As many of you already know, Ben's Friends (the web site) is getting hit by spam pretty hard these days. We went through this a while back and tried several solutions and none of them were ideal. For the time being, I'm using one of those old methods to daily remove all the spam it can find. I apologize that you'll likely still get these in your inbox. Please just delete them for now.
There's a brighter future ahead, though.
BigBlueHat, my company, is building blogging into the BlueInk content management system. When that's ready for prime time (hopefully soonish), I'll be making a central BlueInk installation to manage all of Ben's Friends and convert anyone over to a BlueInk blog that wants/needs one.
I appreciate all those who have hung around these past years as the technology that runs this site has gotten long in the tooth. At the end of the day I built to many "extras" into ye olde Movable Type. It's this kind of branching of projects and finding oneself alone with a customized monster that finally lead BigBlueHat to build BlueInk.
So, all that to say. Thanks for hanging around, and look for more here soon.
I'm ready to give Ben's Friends an overhaul, but I haven't been able to spare the time for...oh...the past year. I wanted to see if any of our regular readers or users would like to help out.
If you're interested in donating to the cause, please head over to the Ben's Friends Upgrade page powered by DropCash.
Thanks to everyone who uses and visits Ben's Friends.
For those who haven't heard yet, there's a new coffee shop in town. It's run by some friends of mine, and I think it'll be more convenient for most of our Greenville crowd than some of the other shops in town.
This one's called Cool Beans Creamery and is next to the McDonald's near Heritage Baptist Church. They've got free Tall coffee's to the first 50 people each day this week, and $0.99 Latte's all week as well.
Did I mention they have free Wi-Fi? :)
Well, he's got a new blog. Had one actually for some time. I'm sorry I never mentioned it before--and worse--left his old one up in the "Other Friends" section.
From now on, you can see the last 5 posts of Gouge's new blog "The Loft" in the "Other Friends" category.
Feel free to wander over and check out the new digs.
TruthFocus.com is the blog of Matt Silver and a eventually a few others. He's just getting started in the blogging world, and I'm sure would enjoy some traffic and comments. He's off to a good start.
Enjoy.
There've been a collection of things I've been meaning to do on Ben's Friends. Not all of them are done yet, but the first few are in place.
1. I removed comment moderation. It's been annoying me (and likely other authors) ever since I put it in place. Happily, it's gone now. The security code is still there, but that's for the best I think.
2. Expand the hard drive space. We used to only have 300 mb collectively. I've now upped that to 600 mb. That doesn't mean we can start uploading 300dpi images willy-nilly, but it does mean we'll have a little more breathing room.
So, that's in for now. There's still a good number of blogs that have gone unannounced, some front page modifications I'd like to make, and some new features I'd like to add. Of course there's also the niggling little idea of rewriting the entire thing from scratch. :) But those won't happen this morning, I'm afraid.
Enjoy. :)
I've added yet another spam prevention method called a "captcha" or "scode." You will notice a small image of 6 characters that need to be entered into the field below it on the comment preview page, just above the submit button. This is yet another attempt to decrease spam.
The image is ment to restrict the ability of comment bots from spamming us. Individuals, who want to take the time, still can, but the bots should at least have a really hard time of breaking in now, Lord willing.
Nothing's perfect thouh, and the downside of the captcha concept is that visually impaired people won't be able to comment on our blogs anymore. I had avoided using this trick for some time because of that reason. If you are visually impaired, please forgive this change. We hope it doesn't have to be permanent.
Thank you all for your patience over the past few weeks.
Maybe it's bad math, but it seems to be in vogue right now for our little community and its server woes. We're moving back to the BigBlueHat server.
What this means is: a little down time in exchange for the ability to use your blog. Not a bad trade-off eh?
Ben's Friends will be down for approximately the next two hours while I move us back. Once we're back there will be a few changes to the system that will hopefully make things better. MT-Blacklist will be turned off, but there will be a new comment moderation feature in place (compliments of ScriptyGoddes).
There will be more info posted when the move is complete. For the time being, please accept my appologies for the misfire and stay tuned for greater things in the future.
Please pray that all goes well.
Ja ne.
As many of you have noticed, Ben's Friends is still having all kinds of problems. It turns out that our 1&1 (at least the package we're on) is rather limited, which has caused a number of problems (mostly with Perl modules).
Due to that, we're probably going to be moving back to the BBH server. When this happens, comments will be disable until I decide on the best option (other than MT-Blacklist) to keep spam down.
I'm sorry for all the trouble this has caused. Thank you all for your patience and encouragement. Please pray that I'll have wisdom and time to make this change soon. I'd like to take Ben's Friends a lot farther for you all. Your prayers go along way.
Thanks again for your patience. I'll keep you posted.
For those who have tried to comment since we moved to the new server, you may have received a 505 error. The error was actually intentional at least while we were at the old server.
Because of some trouble with MT-Blacklist, we were creating an extreme amount of load (CPU/Memory usage) on our old server every time someone commented. Because that continued to happen, we were forced to take down the comments script, hence the error. After moving to the new server I neglected to put the script back.
It is now back in place, so things should work normally. Sorry for the trouble.
The move to the new server is complete. We're now running on a preview hosting account I picked up sometime last year from 1and1.
The move went fairly well except for the fact that when I got home from Port City Java I found that I wasn't able to access the new location. I've contacted Charter to see if they can do anything about. In the meantime, it looks like I'll continue to be a wireless hobo.
