29 June 2008 

[Promo] Vote for my friend’s photos

My friend Raegan is a finalist in Nikon’s photo contest.  Go vote for her photos and help her win a new camera.

 28 January 2007 

WordPress 2.1

Non-bloggers will want to ignore this post, but I just want to note that I’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest WordPress 2.1 (the software that runs and powers this blog).  Overall, I like the upgrade, which has quite a few snazzy changes under the hood.

There were a few snags in the upgrade, particularly with the new classification of the links manager as the “blogroll.”  I incurred many a headache trying to figure out how to display my links as I did before the upgrade.  HINT: for those of you attempting the upgrade, editing the bookmarks file in the [wp-includes] folder can accomplish all you want and more.

The WYSIWYG text editor is now actually good enough to use!  I had previously had it turned off, but now you can easily switch between the visual editor and the code editor.  The autosave feature is nice too.   The best part is that is doesn’t seem to slow down the administration interface any, as upgrades in software tend to do.

All in all, the upgrade was worth the headaches.  Kudos to the WordPress team for continuing to improve an amazingly efficient and expandable product.

 22 November 2006 

Colophon

Software & Technique

The blog’s CMS is handled by the incomparable WordPress. I used Movable Type for about a year before I upgraded. All the graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator CS and Adobe Photoshop. The CSS and HTML were edited using NotePad++.

Site History

I’ve had a website in various locations on the web since February 1996, when I built a web page on the free student servers at the University of Tennessee. The page contained, well, nothing. I had a photo and a text box that said "Welcome to the homepage of Jared Bridges" (does anyone use the term "homepage" anymore?). I added to it a bit in my last year of college, putting up a page with my favorite links, and a page with a brief spiritual autobiography. Not long after the site evolved into this layout, which was in place in various forms for several years.

I started the blog in April 2003 with a two-column layout, which can be seen on some of these snapshots from the Internet Archive. Version II, a three-column layout, was launched in March 2004. Version III, a two-column layout, was introduced in November 2004, and Version IV debuted in November 2006.

 9 February 2006 

WordPress 2.01

Since everybody loves to hear about the nuts and bolts of a blog, I thought I’d let my highly-technical readers (37% of you use Firefox, after all…), know that I’ve finally upgraded TruePravda to WordPress 2.01 from 1.52. The upgrade was effortless, although I had to upgrade many of my plugins. My take on the new version: fancier, but slower in the back-end. Still it’s a needed upgrade, as all future development will be based on it.

I’ve been using the new version for a little over a month on some other sites I’m developing, and finally squeezed in the time upgrade this blog late one night this week. The RSS feeds were down for about a day because of an old WP Hashcash plugin — so watch out for that if you’re upgrading and use that plugin. The RSS feeds should be fixed now, but if you’re still having problems, please let me know. Of course, if you read this site via RSS, then you probably won’t even see this post if the feed is still down…

 13 November 2005 

Around the ‘Sphere

~ Volume XVI ~

It’s morning again in the blogosphere, as blogging has now resumed at Le Sabot Post-Moderne! Discoshaman has hit the ground running, with ruminatinos on the viability of multiculturalism, and rumblings of a new sub-blog focusing on War on Terror news.

Terry Mattingly writes about the upcoming Johnny Cash biopic and notes that the movie apparently misses his spiritual conversion due to the brief period covered by the film.

Mattingly also reminds me that I really need to pay a visit to the Carter Fold when I visit my hometown sometime in the near future. It’s a shame to have lived so close for most of my life but never went.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you undoubtedly can relate to the cartoon Dilbert. Now, its creator, Scott Adams, is now blogging at The Dilbert Blog.

I’ve often wondered if there were anyone else in the world who had thoughts go through their head that were as wacky as mine. After reading Scott Adams, I wonder no more. Check it out for some hilarious refreshment.

You’ve heard of metrosexuals, but Matt Hall identifies a new group on the rise he dubs “metrospirituals.” Read his post for a good discussion on a surprising new face of consumerism.

