I said back then that this blog would eventually be moved to a new location with some changes (once I had time and figured out where I wanted to put it). Well, on December 4th, 2010, I moved this blog to http://infotech.davidszpunar.com/ from http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org./ All historical posts are intact and all of the old URLs redirect to the new ones, so for now at least it doesn’t matter how you got here. I haven’t decided for sure, but if I continue blogging, I may start a new one and leave this one as-is for posterity. Or I may continue here, you’ll just have to wait and see :-) Thank you for reading, if you have, and commenting, if you did. It’s been great!

Until then, I’m loving my new job, though it keeps me busy! And since they are coming up in a few short weeks, I’ll say it early: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

P.S. You can find me on Twitter or on other sites, I’m still active at some or all of them! And the IRC channel of the Church IT Roundtable where you should be too, if you work on volunteer in Church IT!

I have a few things I’d like to publish here that won’t fit on Twitter and will be easier to reference here than on IRC where I still may have discussed some of it already (in the #citrt channel). Now to find the time! Hopefully soon. Poor neglected blog… :-) Maybe with such a cool new backend I’ll post more often. Not that I posted at all while running the betas and release candidates…

I’m trying to get a 90-day trial of Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE) installed. The non-profit charity pricing is under $400, so if I like it I’m hoping to buy it this Fall. Right now, I’d be happy to get it installed! After attempting to install the software (at Service Pack 1) on a virtual Server 2008 machine and failing (you have to install SQL Server Express 2005 with SP2 manually first, which I did, but it kept complaining that I needed to run the Configuration for SQL Reporting Server…which I did! The best I could, at least, but it kept complaining I hadn’t!), I finally switched to a Server 2003 virtual server. 3/4ths of the way through the install it failed saying it couldn’t contact the SQL server (that it installed) so it rolled everything back (the install and the rollback both took an hour!). I’m spending the time installing all the Windows Updates that are available for Server 2003 before trying again, which are a lot! Was trying to try it out quickly and update later, but obviously that’s not going to work! The concept of SCE is very cool but if it’s this hard to install, it better be a whole lot easier to use!

I’m probably the last person to post this, but the Fall 2008 Church IT Roundtable has an official website now! Visit (and subscribe to!) citrt2008.com for updates, details, and links to other update methods like Twitter! It’s being held at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, SC on October 8-10. Be there or be…there streaming online or in the chat or something :-)

I’m getting ready to switch over to Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Premium from a non-SBS, non-Exchange network at the Assemblies of God Indiana District Office where I work one day per week. It’s been in the works for a long time, but the official switchover is scheduled to happen June 6th and 7th (Friday and Saturday) with the 8th available if spare time is needed and some on-site support on Monday morning the 9th to work through any kinks. I’m confident in things going smoothly, but that could just be a lack of knowledge on my part (see the Dunning-Kruger effect :-) My plan is to get Postini installed in front of Exchange at the same time or shortly thereafter. I may get around to broadcasting some of the switch via webcam, but there will be some internet downtime while ISA 2004 is brought up and configured so we’ll see how that works.

In still other news, I’m going to be trialing FeedBlitz for sending out email newsletters for our Worship and Creative Ministries team in the next few weeks. I’m curious to see how that goes; I know Constant Contact is the well-known name in that space and we’re open to going with them as well. Pricing is the same for our subscriber levels, but FeedBlitz seems to have the corner on social features including publishing email from an RSS feed and now sending out messages via Twitter as well so we’re going to try it first I think.

It gets harder to blog stuff the longer I go without doing so. I seem to pressure myself to “write long, big post with a ton of juicy technical information” as the first post back from an absence. I also seem to subconciously want to post only big, important stuff to avoid wasting time with any smaller things. This contributes to not posting at all! Thus, I will attempt to be less picky about what I’m posting or the length of posts in order to keep going, while still providing some good, solid information! I may also kick up the number of shorter posts with links to other content, or republish the occasional funny comic, but will try to keep the “noise” down. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments about what you’d like to see, one way or another!