Enjoy the new server, and please let me know if you find any bugs.
Just to let everyone know, Ben's Friends we'll be moving to another server in the (hopefully) not to distant future. We've had a bit of trouble with our spam protection causing serious server load issues.
What this means for everyone is that during the process, Ben's Friends will be unavailable for posting, commenting, and searching (except via Google) for about 3-5 days. The content will still be there, however, so anyone who wants to read our blogs will still be able too.
Another thing I've pondered is making the move to MT 3.15 (the current version of MovableType). SixApart is an amazing company and MT is still one of the best blogging software packages available. That said, the license we'd need to purchase costs around $100.
The other option would be to hack WordPress 1.5 to handle multiple blogs in the same database. This has some major downsides, however. WP does not natively support the kind of multiple blog community we run. It also would be a bit of a "culture" shock for those who are more novice in their use of the web or who have greatly customized their templates, etc.
A third option would be to look into something like Nucleus. Nucleus is another good, fairly widely used blogging software that supports multiple blogs per installation, but it too would carry a pretty heavy "price" in the way of time to re-customize everyone's sites.
The forth option, is we could write our own bloggin software that uses MT Templates (or something exteemly similar). [throwing this in for good measure]
So, if you have thoughts, concernes, donations you'd like to contribute to the cause of our blogs please comment below.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. Other than the small amount of downtime, the move should only make things better for everyone.
Grazie.
Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin was released last month. I just found out about it, but hopefully it will ward off some spam.
How it works
Google and many other search engines have agreed to rescpect the "rel='nofollow'" attribute and value on anchor tags. Adding that to an anchor tag (<a>) will now keep search engines from indexing routes to those links and increasing the page rank of the linked web sites.
The new MT plugin (which has been installed) adds the "rel="nofollow'" code to anchor items in comments and trackback entries. It doesn't add it to blog entries, however, since you'd probably like to be able to promote things via your blog.
So, all that to say, hopefully we're at least not helping the cause of spammers, even if they keep annoying us.
Many of you have wanted to put an image in your template's header. There is an HTML way to do it, but if you're using the shared Individual Entry Archive template (which most of you are to simplify maintenance) adding the image to the HTML can change other peoples blogs.
To add the header image to your blog without affecting others (and to have primarily semantic HTML and your design in CSS) you can add the header image to your CSS stylesheet and keep things clean.
The CSS you'll need is below:
#banner h1 {
height: {height-of-your-image}px;
background: url('{path-to-your-image}') no-repeat;
text-indent: -9000px;
}
Change the two pieces of text in curley braces ("{...}") to the height of your image and the URL of your image.
To upload your image you can use the usual "Upload File" button and then just copy the href from the anchor (<a ...>) tag.
Feel free to comment if you have any questions.
Good news:
We won't be getting any spam for awhile.
Bad news:
We won't be getting any comments either.
Something's gone array with MT-Blacklist. My only guess is that something was added to the blacklist that is throwing the plugin off. There's at least a billion entries though, so it may take me a while to find what's messing things up.
In the mean time, enjoy the peace and quiet.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
As many of your inboxes probably know, our blogs have been getting hit by an increasing number of spam attacks. Some of them are annoying others of them reach hieghts of depravity not to be written about.
There are two small defenses I'll need each bloggers help with that should help stem the tide. The first is not using the comments popup. To make the change, open your "Main Index" template and replace this code:
<a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>"
onclick="OpenComments(this.href); return false">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>
with this code:
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>
If you're warry of deleting things, you can comment the code out by putting a "<!--" at the beginning and a "-->" at the end. Be sure to rebuild your Main Index template after making these changes.
The second step is to remove the "Post" button from the comment form in your Individual Archive Entry template, thereby forcing users to preview their comments before posting. To do that remove or comment out the following code:
<input style="font-weight: bold;" type="submit" name="post" value=" Post " />
If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me.
There are other defenses that I have put into place in the past and some more to come. For now, please make these small changes and pray that we can make better neighbors with these fences.
Dear bloggers,
In trying to rid our blogs of some recent spam, I'm afraid some normal comments got removed in the process. It would be nice if there were a way to "white-list" commenters, so MT-Blacklist wouldn't go after the wrong comments.
All the same, there were a few good comments deleted that shouldn't have been. For those who are the owners of the entries or for those who may have done the commenting, a list of the commenter's and the first line of their comment (which is all I have) are in the rest of this post.
Again, I am very sorry about this problem. It seems I need to be looking for some more (and less potentially destructive) anti-spam methods.
Happily about 10-12 of them were real spam. Somewhat comforting, I suppose...
joy
i so wish i could publish that photo. weren't the
Posted to expressions entry "I never knew."
mels
NOW i remember why it's called the incredible hulk artist
Posted to expressions entry "I never knew."
sligh
I'll be there.
Posted to Series of Doors entry "for show"
sligh
It took me a long time to realize that I
Posted to Series of Doors entry "A few select posts"
Micah
I concur with Kammer. But trust him; he's the artist.
Posted to Esin entry "finished column"
Micah
Heidi, it's ironic that your support for Gwen's reformation doesn't
Posted to Esin entry "I've decided to reform"
gwen
=D yeah I don't know what in the world has
Posted to Esin entry "overdose of Mucha"
timf
OPTION-'n' (on your trusty macintosh) and then type the letter
Posted to gadabout entry "mexican, by mexicans for... everybody"
timf
hmmm... I'm seeing the costume design class influence.
