Hi, all.

First off, I apologize for not spending much time in this space over the past couple of months.

If you’ve followed my blog activities (and inactivity!), you know that on October 22, I accepted a position as marketing and media director at one of the Assemblies of God’s 100 largest churches. I was thrilled not only to have a job but to be in a position that required top-notch creativity and performance from many areas of my skill site — and many areas I was eager to acquire new skills in.

As marketing and media director I designed several promotional and in-house printed pieces, I wrote press releases, I worked with vendors, I approved and gave guidance for the video and broadcast editing (though not much of that because my staff was not only skilled but very professional and surpassed my knowledge in many ways). My team struggled with print deadlines, malfunctioning and aging equipment, and volatile tempers. I raised the visibility of my overworked team’s plight (loads of stress and too much work), and asked a lot of questions. I didn’t always like the answers, but my job wasn’t to change the church, but to understand it first.

Unfortunately, I failed to understand many things quickly enough and I now find myself looking for work once again after the single shortest tenure at any job I’ve ever held in my short, if rotund, life.

But, fortunately, my hasty departure from the church is not due to any sort of illegal, unethical, or moral wrongdoing. Instead, I chalk it up to a severe failure to communicate on my part. Which is ironic, really, since communication was my … err … job. (Big failure on my part.) As the pastor noted when he released me, my personality was not a good fit for the church.

Upon tearful reflection, we are agreed.

So, once more into the breach. My family and I will covet your prayers yet once more. We are packing up to move to Michigan where we will live with family while we wait for our Chicago home to sell and try to find gainful employment again.

Regards,

Share This

According to the SiteGround support center, everything’s hunkey dory. According to the server notification center, there are no updates or information that I should know about. So, when I go through the laborious process of collecting information, pulling together stats on server performance (see the graph behind the thumbnail), pinging, tracerouting, and more, I finally get a note back from the help desk:

There has been a short-term overload on the server that hosts your website, caused by an abnormally high activity from a website located on your host server. This probably affected temporarily your website loading speed. SiteGround system administrators are already working on bringing the server performance back to normal.

We would like to assure you that all measures are taken for the problem to be fixed as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

Nothing wrong with that response, really. But as I indicated in my trouble ticket, the problems began at 7:30 AM CST, and I was contacting them five hours later! As of this writing, I’m still experiencing server difficulties with long lags and numerous “500 Application” type errors.

I understand what it’s like to provide support to a large user-community — I used to provide help desk and technical support to a network of 1,000 computer users. Yes, it’s not the same scale as, say, 1,000 web sites on a single server on a server farm of hundreds of computers … but I at least get what’s going on.

But there’s gotta be a better way to provide feedback. Despite my complaints SiteGround has yet to initiate a proactive email blast system or even an RSS feed for updates. I mean, how hard could this be? Set up a single RSS feed for each server, and an aggregate feed for all servers, and whenever there’s an outage, plug a note into the feed about the outage and what’s going on. Then, as it’s resolved, plug another note in. Communicate!

:: sigh ::

I suppose if I had a job this wouldn’t irritate me as much. But, nevertheless, it ain’t fun. SiteGround’s answer, of course, to my problems is to buy virtual private network hosting on a dedicated server. Yeah. If I were making $100 a week from Google ads, that might make sense. But, alas, no.

So, anyhow, sorry you’re experiencing problems. I’m sure it’ll be fixed within the next several hours.

Share This

If you’re part of the one-percenters who comment here from time-to-time you might be happy to know that I have enabled a feature to edit comments after you’ve posted them, and you don’t even have to leave the page! (Thanks to Ronald Huereca.)

Come on, leave a comment and give it a whirl! You know you want to.

I’ve set the tool to allow you to edit your comments for 90 minutes after you’ve submitted it. I have no idea what the system will do if you’ve never commented before and your missive winds up in the moderation pool. But it would be useful to find out. (Hint.)

Share This

FireFox Search Plug-in

PneumaBlogs
Toolset

• List of Bloggers
  (Also available via Squidoo)
  
  
• Most Recent Posts
  
  
• Power Viewer
  (All posts, searchable too!)
  
  
• Search PneumaBloggers’ Sites
  
  
• PneumaSearch plus FireFox Searchbar
  
  
• OPML file
  
  
• Complete RSS Feed
  
  
• Widgets for your site!
  PneumaSphere
  All PneumaBlogs

Get your

button here!

First off, fellow PneumaBlogger Christoph Fischer (”my cup of coffee“) saw that I’d created a Google Co-Op tool to search within the entire set of PneumaBloggers (PneumaSearch) and he went off and quickly fabricated a PneumaSearch MyCroft extension for the FireFox search bar. What this means is that if you use FireFox and if you use the built-in FireFox search bar, you can quickly add a tool to your search box that will allow you to search only within the PneumaBlogs universe of bloggers.

Thanks Chris!