One of the best new English translations of the Bible is the English Standard Version (ESV). Their website is hands-down the best internet-friendly bible resource, as it is quite blog-developer friendly. On their blog, they point to new, likewise wonderful resource for biblical study, zhubert.com.

Zack Hubert’s site has a number of original-language resources, including both Greek and Hebrew searchable texts, all for free. Could something like this put Bibleworks and other programs out of business? Not immediately for sure, but it will be tough for them to compete against the free stuff in the future.

Finally, a technical note: if you’re a blogger and you use WordPress, be sure to check out the new Akismet anti-comment spam plugin. I’ve used it for a couple of weeks now as my sole anti-spam measure, and it’s reduced my spam by 80% versus the other measures I was using.

It’s a bit of trouble due to the fact that you have to get a WordPress.com blog to get the API key, but it’s well worth the hassle.

 2 March 2005 

One Point Five

I just finished upgrading to WordPress 1.5 and it works beautifully (as far as I can tell…). If you have any problems, let me know—I’ve already been banned from the comment section once. All in all, the upgrades look very helpful. I’m anxious to poke around more and see all its expanded capabilities.

The upgrade was tedious, but not difficult. I followed this guide step-by-step and everything worked perfectly (I did have to reconfigure the comments area, but the guide indicated that this might be a problem). I configured my site layout into a WordPress theme and everything was ready to go. Congrats to the WordPress team on a job well done!

 1 January 2005 

Spam Isn’t Worth Writing About…

…but it is just so frustrating. Comment spammers—especially porn-comment spammers—should all be sentenced to life of bondage watching their friends play Texas hold’em on a webcam.

I arrived back from out of town to find my blog hit with 1600 pieces of porn comment spam. WordPress’s moderation system got 99% of them, but that still left a bunch to delete. The onslaught appears to have been going for the last 24 hours or so and is still going on as I write this.

I installed the Spaminator plugin for WordPress, and it’s getting most of it before it reaches moderation now. I’m looking into this hack right now—I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE: I didn’t install the image authorization hack—for now. Instead, I installed the WP Hashcash plugin, as referenced by Josh on a comment on Matt Hall’s blog. I had another spam onslaught today, but I haven’t got any since I installed the plugin (holding my breath…). One thing new that I noticed in the spam is trackback spam, which could prove to be a whole other beast to conquer.

 16 June 2004 

Pressed and Ready

I’ve now completed (for the most part) TruePravda’s migration to WordPress as its backbone content management system (CMS). I’ve formerly been using Movable Type, and though it’s been good, I think WordPress will be better.

It took me a while to get everything transferred over, but it was actually kind of fun to learn a new system—and a better one at that! There are still a few little enhancements to be made—like automatically redirecting my old archive links to the new WP links. If anybody knows how to do this from MT 3.0D, I’m all ears.

Also if anyone is subscribing via XML please note the changes (and new opportunities! over in the righthand column). More blogroll changes coming soon, but I thought I’d go ahead and launch for now.

 17 May 2004 

Movable Type 3.0

This post will only be of interest to other bloggers or potential bloggers, but I thought I’d give a tech update on blogging software. I’ve installed Movable Type 3.0 (the free version). This is the first post I’ve made with the new version. The upgrade installation from 2.64 was pretty seamless and easy—no problems, and everything worked (pending the successful publication of this post).

Aside from a minor freshening-up of the interface, there is not a lot different from 2.64. There are minor changes, like the ability to make an Atom feed, and of course, the changes in comment management, which I haven’t used that much.

I’ve been eyeing WordPress for quite a while, and I was waiting to see if MT 3.0 would have enough features to make me stay. The (simple) features I wanted were better text-formatting and an integrated sideblogging feature. These things can be improved in MT via plugins, but WordPress includes them with the app. As of now, there’s nothing really compelling to keep me using MT except the time it will take to learn WordPress. This doesn’t mean I’m switching for sure, but it does mean that MT 3.0 didn’t save the day for this blogger.