:: in a mirror dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

As of right now I’m still a loyal user of WordPress. I’m pretty happy with the Minyx Light theme, mainly because it’s very simple and does not require tweaking with images, colors, or lines. I don’t have much time for design right now.

Nevertheless, while I’m talking about the theme of this site, I was wondering if this site is easy to read? I made the “about” box yellow-ish to help stress the two column look, but I’m also toying with the thought of making a line down the middle in between the two columns. I find the site easy to read, but I also spent a lot of time looking for this exact format, so I may not be the best judge. I’m open to any reader suggestions on how to improve this site.

While writing yesterday I also took some time to revamp my professional writing site: www.edcyz.com. While I do blog there occasionally on writing, the weight of my book deadline, a few small projects, the insanity of our personal lives that has kept us constantly on the road, and the intensity of work during the Fall season all make it really hard to keep this blog and that site well fed with posts. Therefore the blog on my edcyz.com home page and has been moved to it’s own page.

When you visit www.edcyz.com, you’ll now hit the “About” page where I talk about my current projects. As always there is a page with links to some of my writing, though not all of it is available quite yet.

It was bound to happen. WordPress is slowly winning more converts to its pure publishing, and now the grandfather of many Christian bloggers has kicked his Blogger habit and changed over to WordPress.

Jordon Cooper, one the earliest Christian bloggers I know of, has made the major jump from two-columns to the three-column Prosumer theme. I myself have been very pleased with the myriad themes, extensions, and management features offered by WordPress.

Even with these options it’s still very easy to use. The spam blocking for WordPress is also second to none. Now I’m waiting for Andrew Jones to drop TypePad . . .

I’ve been wondering if anyone has ever designed a blog template for wordpress where the content of the blog generally fits all on one page without the need for scrolling. Alas, it has been done.

Small Studio 1.1 is a clean theme with an excellent design. It provides a great first look of the site.

UPDATE: I also found Recycled Canvas 0.9, another nice theme that fits on the screen without scrolling.

Technorati Tags: blog, wordpress, theme

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Firefox used to have a little blue notebook at the bottom on my browser window. It was something called “Performancing” I think.

The concept was pretty neat: a blog editor built into your browsing screen. Alas I couldn’t figure out how to set it up. “xmlrpc” what? I’m a hack who is slowly catching on to things many bloggers simply take for granted as common knowledge. And so I gave up on the little blue notebook and have been using Windows Live Writer instead.

This past week Firefox updated Performancing and changed it to something called “ScribeFire.” I’m giving it a shot and so far so good. It set up my blogs really easily and has been very easy to use.

Has anyone else had good or bad experiences with ScribeFire so far? I’ll give it one thumb up this time around.

Technorati Tags: scribefire, firefox

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Church Communications Pro has been one of my favorite web sites of late, not so much because of the church side, but because of the excellent blogging and web site tips shared. In addition, Cory Miller of Church Communications runs Rockin Themes with a friend, and they regularly release sharp, clean, user-friendly themes. Many of my favorite Word Press Themes come from them.

Church Communications Pro is updated regularly and has some great archives that are of real value. My favorite is the series of posts on using Word Press for a church web site. The best part is their content benefits churches and non-churches alike.

My fledgling blog on Vermont, South West Vermont.com uses one of their nicest themes, though I am intrigued by their latest “newspaper” themes.

And speaking of Word Press Themes and blogs, I’ve been keeping track of useful web site resources, especially themes, at my new Blinklist account. Since I’m using my del.icio.us account to track theology resources, I opened Blinklist for all other items of interest, particularly web design stuff.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so jumped out of bed and did a little fidgeting with one of my newer blog projects. While I liked the chosen theme, it just didn’t work for the kind of content I was posting. Therefore I visited the wordpress theme viewer.
The trick was to find something that can hold a lot of content, but isn’t too flashy and overwhelming. I had the New York Times in mind.  There is a lot going on, but you can always find the main content and navigate around the various columns. Based on this criteria, my two front runners were Blue Zinfandel and RockinPaper.

In fact, the designer of RockinPaper was accused of ripping off the design of Blue Zinfandel. It turns out that they’re just friends who sometimes share elements of their designs with one another.  In the end I chose RockinPaper because I wanted to post my owner header on the page

If you’re like me, the list of wordpress themes is simply staggering. What is the best way to sort through them all to find the one golden theme? Having gone through this process a few times, I have a system that I follow.