Squidoo alternate for PneumaBloggers

In hopes of driving yet more traffic to your sites, I’ve set up a Squidoo Lens for PneumaBloggers. It’s simple, straightforward, and never needs updating since it’s plugged into my auto-generated list of bloggers, and will get updated every time I update this site here. If, for some reason, you’d rather point folks to Squidoo for the list rather than here, feel free.

OPML File

If you want to add all the current PneumaBloggers into your favorite feed-reader so you can track them all yourself, I now offer a fresh OPML file every time I update the site. Feel free to download the pneumablogs.opml here, then import it into your offline feed reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, or whatever. Just note, however, that you won’t necessarily know who the latest additions to the list are say, six months from now. (I have added a “Modified” date to the description field if you want to look to see who’s new or who’s changed.)

However, you could also subscribe to my RSS feed for the PneumaBloggers list so you’ll know when a new one has been added…

Update: You can also display the bloggers and their feeds by using the new SpringWidget OPML viewer, see below.

PneumaBlogs RSS Feed

This is not a feed of all the latest PneumaBlogs post (for that, see below), rather, it’s an RSS feed of just PneumaBloggers. That’s it. It’s every blogger from my PneumaBlogs page in a single RSS feed that you can load up in your feed reader. Then (if everything works properly), whenever a new blogger gets added to the feed, your feed reader will download the freshest item, and Et Voilà! You’ll know there’s someone new to subscribe to.

This is also a handy way to show my constantly updated list of bloggers in your blog, if you know how to display the results of RSS feeds in your template. Sorry, though, that’s too much to go into right now (maybe a future post). Check your blogging software’s features, though, there’s generally a pretty easy way to display RSS feeds in your sidebar.

Update: You can also display the bloggers and their feeds by using the new SpringWidget OPML viewer, see below.

PneumaSphere Re-Feed

Some of you might want to pick and choose who you subscribe to, and that’s fine. That’s why I display all the RSS feed URLs of every blogger on the PneumaBlogs page. However, some of you might want to the whole enchilada to show up in your favorite feed reader, so to do that, I’m providing a special feed here, just for you. It’s based of of my constantly updated list of bloggers, so it’ll always have the latest stuff there (I drop cat-bloggers, many boss-bloggers, and eventually, those who fail to update their website within the last several months). Just point your feed reader here and start drinking from the fire-hose!

PneumaSphere Power Viewer

And if you aren’t satisfied with checking out the last 50-60 posts featured on my PneumaSphere river-of-news page, but you aren’t totally committed to subscribing to the massive re-feed, and you don’t want to go through the trouble of picking and choosing which blogger to follow along with in your reader, then try this beautiful solution: Bookmark my PneumaSphere Power Viewer.

This is a great way to dip into the river-of-news without missing a beat. You can also search the most recent posts, you can view a “tag cloud” of the most popular subject items, and you can browse by date or by author. This is a nice addition to the PneumaBlogs arsenal, and like everything else, it’s kept constantly up-to-date.

The PneumaSphere Widget —On Your Site Now!

If you’d like to host a little river-of-news applet on your website, or even on your desktop, check out the PneumaSphere widget provided by SpringWidgets, below. You can customize it to your liking, here, and stick it just about anywhere that accepts HTML code. Or, as I mentioned, you can just download the widget and run it off your desktop. Very cool.

Or you can grab the code I use to display the above widget:

<object 
      classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" 
      codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" 
      width="400" 
      height="500" 
      align="middle">
      <param 
            name="movie" 
            value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" />
      <param 
            name="flashvars" 
            value="param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" />
      <param 
            name="quality" 
            value="high" />
      <param 
            name="wmode" 
            value="transparent" />
      <embed 
            allowScriptAccess="always" 
            src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" 
            flashvars="param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" 
            quality="high" 
            wmode="transparent" 
            width="400" 
            height="500" 
            align="middle" 
            type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
            pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
<div style="font:10px/11px Tahoma, arial;width:400px; text-align:center;">
<a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgetize/23/?param=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FPneumaBlogs&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;width=400&height=500" target="_blank">Get this widget!</a>
</div>

Put All the PneumaBloggers and their Feeds on your site!

I was alerted to the possibility of pointing a SpringWidget at my OPML file by Don Synstelein from SpringWidget after posting this entry. So, I tried it out, and it works nicely. See for yourself:

And now you, too, can put this widget anywhere in your blog you’d like or you can download the widget and stick it on your desktop. No more futzing around with Feed Readers or keeping up with my jones! Just grab the code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" 
      codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" 
      width="400" 
      height="500" 
      align="middle">
      <param name="movie" 
            value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" />
      <param name="flashvars" 
            value="param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" />
      <param name="quality" 
            value="high" />
      <param name="wmode" 
            value="transparent" />
      <embed allowScriptAccess="always" 
            src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=RSS Reader.sbw" 
            flashvars="param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;memberId=thespringbox" 
            quality="high" 
            wmode="transparent" 
            width="400" 
            height="500" 
            align="middle" 
            type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
            pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
<div style="font:11px/12px arial;width:400px; text-align:center;">
<a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgetize/23/?param=http%3A%2F%2Ftatumweb.com%2Fblog%2Fpneumablogs.opml&amp;param_style_borderColor=0x660000&amp;param_style_brandUrl=http://tatumweb.com/blog/pix/logo-pblogs-springwidget.jpg&amp;width=400&height=500"  target="_blank">Get this widget!</a>
</div>

New PneumaBlogger Button

Finally, if you aren’t happy with the tiny little PneumaBlogger badge which, really, doesn’t have much going for it design-wise, you might be more inclined to proudly display your PneumaBloggyness by displaying the fired up square badge, shown here. Either way, visit the PneumaButton post to grab the images and the HTML code for displaying the badge in your sidebar.