One more thing: I have Woopra set up for statistics tracking on this blog now. I don’t run the client often right now, but when I do it allows me to chat with visitors in real time! So if you’re reading this on the website and not via RSS, I can actually initate a chat with you! It’s unlikely, but keep it in mind! If you want to start a chat with me, you can do so via the Google Talk Chatback badge, currently in the sidebar menus on the site. No registration is required. If I’m not at my computer, you won’t get a response, sorry! I try to keep my availability status updated but I don’t always succeed. Try the #citrt channel on IRC or just send me an email (use the Contact Me page) if it’s that important! Blog comments are preferred if it’s a public topic or question, though!

If you don’t use a podcatcher such as iTunes to subscribe to podcasts, you can subscribe in Google Reader and stream episodes from your web browser, in addition to just downloading the MP3 file from the JesusGeek post directly.

The interview was complicated by a few connection losses while recording, so if the audio sounds awesome John gets the credit for making it work anyway, and if it has any issues, blame me! I also lost my notes about which WordPress plugins I was going to talk about in my XP-to-Vista conversion on my laptop and didn’t realize it until we were recording, so that was a bit more off-the-cuff than I had intended. Live and learn!

The basic idea I gather is that the group is a way for Christian geeks to fellowship and share, similar to the Church IT Roundtable concept only smaller and not focused specifically on “church IT” and more on a shared love of Christ and electronic gadgets. I didn’t take my laptop, but without it I felt in the minority, although I think it might have been split 50/50! My Nokia N800 was charging or I would have taken that at least!

I’m sure I’m leaving someone or something out, and it was great meeting everyone, but I met a few people at lunch that were particularly relevant to my present activities. One was Neil Cox, aka IndyChristian. Neil is a local Indianapolis blogger who has been using social media extensively to help his life and with Christian outreach. I have been accumulating del.icio.us bookmarks for a while and have over 1,700 links saved, but Neil has several times that! I like Web 2.0 technology and social networking and it’s nice to meet someone else in town who shares a similar interest! Of course, Dr. Ho is also quite into social media, but is currently using Twitter the most (granted, I have been too!).

Eldon Kibbey was the first person I saw when I showed up for lunch. He was at a table by himself, but as he had a laptop open I figured it was a safe bet to head over and introduce myself. The bet was as safe as I thought! Eldon’s the Director of the Christian BusinessMen’s Connection (CBMC) Indiana and is also the Transform Indiana Moderator.

I also met Tom Buckley, who works for Exacq, a company I was only vaguely familiar with before that I’m taking a much stronger interest in now! They make security camera software that I can’t wait to get my hands on and try, both because it’s cool and because we’ve been having some security camera issues that I may get around to blogging about. (Exacq is pronounced just like the word “exact” without the “t” at the end, by the way.) Because they run a demo system in their offices that records 24/7, Exacq managed to get some footage from their office cameras of the recent earthquake in Illinois that they put on their blog and it was picked up by several news stations. Ironically, the company that installed our current security system was Vigilcorp, whose offices are in the same building as Exacq and who now sells primarily Exacq systems, which was not the case when they put ours in. We really like the guys at Vigilcorp and I really like Tom at Exacq, which is a good combination!

Alex Connor, an IUPUI student and programmer/web developer who also maintains the IndyChristianGeeks.com website, was also at the meeting banging away on some code, along with a woman who stopped in a little bit later whose name I have unfortunately temporarily forgotten.

This seems to be a great group to get to know, and an excellent way to get into the local Christian IT community and not just the online one, not that there’s anything wrong with either. But I think this may help (even though most of the Geeks aren’t necessarily “church IT” geeks in the same sense that I am, or many of the CITRT folks are) with my eventual goal of bringing together a Central Indiana Church IT Roundtable as a regional extension of the national CITRT. I’m already making contacts in that direction, but I don’t have any firm plans. If you do IT at a local church here in or around Indy, in a paid or volunteer capacity, why not get in touch with me and start a relationship? We can work towards a Roundtable, which I think would be beneficial to everyone. I’m not the most outgoing person I’ll be the first to admit (which makes meeting new people and sometimes even working with people I don’t know very well a challenge outside of my comfort zone), but if you get me started talking tech you’ll have a friend you may not be able to shut up once in a while! I’m definitely planning to be at next month’s Indy Christian Geeks lunch barring last-minute schedule conflicts!