Posted to Esin entry "overdose of Mucha"
Kammer
Magnitude of moving rings a tone I cannot interpret, or
Posted to simplicity entry "For an eclipse"
Kammer
Um Gwen, I submit you continue with the working maids.
Posted to Esin entry "finished column"
amyteedot
Yummy!!! R.E.M.--good Saturday morning tunes.
Posted to expressions entry "from the inside cover of Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems"
Brie
I'm inclined to agree with you. Some neighbors did see
Posted to Guarded Grace of a Politician entry "In the Home....."
Jammer
Brie, I most likely wasn't kids. Mine was stolen by
Posted to Guarded Grace of a Politician entry "In the Home....."
gwen
she's a children's book author and the head of journey
Posted to Esin entry "I've decided to reform"
heidi
I love the word appalled. And I support your decision
Posted to Esin entry "I've decided to reform"
For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the PayPal donations button to appear on the site, it's finally here.
Things have been rather busy with the business recently, so I've been having to carve out time for Ben's Friends when and where I can. Lord willing, I'll get to the file manager access for those who've requested it later this week. If you haven't asked for it and would like access, feel free to e-mail me or comment.
Also, I've got oodles of new improvements in mind for Ben's Friends, and I hope to get them in over the next couple months. Please pray that I can make this more of a priority. If you know of anything you'd like to be able to do, please ask. It may take me a bit to get to it, but, Lord willing, it will happen. :)
Grace and peace.
Bloggers,
You may have noticed some missing portions of pages, not pages at all, or other problems on our blogs over the past few days. The problem has arrisen due to the limited space we have available.
Currently, we have 150 mb of space. As the number of bloggers have grown and the size of their blogs have grown, the space we have has gotten rather full.
This morning, in order to fix the disappearing content problem, I upped Ben's Friends capacity to 200 mb. Please continue to be thrifty with the amount and size of photos you upload (those are the general culprit). I know MT makes it wonderfully easy to upload any size photo, but the larger the photo the more space it takes up.
In a larger effort to remedy this situation, I would like to offer two solutions.
The first, is donations. Ben's Friends runs on BigBlueHat's servers and consequently takes up space that would otherwise be used for clients. Many of you have expressed a willingness to help curb the cost of the server space and time that goes into making Ben's Friends the best little blogging community we know. ;) If you are interested (please don't feel obligated), we will be taking donations in the near future. I will post more information once we have the PayPal account setup.
The second, is a file manager. There is one now that's in use by a very few people. If you upload lots of pictures and have wanted to remove old ones, or accidental ones but not known how, the file manager should solve your problems.
Because of the time it takes to set up File Manager accounts I won't be able to set everyone up all at once. I'll need you to comment on this post to let me know you're interested in getting access. Once setup you'll be able to add, delete, and move files within your blog directory. Please be adviced that moving, deleting, or renaming files will likely break your MT post that references that file. Be sure to keep that in mind when making changes.
I want to keep Ben's Friends free for those who are of the same mind and who are interested in getting started in blogging. BBH will be offering full fledged blogging services in the future for those in need of something larger.
Thank you for being understanding and patient with our limitations. We hope that we can continue to improve Ben's Friends to provide the best possible blogging community for our users.
P.S.: Another thing to ponder, if we could raise enough money through donations, we might consider (as a group) the possibility of purchasing the $99.95 Unlimited Personal Edition of MT 3.1. We could upgrade from our existing platform, have more features, and keep the community running smoothly. It's not a must, but something to consider. Thanks for your time.
I've been thinking about blogging more than I've been doing it. My thoughts have lead me to find more ways to equip our little group to blog more effectively.
There are some new features that have been in testing on my blog and on a resident beta tester's. Between the two of us, we've gotten most of the things working efficiently.
There are basically five new plugins available.
The first is a spam blocking system. You'll notice an extra line about that when you receive a comment notification. Just follow the instructions in the e-mail and you'll be good to go.
The second is called MTMacro. Just like macros in other applications, this little set of template tags lets you define reusable bits of code that will run on your entries. For example, on my blog I've been posting about books and plays I've read and movies I've watched. The entries look like nice little cover images with the title and current Amazon price underneath. In reality, there's really only one small bit of markup that looks like this:
<book_info asin="#####">Book Title</book_info>
Any time I put that markup in an entry it is replaced by a the book's information from Amazon. Finding and replacing the markup is done by MTMacro. The actual generation of the content is done by the next new feature here.
NOTE: You have to have this macro set up in a Template Module. If you want the code for this, please let me know. I'll likely post it on my blog after the first request (if not before).
The second to last feature is similar to MTAmazon, but with fewer features. It's called, MTWair (Wair = What am I reading). If you search for MTWair on Google you'll find that Jbo (our beta testor) has gotten it working on his blog and also has example code.
The last, but certainly not least: MTList. This plugin works great with the MTWair plugin. Rather than creating a seperate MTWair tag group for every book you've read, you can create an MTList, wrap one MTWair tag group with an MTListLoop tag, and output a seperate MTWair book for each loop. I'll post example code for this one soon, Lord willing.
So, that's the skinny on the new features here at Ben's Friends. Sorry, there aren't more code samples. If I had been keeping up with blogging as well as adding features, there wouldn't be this wonderful backlog of blogs needing to be written. Oh well, still learning discipline.
