of Vincent Flanders (for a speech that won’t bore you) … and if that’s not a shameless enough plug, BUY THE BOOK already !-)

Unabashed marketing aside …

I was exchanging some E-Mail w/Vincent, desiring multi-user blogs so I could get the RBC Church staff adding compelling content to the Redland Site as the whim hit them.

Vincent’s first reply was “Manila” … which gave me gas along the level of $899 or so. But if I can get RadioUserLand to work for $39.95 … well then … imagine all the relevant, up-to-date compelling content they could spin?

Web usability expert Vincent Flanders is back, with an irreverent new look at the Web’s worst. If you design Web sites or hire people that do, you need to hear Flanders take on the many mistakes that undermine some of the best-known sites on the Web.

Having helped penned Chapter 14 of Son of Web Pages That …, I can highly recommend it for anyone serious about having a good time learning how to design effective websites.

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