You are reading the result of yesterday’s work. I have not found any incompatibilities with my theme. I’ve used the new auto-upgrade feature to upgrade about 5 Plugins to newer versions from right within the administration panel, which works in most cases (depending on the Plugin), and is very, very awesome given the number of WordPress installations I help maintain! I also replaced the aging WP-Cache Plugin with the excellent WP Super Cache, a worthy replacement and an even easier install!

Comment Spam

The Akismet anti-spam Plugin was disabled without me noticing for some reason (I could have clicked it accidentally, I have no idea if it was a result of the upgrade). After getting eight spam comments (only half caught in moderation automatically) within an hour that I had to deal with manually, Akismet was re-enabled in short order with just a click! (Do spammers count as neighbors for that Bible verse? I hope not…although I guess we could “hate the spam, love the spammer,” right? :-)

Administration Area

The color scheme and layout of the Administration area has certainly changed. Some people love it, others hate it. I like more than I dislike. Some things work better, or differently, or more accessibly. Having all areas of the Write Panel available only by scrolling down will take a little getting used to. But the Manage interfaces for Posts and Pages has improved and displays more information in a smaller area, with excellent additional filtering options.

One of the first things to notice when editing a new or old post is that the TinyMCE visual text editor has been replaced with the new version 3 of the same. I’m enjoying the upgrade tremendously! It works more smoothly, has more options, and has no bugs I can find yet! It adds a full screen composition mode, which makes concentrating on writing a post without distraction that much easier, and it’s available with a toggle toolbar button or the shortcut Alt+Shift+G. On the extended options bar (click the far-right toolbar button in the editor), most of the options remain the same but the Help is excellent if you need it, and there is an “Insert / Edit Embedded Media” button that lets you do just that from a variety of media types, with a preview.

But the best media addition is the Add Media buttons above the editor itself, allowing you to easily insert images, video, audio, and media (like PDF files, etc.) by linking to a URL or uploading. I haven’t tested this much but the interface is slick and I believe it will embed YouTube videos, for example, without you needing to know all the codes or install a Plugin (like I said, I haven’t tested this and I’m not 100% sure). You can also browse the Media Library (also available under its own Manage panel) to insert existing media. This is an area badly in need of improvement and they’ve done a great job!

In addition, you can now Manage tags (without an additional Plugin, although I still like and use Simple Tags), and the Comments area has been redesigned. Everywhere you go in the Administration area you can see how many moderated comments await your approval, with the balloon count up next to the Comments tab. The method for editing Sidebar Widgets has completely changed. The interface for adding tags to posts has changed slightly. And numerous other changes that are slipping my mind at the moment! So far I have not run into any plugins that refuse to work entirely in 2.5, and I have a lot of plugins installed! (Somewhere in the ballpark of 30 I think).

Conclusion

Come Monday, what do I recommend? Backup your database (and files), do the upgrade, test and see how it works. You can always go back with the backup. If you’re not comfortable with it, wait a couple of weeks to see if the bugs get worked out and make sure that the Plugins you are using have been tested with 2.5 before making the jump. And keep in mind, this is the first attempt at an Administration redesign since 1.x somewhere, so the design itself is like a beta. I’m sure it will get refined in future releases. But I’m enjoying a much more bug-free visual editor, options that make more sense, and a more navigable interface right now!

Besides giving me an outlet to polish my writing–a never-ending process–this blog marked the beginning of the end of isolation for this Church IT guy! Little did I know, until I stumbled upon Jason Powell’s blog in some way I don’t even recall now, that there was a growing group of Church IT-ers getting to know each other online, while remaining somewhat isolated by positions that are generally volunteer or, perhaps most often with the online group, one-man IT department positions that make peers hard to come by on a regular basis. There are certainly exceptions, the churches where Jason Powell, Jason Lee and Clif Guy work included along with others, where churches are large enough to have two, three, or more IT staff, and those churches also tend to lead the way in creating and contributing to the online community (well, Jason Lee’s new to the blogging scene but has certainly started off strong). Do those guys just have the spare time, now that they have staff to do their grunt work, to spend online? (I hope you see the wit behind that fallacy–there are numerous one-man IT shop bloggers and many of the aforementioned IT Directors have bloggers on their staff, among many other reasons my question does not have merit! Arguably, one-man IT shops need the online community more than those with an on-site team!)