Enjoy the toys. :)
Just to let everyone know, Ben's Friends has now been joined by eMom (Mrs. Egolf) and Gadabout (Tim French). They're both off to a good start, so please welcome them to the group and give them all the MT tips and tricks you can. :)
Oh, and in case you missed it, Gouge is now on the front page. :)
Just so everyone knows. Check the bottom of this page.
Anyone else I'm forgetting?
Sometimes, I forget things.
This time, it was a new blogger.
His name is Micah Ellis.
Mr. Ellis has been maintaining his blog since... oh... April (sorry Micah).
Please welcome Micah (many of you have already found his blog.
His blog is titled ME Studios.
My apologize, Micah, for not announcing you sooner.
Welcome to the family.
Yes folks, it's true. There still is a "landlord" for this website. You'll be able to find out more about his disappearance and return on his blog soon. In the mean time, he'd like to annouce four new blogs:
Now, some of these people haven't actually started blogging yet (I just built the last couple today), but they'll be there soon I'm sure.
Enjoy the new bloggers, new blogs, and old friends.
We have a new blog -- "Expressions" -- authored by Heidi Mulford. Formerly
of the Chicagoland area, Heidi hails from Greenville, South Carolina now.
She comes to us via the word-of-mouth rumor mill through friends like Joy
and Kammer. She works for a lawyer who likes to bribe her with lattes. Too
bad I don't do that for my employees. [contributed by Joy]
I do buy lattes for the only "employee" that lives in Greenville. :)
Shipping's too much for the others. [rebuttal by Ben]
Lattes aside, check out Heidi's blog.
Gabriel Egolf has joined our Ben's Friends. He's been lurking around here for a while, but just last month he began blogging at vortex. Gabe and I worked at the Web Technologies department of BJU and worked on a lot of web site projects together. If you're interested in web design or CSS (specifically) or even PHP scripting, you'll probably find his blog particularly interesting. He does more than blog about web technology stuff though. He's also blogged a number of good Christian walk entries intended to provoke to Love and good works.
Thanks for joining, Gabe.
Ben's Friends is now on a new server. BigBlueHat is going through a transition stage and preparing for larger, long term growth. That being the case, we now have our own Ben's Friends hosting account. This should allow us to manage space better and also tracks stats. 8o)
I'll be posting more information about the stats soon.
All together the move went pretty well. We had some trouble with some of the plugins we added. One of them in particular, mt-rssfeed, plays a crucial role on the front page. It handles getting the entry information from the other blogs to display on the front page. The old path for it's temp directory was hard coded into the application (a Perl file). After fixing that and a few other hard coded paths in a few other files and the database, things seem to be working well.
Please let me know if you run into any problems.
Enjoy the moved site. 8o)
Over the past couple weeks, we've added three new bloggers to the site: Shifting Sand, Esin, and Vortex.
Hope you enjoy all three as they add to the diversity and amount of content here.
Jon joined us through Brannon McAllister.
Gwen and I have been friends for a while as well. I think Hillary was probably most instrumental in getting her to come on board though.
Gabe and I go "way back." We've been friends since our freshman year. We were in the same Prayer Group, but didn't actually meet until after we found out we'd both joined the same society. We were coworkes at Web Tech until last summer. He's working there, holding down the fort, for a few months longer. If you like web design and/or programming, you'll want to watch his blog carefully. He's often my source of CSS information or just cool stuff online.
Enjoy the blogs.
The ability to put ability to put thumbnails into blog entries here at Ben's Friends. If you click the little photo to the left, you'll get a popup with a larger version of the same image.
Adding thumnails is as easy as uploading images directly into your blog entries. After you've clicked "Upload File" and uploaded your image, you'll see fields for creating a thumnail and setting its dimensions. It should be a very straightforward process.
Now, don't go too image crazy. We do have a limit on our space. We've been filling it up quite a bit recently. You're still welcome to upload images, just don't make them flag sized. :)
Enjoy.
For those of you who like to blog in multiple languages or use "extra" characters, things are looking up. 8o)
Ben's Friends is now using UTF-8 (Unicode) on all blogs. Some of the blogs may still be rendering in ISO-8859-1 (the old encoding). If you notice any strange character renderings or '?' in various places on someone's blog, please send me the URL and I'll be glad to update that blogs templates.
Switching to Unicode *shouldn't* cause any problems, just give us more flexability.
Here are some things to help you on your way to i18n blogging.
- Unipad - a unicode text editor
- Other Keyboards for Unipad (include Deseret, Maltese, and Tsalagi{Cherokee})
I've upgraded MovableType to version 2.661. This version includes some spam reduction features that will hopefully prove helpful. Let me know if you experience any problems.
For greater visibility try a domain name. Great for the holiday season! 8o)
Ubertati just recently got one (ubertati.com) and you can too!
If you'd like your blog to have its own domain name, Let me know, and I'll explain all the ins and outs. 8o)
Brannon McAllister has begun blogging on the new Portland Studios blog. Keep an eye on this blog. Brannon, Justin, and the rest of the Portland guys are working hard to create a "Great Commission Company."
Enjoy.
Ben's Friends is now running the latest MoveableType 2.65. Most of the improvements are security related. There are some features related to the Atom API, but I'll need to do some research about it before I can really fill everyone in.
