Category: Websites

Tribute to John Williams

Have you seen the Star Wars song on YouTube? It is quite popular this week. I wanted to point out a couple of interesting things about it.

I first saw it when it had been viewed 300,000 times. Just a couple of hours later it was up to 450,000 views. Now, a day later, it has been viewed more than 1,000,000 times! Quite the craze.

Being the curious type about these things, I had to learn more about it. I clicked the link to the lyrics which led me to the main page of MooseButter a capella comedy group. The song is called Star Wars and was first performed in 1999. In the video the artist, Corey Vidal, is shown singing all the parts. Actually, he is just lip syncing the MooseButter group. Very well I might add.

Enjoy the video!

Super Size Me

Tim at the 2Big blog is giving away a download of the Super Size Me movie. I saw this movie last year and found it very thought provoking. I don’t know if I agree with all of the author/producer’s conclusions, but I certainly agreed with a lot of them.

There has been one thing that has kept me from writing about the movie and recommending it in any way. The gratuitous cursing is off putting. Someone who is not educated enough to use courteous speech in a movie that is trying to promote his political agenda loses credibility with me.

I like the idea of an independent film maker being able to seriously promote his cause, but I doubt there will be long term mass appeal for the movie. It certainly won’t be something you want to pull out and watch with the grand kids. And I hope they are not showing it in schools. I know kids see movies with worse language and lots of violence, but it in unnecessary.

If you want to enter yourself to win the download of the movie head on over to Tim’s blog and leave a comment or twitter about the contest. You will earn yourself a chance to download Super Size Me. While you are there check out Tim’s story of his total body transformation. His journey and mine are very similar.

Keyboard shortcuts in OOo

I read an article today about different keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org Writer that was very helpful. If you use Writer you can certainly take advantage of some of these. The author said that some of these will probably work in other programs. I tested a couple of these in my blog editor and can confirm some work here as well.

To start off, let me list some of the basic ones that everyone should know.

  • CTRL + C = copy
  • CTRL + V = paste
  • CTRL + X = cut
  • CTRL + P = print
  • CTRL + S = save

Here are three very useful ones he pointed out that I did not know.

  • CTRL + ALT + Up/Down Arrow = moves the current paragraph above or below the previous or next paragraph.
  • CTRL + Left/Right Arrow = moves the cursor to the next word either left or right.
  • SHIFT + Up/Down/Left/Right Arrow = selects the text appropriately. Just try it and you will understand how to use it.

Jump on over to the original article to see the many others he showed. Not all of them will be useful for everyone, but using keyboard shortcuts really are a better way to work once you learn them. Until you learn them and put them into practice it is hard to see their value.

New site is up

I finally got done with my redesign of www.dpeach.com. It really was not as much of a redesign as it was a moving to a new platform.

In the last few days I cleaned up the CSS to make the site more readable. I also changed fonts. You can sign up for our prayer letter mailing at the site. That was a feature at the old site as well. This site is functionally equivelent to the old site, it is just easier for me to maintain.

One thing that has been broken for a very long time at the site was the RSS feed. Now that is fixed.

Since it is a WordPress site, I am going to allow people to leave comments and see if I can build a bit of a community there. My readership will grow over the next year as we travel to our supporting churches and announce the site. I also plan to do regular updates. The old platform was not as easy to update as WordPress is. But, that was somewhat by design. When I built the previous site, I did not want it to look like a blog. I also did not want to bother people with constantly changing content. I am going to treat the site more like a blog now and see if I can get some interaction going.

With that done, I can come back to working on the new design of My Thought Spot. I changed the theme here and then abandoned the work I was doing on it. But, I did learn quite a few things at dpeach.com that will help me working on My Thought Spot.

Websites update

I am heavily working on 2 sites right now. On this one, My Thought Spot, I am mostly just tweaking a few things here and there as they show up. I did not do any serious testing of the theme before I put it live. I also have some features with the old theme that I have not moved over here yet.

The bulk of my site building time has been spent working on my main ministry site www.dpeach.com. I have the new site at www.dpeach.com/new which is mostly ready to roll out. Currently I don’t like the header border. I have not figured out how to change that white section to another color and still keep the nicely rounded corners.

I also am working on getting phpList integrated with my theme so that I can still have people sign up to get our prayer letter. My old CMS software that I was using at dpeach.com has a mailing list program built in. With the move away from phpWebSite, I need to find different mailing list software.

The one thing that is keeping me from putting this all together is that I don’t like the “plain text” mail that phpList is sending out. My preference is always plain text mail as opposed to HTML mail. But somehow the text coming out of phpList is different than the plain text I get from any other source. I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists which use phpList and they all have the same font problem. The font is too small. I thought “plain text” meant a certain standard? Until I can figure out how to get the fonts working right I am hesitant to commit to phpList and therefore the roll out of the new site will be delayed.