But I digress, because my initial question was if this blog has existed for one year already. Because I’m not sure. I managed to, unintentionally, begin this blog one year and one day before a leap year Feb. 29th. So, which is it? The 28th is the anniversary of my first post, but the 29th is the last day of the twelfth month. But don’t worry, I promise I won’t duplicate this post tomorrow, if you promise not to read it! Ironically, outside of Church IT I actually had a blog before Jason Powell (the brief 2002 foray he mentions notwithstanding), who made his first post back on Feb. 19th, 2005 (congrats!), while I started my personal blog just under four months before that, back on November 9th, 2004 (at around 2 am…not far off the time of day this blog started). It was the same day, coincidentally, that Firefox 1.0 was released. My personal blog was going rather strong until May of 2005, when a multi-month quiet period followed my engagement, and I was otherwise occupied. It picked up a little bit after the wedding (not immediately, of course…), and then, right about the time our son was born and I set up a blog just for him…it went completely dead and has thus mostly stayed. This blog is definitely more focused than my personal blog (mostly), and is about stuff I’m passionate about and work with on a daily basis. It’s been a little slower of late, but I’m looking forward to a summer free of most schoolwork where even a long workday can end happily without school deadlines looming that evening or the next. I’m taking a web design class this semester, so while I’m not debuting a new blog theme yet, I may take on the creation (or customization) of something over the summer. That, or I’ll be so fed up with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) by then, it’ll have to wait a bit longer…

Anyway: To the next year of online ChIT! (Hmmm…does that mean all this stuff is ChIT Chat?) And thanks for reading.

As you can imagine, the N800 didn’t get much of a workout at work and wasn’t a top priority at home, either. I even forgot the charger when I left work sick on Tuesday, and was left with a dead battery at home all day Wednesday!

I’ve still managed to give the device a pretty good workout, and it’s a very nice little system that has already been handy to have in my pocket on more than one occasion. The main limitation has been that the system is slow when loading large or complex websites, although it will still handle most of them. The onscreen keyboards (for stylus and thumbs) are much poorer than the thumbboard on my Treo 650, where I can almost touch-type at high speed, but the bluetooth keyboard is a huge improvement (over even the Treo usually) when I turn it on.

The HelpSpot helpdesk software runs a touch slow (pun unintentional but fully intended, I’m sure :-) but otherwise is almost completely normal in the Gecko-based web browser. The response field is not as wide as it could be (there are gray bars on the sides where it could expand but doesn’t), but it’s functional. All AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) appears to work properly. Gmail is also slow but usable. WordPress, at least my heavily-plugin-customized version, runs well except when composing a post, when the text editor is slower than molasses. in January. Switching to the WPhone mobile version is much faster and even easier to navigate on the smaller screen. Supposedly, WPhone is optimized to provide an even better interface on the iPhone than on other mobile devices that support AJAX, but this doesn’t carry over to the N800, although I am assuming the browser is more than capable. It’s probably an auto-detection thing.

There is a Nokia N800 WordPress editor called Maemo WordPy which was a bit difficult to figure out initially due to a poor user interface and one or two limitations that should be fixed in future versions. It will do some cool things (in the latest beta) like upload images directly to Flickr and insert that into a post! However, I am using the web-based WPPhone for this post as I mentioned. Copying and pasting links is not the best experience on this thing, so I am going to cheat and do some hotlinking from my full-sized computer before posting :-) (And a bit of proofreading and editing, it turns out!)

Is it perfect? No. Nothing is perfect when you are looking for a 22″ widescreen monitor on a quad-core desktop that all fits in your pocket! But it makes some good compromises and performs well for what I want it to do, at a (very) reasonable price. (Amazon had it for $231 when I bought mine off of eBay for a bit more with an SDHC memory card and Bluetooth keyboard that Amazon also had for $50.)