Let me know
if you find any trouble with the blogs.
We ran into some more bugs this afternoon, but I think there all gone. We all hope so. 8o)
I did want to clarify how notifications work and what type of notification features there are for our blogs.
First, there are blog notifications. These can be subscribed to or unsubscribed from on the front page of most of the blogs. If you'd like to have this feature on your blog, follow the instructions on the "Subscribe/Unsubscribe" entry. If you subscribe to this type of notification, you will only receive an e-mail when the blog's author sends one. That may be each time they blog, but it's generally less frequent and always up to the author.
The second kind of notifications are for comments. Those are per-entry subscriptions and can be made when you post a comment. You can also subscribe without commenting using the "Subscribe without commenting" form below the main comments form (too many forms 8o) ). If you subscribe to this type of notification, you will receive an e-mail every time someone comments on an entry you're subscribed too. This type of subscription helps the blog entries take on some of the features that a forum would normal handle.
I hope all that makes sense. 8o) If you have any questions, feel free to comment here.
The subscription trouble is passed. It turns out that one has to have "e-mail comments" set on their blog in order to use the MT-Notifier plugin.
MT-Notifier is a new commenting system that replaces the one we previously used by Jennifer from ScriptyGoddess. Jennifer suggests upgrading to it, and it also works well with some of our new spam control features we've added.
I hope this helps everyone. All the blogs have been updated to reflect the changes.
Some of our bloggers were receiving spam from some not-so-nice people with too much time on their hands.
So, I implemented some changes to keep them out of our domain. Trouble is, by doing so, I caused some new problems.
The comments subscription forms are out of commission for a little while. We are close to having the whole thing resolved, but until then, your users may get errors when trying to comment or subscribe to comments.
If you notice trouble, please let me know about it. I hope to have it remedied soon.
Probably the most long awaited feature is at last here. The subscribe/unsubscribe feature is now available to all blogs on BensFriends.com. Information about adding it to your own blog is below. If your not interested in digging under the hood, please let me know
.
Lord willing, this feature will help others get involved in growing as a Church.
Here is the technical info behind how all this works and how to add it to your blog:
The dirty under the hood stuff is already done. The only thing left to do in each blog is provide the interface for your users.
First, you'll need to add this code to your side bar (look for 'div id="links"').
<div class="sidetitle">
Subscribe/Unsubscribe
</div>
<div class="side">
<form name="sub" id="sub" method="post" action="<$MTCGIPath$>mt-add-notify.cgi" onsubmit="return checksub()">
<input type="hidden" name="blog_id" value="<$MTBlogID$>" />
<input type="hidden" name="_redirect" value="<$MTBlogURL$>" />
<input type="radio" name="sub_action" value = "subscribe" checked="checked" /> Subscribe
<input type="radio" name="sub_action" value = "unsubscribe" /> Unsubscribe<br/>
<input type="hidden" name="blog_name" value="<$MTBlogName$>" />
<input name="email" size="20" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>
</div>
You may customize that as you please.
Next you'll want to add this little piece of JavaScript inside your <script/> tags at the top of the "Main Index" template.
function checksub()
{
var str = sub.email.value;
var re = /^[A-Za-z0-9_\-]+([.][A-Za-z0-9_\-]+)*[@][A-Za-z0-9_\-]+([.][A-Za-z0-9_\-]+)+$/;
if (!re.test(str))
{
window.alert('Invalid email address');
sub.email.focus();
return false;
}
return true;
}
That should do the trick.
Let me know if you need or want anything else.
P.S.: Special thanks to everyone that worked on this hack over at the MT Forums.
The front page of Ben's Friends will now be updated every hour thanks to a cron job using the mt-rebuild script by Timothy Appnel.
We're getting closer to the ideal community front end.
BTW, if there are any other features that you'd like, please comment on this post.
Lest you fear me homeless, I am taking up blogging residence in the relocated HatShop. We're just beginning to embark on a reawakening that may very well start with blogs. Write, Live, Dream, Love.
Remember the "Big Dreams Afoot" post? Those dreams are beginning to find their way out of my head and onto paper or screen.
If Ben's Friends looks the way it always has, reload the page. Hopefully these changes will help the community grow. Now everyone's hat is over the fence. 8o)
Enjoy!
Last night I added the subscribe/unsubscribe feature for comments on Ben's Friends. If you would like to have this feature added to your blog, please let me know.
Special thanks to ScriptyGoddess (don't worry, it's a good site) for creating the script.
The Scripturizer 1.2 plugin by Dean Peters and Jonathan Fox is now available for use on your blogs. Basically, this little plugin turns all your Bible references into links to bible.gospelcom.net. For those who like to hack their own templates here's how to add it:
Change any <$MTEntryBody$> that you find to <$MTEntryBody scripturize="ESV"$>. The available translations are NIV, NASB, AMP, NLT, KJV, ESV, CEV, NKJV, KJ21, ASV, WE, YLT, DARBY, WYC, NIV-UK. Whichever one you pick will be used for all scripture references.
The main two templates you'll need to make the change in are the "Main Index" template and the "Individual Entry Archive" template. Your welcome to add it to all of them if you'd like.
There are more Ben's Friends additions in the works. Stay tuned. 8o)
If you like Tolkien, Narnia, or hobbit-like-conquests-against-mordor, you should check out A Glimpse...That Place. It's run by a "hobbit" who goes by "Key." A few other friends will be joining her on her blog soon.