First, I choose the number of columns I want. Then I search based on the most downloads, opening up in tabs anything that strikes my eye within at least the first ten pages. I view these in the test run screen and leave open anything that may work. Then I search based on downloads, once again sorthing through whatever looks good inthe first ten pages. Lastly, I search by date because something new may be sharp, but it may not be popular yet. That’s how I found RockinPaper.

Please note that a theme without a thumbnail can still be viewed in the test run screen, so make sure you click on every black square. You may be surprised.

Not everyone loves writing. One high school student in Burlington wants to be accepted into a theatre school, so why not make a video essay? It’s a great idea, even if it may not work, I give him points for his creativity, boldness and staggering dance moves.

Cathy blogs about it and has a link to the video. I guarantee this is worth watching.

Technorati Tags: college - application - 802+online

I’ve almost hit the two year mark for blogging, and as part of this milestone, I decided to finally make the switch to WordPress from Nucleus. Nucleus is a nice little web blog platform, but who can resist the plug-ins, features, functionality, and theme options when it comes to WordPress? I’m especially tempted because WP provides code and plug ins that make it really easy to do stuff I would never figure out with Nucleus.

So if you don’t like posts about technology and computers, I advise that you stop reading here. Though I will mention that it has a happy ending for what it’s worth.

So I began my research yesterday and found that my server has Fantastico, which installs WordPress really, really easily. I also found that a WP user made a program that transfers Nucleus files over. Not bad so far.

This afternoon I began the process and it went smooth. I had the WP default theme up and running in no time, only, it wasn’t www.inamirrordimly.com that I had. I had www.inamirrordimly.com/IMD. Somewhere along the way of reading lots of forums and documents I got it in my head that you need to install WP in a completely separate file. Not so. If you want to transfer your site, you need to install it in the main directory.

SHOOT!

So I removed WP and Fantastico . . . and that is where the problems started. Apparently the uninstall files didn’t install correctly and little files were hiding on my server that were preventing further installs. SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT.

No problem, I decided to just do install WP manually. That was not good. I figured most of it out, but the database/SQL Database or whatever alluded me. I never could figure out the exact format to write out all of the database info in the config. file.

I became so frustrated with that stupid SQL Database that I vowed to eat the tuna that is not dolphin safe (SQL logo is a dolphin by the way) for all of next week. I was frustrated. Hours had passed and I basically didn’t have a web site. It was all on my computer at that point.

I began hacking away at Fantastico and deleted all kinds of stuff on my FTP server. Thanks to my astute recognition of a big fat file called “Fantastico,” I was able to delete it and POOF!!! My problems were solved.

So now this blog is using the “zenlike” theme. I apologize for the musical themes of late. I’ve been dissatisfied with the Nucleus theme selection and hope to just pick a theme and stick with it.

My wonderful lovely wife said she likes the old theme better, this one reminds her of the cover of Stephen King’s book On Writing. Be that as it may, I’m sticking with it for now. I still need to update the links in the sidebar and clean that up. Also, some pictures in previous posts may not show up. Since this is not a photo blog, I’m not going to sweat it. If you really want to see a picture, I’ll be happy to fix up the post.

So I now run three blogs on a custom WordPress and one on the hosted version of wordpress.com. I feel complete, no longer divided, sharing a little piece of myself with every blogging service that comes down the block.

Technorati Tags: wordpress - blog - nucleus - zenlike - sql

You know that tagging has hit the mainstream when the BBC runs an article on it. They even included a nifty picture of a tag cloud which some love and others despise.

So what does this mean? Some will just pass by the article. Others will scratch their heads and say “Tagging? What the heck is that about?” These will look to Google or Wikipedia for answers, sign up with Technorati, spend hours trying to integrate a plug in for their fledgling blogs, spend another hour setting up a del.icio.us account (that is, if they can spell it and therefore find it), spend even more time inventing tags that are useless or incorrect, and then rewrite all of their tags wondering if all of this hard work was for naught.

After a few weeks they’ll have the del.icio.us firefox plug in worked out, they’ve integrated a technorati plug in for their blog or blog editor, and can actually type out “d-e-l-.-i-c-i-o-.-u-s” with barely a thought.

Sure we have a mess of sloppy tags all over the place, but a new tagger has been born, the world’s information is just a little more organized and connected, and uptight tagging geeks with too much time on their hands breath a collective sigh of relief.

Technorati Tags: tags - del.icio.us - technorati - bbc

One topic I’ve been putting off blogging on has been the concept of a YouTube film festival. I was thinking that this could be a fun, low-cost event.

Apparently the Swedes are on to it.