And thus 2007 comes to a close, with a not-so-subtle nod to HTML/XML closing tags. Which is fitting; I’ve spent a good chunk of time with the church websites this past quarter. The results aren’t public yet, but things are moving along. (There’s a poll to take at the end of this post, for good readers who make it to the end or bad ones who skip ahead ;-)

The past week and a half have been very relaxing. My in-laws came around Christmas, and are back through tomorrow. It’s been good to see them, and my son is enjoying getting to know them a little since they live 2.5 hours away, and his long-term memory isn’t all that great yet! He turned one last week, and immensely enjoyed his banana bread “cake,” some of the most sugar he’s been allowed to eat.

I’ve had less time to spend online than I’d planned, and the time I did spend was primarily reading, learning, and helping a friend get his website up and running (he used to be Lakeview’s Media Pastor, now he’s a professor and runs video production company Media 21 on the side). I also spent some time reading through WordPress core source code and Trac. I was able to submit two or three small patches that may or may not make it in some form into WordPress 2.4, coming out in January! I also updated most of my WordPress installs, including this blog, to version 2.3.2 within seven hours of it being released this past Saturday.

WordPress Babblings

Why the focus on WordPress? Well, I calculated recently, and I’m actually involved with (running myself or set up for work or family or friends) twelve WordPress installations right now! This blog runs forty WordPress Plugins, and some of those I use on the other installs as well! I’ve been having a lot of fun working with WordPress from the technical side, but this past semester, as I’ve mentioned, I had a Technical Writing class that pretty much took all of my writing creativity, resulting in my lowest monthly post count ever in December! I thought when the semester ended I’d be right back in the saddle here (and I managed a post or two), but it turns out I needed a break!

If you’re interested, here’s an approximation of what those twelve WordPress installations I mentioned are:

• This blog (1)
• My son’s blog (1)
• My wife’s blog (1) (now about obsessions and compulsions! Some of which I share, or at least strongly approve…)
• Pastor Nathan’s blog (1)
• Blogs of a missionary from Lakeview and a Director at the Indiana Assemblies of God District Office (2) (still somewhat in development)
• Two WordPress-as-Content Management System installs for Lakeview, not public yet (2)
• Media 21 website for Rob Price (1)
• An inactive install at one of my domains for testing (1)
• An old blog I ran for a while a few years ago (1) (Don’t you wish I’d give you a link? It’s not hard to find!)
• An unofficial blog for my homeowners association (not turned over to residents from the builder yet, can’t get enough people out to the meeting to vote! Hence blog!) (1)

That makes twelve! I may also get around to setting up an internal WordPress installation for our intranet, which is how I got started with WordPress for the church in the first place but of course, the intranet got stuck on the back burner!

I’ve promised in the past that I would post about the work I’ve been doing on the church websites and converting them to WordPress. As you can see, I’ve been doing a lot more with WordPress than just the church, and I’ve discovered a lot of tips, tricks, plugins, and all kinds of WordPress stuff, and a lot of general website stuff as well! I know some Church IT readers are interested in this kind of thing, as they are involved with or are responsible for their own church websites. Others probably don’t care in the least! I don’t want to overwhelm readers with WordPress and websites, but I’m curious how many of you are interested.

Why have I not written much about WordPress until now? Like I said, I haven’t been sure how many of you would be interested. Also, I kept finding new information so fast I didn’t have time to post the old. And I wanted to provide some context first; I want to start at the very beginning. (“…a very good place to start. When you read, you begin with A B C.” Oh wait, this isn’t the Sound of Music! :-) Anyway, I want to start at the beginning and describe the reasons for choosing WordPress, what the catalyst was for the project, what steps we’ve been taking, what’s changed as the project has continued (another reason not to post, things keep changing!), and then get to the meat like plugins and links and implementation. I haven’t had the time to fill in the high level stuff yet, so I’ve skipped jumping in in the middle! Another good reason to hold off is politics. Not the presidential election, as interesting as that may be to some, but a church website at a larger church has reach among many areas and departments, and while the sailing has been more smooth than I could have hoped for on a project of this size (really! I have awesome coworkers!), there are always bumps and friction when working with others and I don’t want to publicly vent or air dirty laundry.