To find out more about Key and her hobbit companions check out kumiko's post over at Ubertati.
The Mozilla Foundation (who's site seems to be temporarily down due to extreme traffic) released the latest and greatest versions of all of three of it's five software packages yesterday.
Because the Mozilla.org site is experiencing some down time, I thought I'd help out and offer the downloads here:
- Firebird 0.7 (browser only)
- Thunderbird 0.3 (e-mail client)
- Mozilla Applicaiton Suite (browser, e-mail, web page editor)
The App Suite gives you the whole array of Mozilla applications including a decent web page editor. Firebird and Thunderbird are smaller and therefore faster. I generally run Firebird and Thunderbird, but because I'm a web designer/developer I keep the Mozilla App Suite handy just to check it's progress.
To install Firebird or Thunderbird, download the '.zip' file and unzip (or extract) it into your "Program Files" folder on your "C:\" drive.
To install the App Suite, download the installer and run it. The installer will handle walking you through the rest.
Hollar if you need anything. 8o)
It seems the Mozilla foundation was thinking the same things we were.
The games not over yet.
And that was just one idea.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I changed the why my blog entries are archived.
The old URL's used to look like this: http://www.bensfriends.com/archives/000488.html
The new URL's look like this:
http://www.bensfriends.com/archives/2003/10/13/thems_fighten_words.html
The new URL's are a good bit more descriptive (hence the change). The old archive files are still there for backwards compatibility, but the new ones are in place for future happiness. 8o)
How did I do that?
- In the 'Weblog Config' section of your blog, click on 'Archiving.'
- Once your in the 'Archiving' section you should see a 'Add New..." button at the bottom. Click it.
- Pick 'Individual' in the first box.
- Pick 'Individual Entry Archive' in the second box.
- Click 'Add.'
- Select the radio button (the little circle) next to the second 'Individual Entry Archive' line of fields.
- In the text box to the left past this string:
<MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d">/<MTEntryTitle dirify="1">.html - Click 'Save.'
- Click 'Rebuild.'
- Go check out your new Permalinks (click the time at the bottom of one of your entries).
If you have any questions, let me know.
If you'd like to read some more about how this was done, check out these links:
- http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_blog_config.html#archiving
- http://nslog.com/archives/2003/03/13/starting_a_blog_with_movabletype.php
Enjoy.
10 points for blogs!
For the past four months or so, I've hardly used my Clie. When I was in school and teaching it was one of my most valuable assets. Now that I work at home and my schedule is comparitively simple, I've found enough storage in my head and on my laptop to keep my appointments and todo list strait. Hence this blog entry.
I'm probably going to put this up on UniversityYardSale.com soon, but I thought I would offer it to my blogging audience first.
Here are the stats for the Sony Clie 710c:
8mb (6.5 available for storage)
8mb Memory Stick
65,000 colors (upgraded OS to 4.1)
HotSync Cradle
Built-in MP3 Player
Head phones with volume control on cord
Original Software and documentation
If your interested, let me know. If your in the Greenville area I'll be glad to bring and by and show it to you.
I'm asking $125 for the whole shebang.
Macromedia's Dreamweaver product has been falling behind at an alarmingly fast rate. It still works well if you design with tables and single pixel gifs, but it destorys CSS layouts.
Perhaps I'm picky or live to much on the bleeding edge of technology, but I really liked Dreamweaver when it first came out.
It seems that Macromedia seems to have noticed that their product has been aging in dog years. They're releasing a new version very soon.
Don't know that I'll buy it, but I'll at least play with the demo. 8o)
P.S.: The site looks better too. 8o)
There's a new blog called simplicity. It's been up for a couple weeks (I now have time to announce it). 8o)
Tennie, Kammer, and I have been writing haiku almost every Wednesday for the past five months or so. We finally decided to turn it into an all out blog. If your interested in writing haiku with us, please let me know.
Next year we may do tanka. 8o)
Here's some general knowledge about tanka, haiku, and other Japanese waka (poetry).
Well folks, the TypePad beta days are over. The Preview Release ends tomorrow. I enjoyed it tremendously. The Trott's have done a great job yet again.
For those of you interested in a clean, easy to use blogging system I highly recommend TypePad. It has all the features of MoveableType plus photo albums, "TypeLists" (links, books, friends), and a very clean interface.
I considered looking into TypePad for us hear at bensfriends. The only trouble is the cost. It's reasonable for one or two people, but it gets rather pricy for ten or so. I've enjoyed building a community for you all, and I hope to continue it long into the future. Lord willing we'll be able to make this an even more creative and innovative place.
All that said, I'm back from the HatShop. 8o) The HatShop blog has a new home now though. I've added it to BensFriends and it may eventually become my main blog leaving this front blog for announcements and other fun stuff (more on that later). 8oD
Also, if anyone is interested in using TypePad for blogging, send me an e-mail. I've got 20 "friend and family" discount codes that will get you 20% off as long as you stay subscribed to TypePad.
Carpe diem
corum DEO.
Some of you may have already received an e-mail from a friend about this. I wanted to put it up here for those who may not have received it yet.
CNN is running an online poll concerning the defenition of marriage. President Bush has said that marriage should be reserved only for heterosexuals. The media (in this case CNN) is attempting to use it's voice to make the Truth seem outdated.
Please read the article linked to below and cast your vote in the online poll.