Hopefully, that’ll be it for a while. After several weeks of redesign fall-out and blog-tweaking, the PneumaBlogs stuff was the last to get overhauled because there was a lot I had to re-organize. Hopefully, this will be easier to maintain from here on out.

Regards,

Rich

Share This

Just now I’ve added a third page to my collection: PneumaSearch. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone crazy with the whole “Pneuma” prefix, just like I’ve irrationally appended “Rodent” to everything else. I guess, in the tradition of Web 2.0 mash-ups, I’m the PneumaRodent. But that may be carrying things too far. (Talk to my editor about it.)

Anyhow here’s what’s new:

I’ve finally gotten around to evaluating everybody who’s been asking for consideration, and it shows. My paltry list of 70-80 PneumaBloggers has shot up to 130+. That number could change daily, or weekly.

Also, previously, I’ve used the built-in “BlogRoll” or “Links Manager” function of WordPress to manage my ever-growing list of Spirit-filled bloggers. But, no more. The WordPress link management system is just too unwieldy for this sort of list, and it’s too difficult to output and format things just the way I like it. Sure, if I were a crack coder, no problem. But I’m not.

So, after spending hours and hours attempting to fit every online blogrolling tool I could find into my format and needs, I’ve given up. I’m now going old-school and using an Excel spreadsheet to maintain all my information, from email addresses, blog-owner’s names, URLs, and even my pithy descriptions. Who knows, some day maybe I’ll add rankings and ratings.

The upshot of all this for you is that it’s now easier for me to maintain my list and insure it is always kept up to date. Now I can add a blogger, save my spreadsheet, and with a few simple actions, I can have an updated link list out on the site within minutes.

Please, check it out. And notice that nifty little homepage and feed icons. Feedback welcomed.

First: note the obsessive fascination with suffixes. And, yes. I’ve changed the name of the page to PneumaSphere.

Second: This page, too, wasted several hours of research-time trying to find the ideal online aggregator just so I could display a “river of news” for the most recent items from my link list. After trying a dozen aggregation and re-feeding sites, I’ve come back to my old standby, the BDP RSS Aggregator. It’s a sweet application and does nearly everything I need it to do, except manage my linkroll list (see above). So, for that I use Excel. I could bore you to tears with my travails in finding a usable online aggregator, but, well, nobody cares. If you, for some reason, do care, contact me. I’ll send up a prayer for you.

And, finally, my latest addition is a custom Google search of only the bloggers listed in the PneumaBlogs catalog. This, my friends, is very, very cool. For the first time, you can search within only the best of the Spirit-filled blog-world. This is amazing, and I invite you to give it a try.

My only problem with this is, really, the way it breaks my template (or doesn’t play nicely with my template). This may necessitate spending some time with my template files to make them resizeable and more liquid, but all-in-all, it’s still useful.

And if you want to add the PneumaSearch Google Gadget to your Google start page, click here:

Enjoy!

Share This

Thank you for your patience!

Rich.

Share This

Share This

Okay, so I’m trying out the Windows Live Writer — because I’m a sucker for new tools and I’m always on the lookout for the better (free) blogging tool. Besides, Amy at GentleWhisper made me do it. …

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over — this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing, (more…)

Share This

After carefully pawing through several dozen WordPress themes I settled on several I liked and tried them all out. If you were browsing the blog last Thursday night, you probably noticed the design dance the site was going through. Or maybe you thought you needed medication?

I settled on the WuCoco theme designed by Mike Lococo for a few reasons: 1) it was three-column, and I wasn’t ready to leave that design structure. 2) It was WordPress 2.0-ready, so I didn’t have to worry about the theme breaking in three weeks. 3) It was widget-enabled, which would allow me to fiddle with the contents of my sidebars without having to muck around in the template. And, more importantly, 4) It was very CSS-driven, no tables, and visually pleasing. Unfortunately, it’s a big design. Anybody surfing with less than 800×600 resolution will be profoundly irritated right now.

Share This

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and don’t use a feed reader to monitor the site, you can still catch all the blogalicious stuff right in your inbox by just subscribing to BlogRodent by email.

And, here’s something I have failed to mention before about this: You can get the notification in HTML format–but only if you register first (not my decision–it’s a function of the plugin I’m using).

Share This