End of the year…and more WordPress Babblings

This is the part where I say Happy New Year! And also where I ask you to vote for how much I should talk about WordPress and websites here in 2008:

(Poll coming here as soon as I get the darn plugin working correctly! Sorry!)
There should be a post tomorrow as well; as they say, when one tag closes, another opens! :-D

Tomorrow, I return home! Tonight, I sleep.

Shortest. Post. Ever. (For me. :-)

There are some really cool things I’m seeing both in and out of the Church IT specialty in my feed reader, even though I’m lurking. I’ll be at Jason Powell’s Roundtable next month, and possibly at the national CITRT in Kansas City in early October, but that’s still to be determined. If at all possible, I’ll be at both! As sad as it would be to spend time away from our new house we’ll have only been in for half a month! Not to mention my wife — we’ve never spent a night under separate roofs since we got married in 2005, and our second anniversary is in October. Fortunately, it’s not the 3rd or 4th! :-D

And remember, unsubscribing from a blog feed in your feed reader is anonymous and even easier than unsubscribing from an email list, so there’s no harm in adding her blog for a trial run, right there alongside mine and Nathan LaGrange’s (unless you categorize your feeds by topic, of course). Subscribers even get free cake!^*

*Not really, but it made you want to subscribe, right?

Poor Man’s Google Reader Search appears to have a solution that lets you search a public label or an individual feed, but that’s not what I was looking for.

Google Reader Gears Search has a way to search Google Reader using the Google Gears offline post database if you are set up to use Reader offline with Gears, but again this requires a browser add-in. The creator of this option actually talked to Chris Wetherell, the Google Reader creator, about why there was no search, but he doesn’t articulate the answer with any level of detail.

Google Groups has a thread about Google Reader search, which basically asks the same question I do, but provides no answers. Martin Porcheron comments back in May that Google Reader has updated their CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to include hints of search capabilities, but those haven’t yet materialized. This seems to be the most promising reference that Google is indeed working to make this happen.

The most promising current solution that I’ve found came via a Lifehacker entry about a Google Operating System post: How to Add Search to Google Reader. It requires using Google Co-op and Greasemonkey (there’s another browser add-on to install still!), but it is probably the one I’m going to try for now. You also must export your feeds list and re-import it at the Co-Op site every time you update your subscriptions. Why is it so hard for Google to integrate their own two services, anyway?! I suppose I’ll have to live with the workaround for now, but I still think it’s strange for a company so focused on search to eschew it in such a widely used product. And there’s even an updated Greasemonkey script that will display your search results right within Google Reader. So you (and I) can fake it ’til they make it!

I apologize if you were affected by this (it may have done something like caused all my recent posts to reload in your feed reader, but I’m not sure exactly). It has been fixed and everyone should be using the FeedBurner feed again now, directly or indirectly.

Just a teaser; upcoming posts might be on things like: Windows SteadyState, Meraki Mini mesh networking, using WordPress as a CMS. All I still need to write, some I’m done and can write about and others I’m either working on or will be in the next week. Just have to find the time to document!

I also updated the HelpSpot LAMP VirtualAppliance to the newest version (1.0.131 is now based on Ubuntu Server and allows you to install any Ubuntu module!) to fix the issue I had with DNS resolution, which I haven’t run into on this new version; outbound DNS works just fine now, and the PHP IMAP module installs! (As yet untested, however.) But hey, that was fun, and you’re supposed to have fun on vacation, right? At least I did it from a cottage overlooking the ocean in Maine :-) And there were minimal interruptions from the office the entire time (what there was I instigated by checking my email :-) and I returned to no emergencies or exceptionally urgent or unexpected requests. All-in-all a very good vacation! I could’ve used a little less time in the car (1300 miles in the last three days and that was just the return journey), but I’m not complaining (too loudly ;-)

Anyway, I’m back! And now you know why my posts have been sparse and not full of detailed technical info. Truthfully, I’m actually running low on detailed technical post ideas for the moment (and I do have some catch-up to take care of along with some personal stuff, which is why I’m posting this today even though I returned to work on Tuesday), but I’m sure that won’t last long. Stay tuned! I have a post coming this afternoon about a power adapter mystery/adventure that just happened, in fact…