CNN.com - Bush wants marriage reserved for heterosexuals - Jul. 31, 2003
Thanks,
Benjamin
The new and improved bigbluehat.com site is up and running. I'd love to get feedback from you all on what you think about it, what could be improved, and anything else you might see that you think would be a help.
Business has been going well these past few weeks. It was kind of slow there at the beginning. I've learned many lessons about waiting on the Lord. He truely does renew our strength.
Thank you all for your prayers and encouragement. There still greatly needed. 8o)
I'm beta testing an early version of the new TypePad application from SixApart (the makers of MoveableType).
It's been a wonderful first expereience. I'm very impressed with the interface and definitely like the new features. You can see the fruits of my labor at the new HatShop. Feel free to comment and TrackBack on both these blogs.
I'm not sure how long the HatShop will be up and running, but TypePad definitely looks like a promising application for future blogging. Especially for those who want a more robust site (photo albums, friends, links, books lists to name a few features).
Today has been a transition day. I have moved from working at the University to working for a company the Lord is creating through me called BigBlueHat. Lord willing, this little company will grow to be an international business that will glorify the Lord Jesus Christ in everything that it does. I would appreciate your prayers and support whenever you think of me. Feel free to recommend us as well (if you feel so led). 8o)
I am greatly appreciative to all those who have encouraged me and focused my thoughts on Christ. Today is the day that the Lord has given us, we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Carpe diem,
corum DEO.
I've got another entry I'm working on this evening, but I thought the 100th entry was worth celebrating. 8o)
WOOHOO!!! 8oD
Happy blogging everyone.
P.S.: If you don't have one yet, you need one. 8o) E-mail me.
For those of you who don't know yet, I will be starting BigBlueHat full time this summer. I have been doing freelance web design for a little over three years now. In the past couple years I have been having a hard time keeping up with everything while trying to get BigBlueHat up and running.
Lord willing, BigBlueHat will be in the Greenville area for the next couple of years or so. Lord willing in two years we will have a large enough client base to support and office of 5-10 full time workers (designers, information architects, writers). Once this is established we will be looking to start another office in at least another state if not another country.
As the Lord provides, we hope to branch out every few years, so that we can cover more territory. Our hope is that the Lord will prosper the business, so that it may someday be a fully global company. This would allow us to live as salt and light in the entire World, not just Greenville.
Our prayer is that the Lord will use this business to show His Love to the nations through our work and our lives.
Carpe diem
Corum DEO.
I would like the ourpeace.net site to go through a major revision this summer. I'm going to need help though. A small group of us worked hard at it a little more than a year ago. We accomplished some of our main goals, and go a decent little site up and running.
I've learned a lot more since then. I'd like to apply my increased knowledge of on-line communities and community software to ourpeace.net to create something that will grow and be of greater help to the world at large.
Here's a link for some inspiration: Everystudent.com - exploring questions about life and God.
Another blogger joins the friends. He goes by "kammer" on the blog. I'm looking forward to lots of good things from this blog. He's a potter too, btw, so there may be some photos available in the not so distant future.
His site is called "Series of Doors."
Yes folks, it's finally happened: BensFriends.com has pictures. 8o) Well, a picture to start out with.
This photo is of a wonderful girl named Stephanie Anne Geter also known as tennie of the Ubertati blog. We have been blogging together for over five months. 8o)
This photo is from the production of Othello done at BJ this past thanksgiving.
I hope to see plenty more photos on the blogs.
P.S.: You're welcome David. 8o)
For those of you who haven't heard yet, there is a blogger in Baghdad.
Here is the link to a mirror of the site that BlogSpot set up for him (Google has one too): http://dearraed.blogspot.com/.
According to The World on NPR, he has millions of readers. On the 26th, The World had a short commentary about him at the end of their program (the paragraph about it is at the very bottom).
I found this whole thing very inspiring. Here is a man (with a blog) that has a readership numbering in the millions. Maybe my blogs or the blogs of my friends won't ever get read by anyone other than people I already know, but, Lord willing, they will get read. Because they are read, each entry is an opportunity to convey truth. I for one can't pass an opportunity like that up.
In the past two weeks we have recently had two new members join the bensfriends.com site: Kayleigh and Aratur.
Kaleigh, our first non-US member, began blogging last week. She has gotten off to a good start with three blogs on a range of topics. I'm looking forward to reading more in the near future.
The Aratur blog was added two days ago. It is the home of the thoughts of a very, very close friend of mine... ...my mom. 8o) She is a professional writer as well as a speech teacher at BJ. She's been a wonderful mother and friend, but I'll let you read more about that on her blog. 8o)
The bloggers are back. 8o) The Morris blog had been experiencing some technical difficulties, but is now in working order. The JBo blog also has a recent update that is well worth reading. Our other member, tennie of Ubertati, is still traveling the central states. She has told me, however, that she has a blog planned and is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to post it. 8o)
So all in all, the blogging community here is doing well. I would enjoy hearing from the rest of you at some point. I'd also like many of you to start one. 8o)
I consider it one of the many synaptic links in the Body of Christ. Read "And you have time for this because..." entry on the Morris blog for further clarification. 8o)
The number of BensFriends.com authors doubled this weekend with the addition of two new blogs: Morris and Ubertati.