And while I’m at it, the site covering this event is a neat concept: bloggertalks.com. They interview bloggers, as if they didn’t have enough of a forum. But somehow it works. I find it interesting to find out what goes on behind blogs.

I figured that while I was trying out some new blog editing programs, I may as well try out Ecto. Andrew Jones raves and raves about it. So why not give it a shot.

Ecto costs $15, but you can try it for free for 21 days. So far so good.

Ecto is a breeze to set up and uploading files to the internet has been the smoothest of any program yet.

Perhaps what makes Ecto irresistible is some of the following:

- Spell check as you go.
- All kinds of integration with Flickr, Amazon, Technorati, etc.
- A clean editor that is very easy to use.

I suppose that charging for a product may sometimes give an edge . . .

For those of us who are too cheap to dish out the dough for Ecto, the blog editor of choice, there is Windows Live Writer.

I’ve used w.bloggar quite a bit and even tried Qumana (which I could not figure out! Somehow it refused to post to my blog.) And now I’m using Windows Live Writer at the recommendation of Jordon Coooper.

So far so good. It’s really easy to add pictures and that is one area that w.Bloggar really let me down. It also has a clean and simple interface, a number of viewing options, and a simple integration of categories.

I still haven’t figured out if I can integrate Technorati tags with it, but I’m also not the guy who’s going to blaze the trail.

All in all, Windows Live Writer is worth a shot.

The thing I love about Firefox is the plentiful supply of tools you can add right to the web browser. For example, I have Cocoments built in to my browsing screen so I can track all of the comments I have left on blogs. If anything, it has encouraged me to leave more comments and then follow up on the conversation.

My latest addition is Cooliris. Cooliris is also built in to Firefox and creates a little box to the right of every link your pointer passes over. It works with most browsers, but of course Firefox is one of the best.

When the pointer is brought on top of the box, a screen appears that provides a preview of link’s destination page. It’s quite handy when performing a google search and in many other scenarios where one is uncertain of a page’s content.

Take Cooliris for a test drive. Maybe it’s practical for some and not others. So far I enjoy using it.

Wired News has provided a nice little review of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. The final verdict? Well, I guess I can spoil it for you. Firefox of course is declared the better browser.

Yes the open source world once again triumphs over the large corporation that keeps its source code top secret. While Microsoft is just adding new features such as tabbed browsing and a search box integrated into the toolbar, Firefox has had these for a while.

In fact, Firefox is innovating and perfecting these features. Both browsers are good choices, but if you have to pick one, Firefox is the way to go.

This little blog has greatly changed how I interact with family, friends, and acquaintances. First of all, there are many people whom I would have long lost touch with, but through our blogs we keep in touch and have a great deal to e-mail about from time to time.

In other cases I am able to easily keep family and friends informed on my life and what I’m thinking so that when we get together we already have something to talk about. They also know about many of the big events in my life, so we can pick up where we left off rather quickly.

The bottom line is that calling or e-mailing everyone you would like to keep in touch with is impossible. Even with e-mail I find that it’s very tempting to just dash off a mass e-mail for every friend on my list and give them the 10 minute tour of my life, in all its riveting and uncensored glory.

But blogs . . . blogs as a medium enable communication en masse (I’m thinking of Pappy O’Daniels in O’Brother Where Art Thou saying, “We’re mass communicatin’” as he walks into the radio station). It’s not lazy or impersonal to tell your own stories on a blog, and anyone can read them. That is a nice way to keep up with friends and family. Having the comments open also enables your friends and family to drop a line and start a little e-mail conversation.

Of course an ultra-introspective and personal blog can be a bit dull at times. The ongoing inside jokes, contextless references, revelations that should remain in anonymity, and long lists of friends as part of inane and dull stories just bog down a blog.

You know the type: Today we went to Marko’s house for Maria’s party and Jane, Bob, George, Tommy, Megan, and Phil were there. Tommy did his stupid trick again which really made Phil act the way he did last time. But it was all really funny and then Marko told our favorite story about Megan and her pet python and that was really great. Oh and then I began to think about how boring my life is and how Sheila broke my heart and I would never be the same. And I haven’t. I lay in bed many nights just staring at the blank wall . . . And so on.

Even if abused with such drivel, I think that more people should be blogging. They need not find a niche. They need not post every day. Perhaps they could just post the occasional picture or share a story or two. Blog readers provide the luxury of only checking a blog when it’s updated. I’m currently working on my friend Geoff who is over in China. He’s one guy who needs to blog, he just doesn’t realize it yet.

I have some blogging software suggestions over at my www.edcyz.com site, but it may also be worth setting up a blogger account for free.