The Morris blog is the property of the Dave and Cathy Morris family. Dave is a seminarian at BJ and Cathy is an editor for BJU Press. I look forward to seeing what wonderful things will come from the Morris blog. 8o)
The Ubertati blog is the home of the web writings of Stephanie Geter. Stephanie is a Junior at BJ and will be on the BJU Ministry team next semester. She is a writer by trade and has already proven her "bloggin" ability with her first post. 8o)
For those of you who would be interested in joining our little "club" of "bloggers" please e-mail me and let me know: [email protected].
Cheers!
The Young family is pulling up stakes and trekking cross town this next week. We're presently in the process of buying and moving to a new house on the other side of town. We currently live near Greenville Technical College. By this time next week, Lord willing, we'll be on the other side of Greenville near E. Lee road.
Please pray for us as we move this next week. We've got a lot left to pack and when Thursday and Friday get hear we'll have to work fast to get all the boxes to the new house.
The new house has some really nice things about it. One of my favorite features is a down stairs apartment complete with bathroom and fireplace. 8o) I'm sure we'll be having more "shindigs" at the house in the future, so I'll be sure and give a tour to anyone who'd like to see it. 8o) Once we're moved in, I'll see about posting some photos of the new pad, as well as the rest of the house.
In other news:
The Vespers I'm in next week premiers this coming Sunday and my mom's play opens at the end of the semester.
Cheers! 8o)
The anticipation is finally nearing an end. 8o) Justin's show will be opening on September 30th. For those of you who don't know Justin, you can visit www.bigbluehat.com/illustration/gerard/ to find out more about him and his work. He'll be selling many of his originals as well as prints. Just thought I'd let you all know. Please be in prayer for its success and come if you can.
The show will be up from September 30th through October 11th in the Sargent Art Building at BJU.
Well, it's finally happened. Another one of my friends has started a blog on my site. I'd like more people to follow suite btw. 8o)
His name is James Micah Bohannon. Some of you already know him. For those of you who don't you can visit his blog at www.bensfriends.com/jbo/ (JBo is his nick name). He's already a better blogger than I am, and I'm sure he'll keep it up. 8o)
For those of you who would like to join the BensFriends.com web site please e-mail me ([email protected]). I would really like others to be able to have blogs on here for their friends as well. It really is a very simple thing to use, and I'll be more than happy to set it up for you.
Now that I have Micah as a good example I may be blogging more, so stay tuned. 8o)
Well, it's almost been a year. The nation is buzzing with memorial services, news broadcasts, and slightly increased patriotism. It may be just a national holiday to some, but I think it will remind some people of how short life really is.
Some friends of mine and I have created a web site called OurPeace.net. It is essentially an online tract. We started the project shortly after the 9/11 tradgedy. If you know of anyone who might be helped by the information on the site, feel free to send them the address (http://www.ourpeace.net/). Also, if you have any suggestions, feel free to send me those as well.
Pray that the Lord will use us all this next week.
Everyone will be back to the University this weekend. It's kind of strange not to be going back, but I'm sure I'll adjust eventually. 8o) Lately I've been wondering about what the Lord's got planned for me in the future.
Right now, I'm getting ready for my new teaching job at the University. I'm changing the "Designing for the Web" course significantly. We'll be spending more time learning concepts of web design and user interface production than about HTML and Dreamweaver. Hopefully that will help the students more in the future.
BTW, I'm recruiting people for a new web site I'd like to start. It would be for Americans who want to move to another country for an extended period of time. If you're interested in that sort of thing and would like to help, let me know ([email protected]).
Well, I'm finally in an internet cafe! It's great! The stations aren't as "out in the open" as I had thought they would be, but there still here. I'm writing this from the Coffee Republic in Oxford!
Head to the BritTeam blog for more information (see right side links), or go to www.bensfriends.com/britteam/
Hi from Brimpton,
It seems that no one has found the BritTeam Blog yet. There is a link to it to the left of the posts (some times it's at the bottom of the page). There are a few updates out there. In fact I'm getting ready to post another. 8o)
Remember that if anyone is interested in having their own personal blog you can e-mail Gabe Egolf ([email protected]) and he can set you up with your own account.
I hope everyone is doing well.
Cheers!
Ben has been unable to access the Internet since arriving in Great Britain so he has not been able to update you on his trip. He called yesterday to say that they are alive and well. They are tired but well fed. They held a song and testimony time for some ladies at a Brethern Church that meets in the same building as the Grace Baptist Church run by the missionaries. They had tea afterwards. Ben said it was incredible.
He would love to receive some "post." So if you would like to write to him send your letters to one of the following addresses. Allow 5-6 days for delivery. It is about 80 cents for postage on a first class letter.
Pastor Tom Dotson
27 Beaumont Road
Slough, Berkshire SL2 INQ England
He will be there from May 26-June2
Pastor Ken Scheer
145 Pinnocks Way
Botley, Oxford OX2 9DE England
He will be there from June 3-June9
Rev. Kyle Paisley
16 Hollydene Close
Oulton Broad, Lowestoft
Suffolk, NR32 300 England
He will be there from June 10-June 16
Pastor Jim Storey
2 Treviot Place
Troon, Ayrshire KA10 7ee Scotland
He will be there from June 17-June 23
My plan is to use this site as a way for all of us to keep in touch. As I neared graduation it occured to me that my friends were going to wander off all over the world. What better way to stay in touch then the internet. 8o)
I'll explain more about this crazy place in future blog entries. Thanks for coming. 8o)