But, I’m still pretty young, and it’s time to move on to an environment that will provide some new challenges and experience in a wide variety of settings. So I’m moving to a small company with a Christian owner that provides residential and small business IT services to the Indianapolis and surrounding communities. Based in Fishers, IN, I’ll be working out of a new satellite office on the West side of Indy, not far from Lakeview in fact, and I’ll be working primarily with larger clients, including several churches in the area. What the job will look like day to day I can’t tell you precisely yet, but that will certainly be part of the excitement! And I’m still going to be involved with the Church IT Roundtable online and in person to a large extent (it’s still relevant as I’ll still be serving churches!), which I’m very excited about, as I have many close friends in the CITRT and their expertise has proved invaluable (and I have hopefully reciprocated with valuable tidbits of my own from time to time).

I’m really going to miss all of the Lakeview family on a daily basis. The staff are basically like close friends and family; it’s where I’ve spent all of my adult life in fact (and some volunteer time for years before that). God gave me peace about moving to this new position and I know He’ll provide, but I already miss everyone and I’m not gone yet!

There are still some details to be worked out about the transition, so I’m sure I’ll have some more to post later, and I certainly appreciate any prayers. It looks like I am going to the Church IT Roundtable at Saddleback Church in California on March 11-12! If you work in Church IT or you support or volunteer with Church IT in some way, you should be there! The cost should be under $100 plus travel, though final details should be coming soon.

My first day on the new job is set for February 10th, 2010 (though a few current coworkers said they hoped when I said Feb. 10th it meant 2011! Nothing like feeling wanted!).

What was my solution this time? VMware Player and Windows XP! I grabbed a Windows XP virtual machine and ran it on my laptop in VMware Player, which worked just fine on Windows 7 (another reason not to run the Comcast stuff…who knows if it’s Windows 7 compatible). The biggest “issue” I had was that I had to disable all protocols bound to the LAN adapter on my laptop except for the VMware Bridge Adapter (to allow the virtual machine network access). That way the virtual machine got the DHCP and proxy settings from the cable modem when I turned it on, rather than my laptop (leaving the VM unable to connect). Once the VM had the “only” network connection, the wizard proceed normally and I got everything connected just fine (the wizard is much more streamlined than it used to be at least).

After it’s working, I just turned off the cable modem and plugged the WAN port of my wireless router into the modem, and turned it back on. Everything was smooth sailing from there. It does apparently lock to your MAC address but that is reset when the modem reboots.

Interestingly, the modem is an RCA brand modem, which is funny since I asked specifically when I talked to Comcast yesterday what brand the modem would be and they specifically said a Surfboard, which is by Motorola. Oh well, as long as it works I don’t care too much. Better than my old DLink from last time!

Now, if only Comcast would expand their trial of 16-20Mbit speeds (instead of 6Mbit) from South Bend to Indy, life would be awesome!

I’ve gotten a few draft posts written but nothing finished yet (I know it’s been a while!). However, the big news today is that Veeam Backup 3.0 was released this morning, which I already have a license for and I’m working to clean off the server that I’ll be running it on! It will definitely get a review when it’s up and running. I’m excited!

Prior Todo System Attempts

The result is usually “cool,” and I might use it for a day or two. And then, I forget about it. (I use and love the HelpSpot helpdesk software (Lakeview is even a HelpSpot case study!), but there are tasks (and projects) I’d like to manage outside of requests in the helpdesk, and that’s just an at-work solution.) Now that I have an iPhone, although it comes with no built-in task managment program (why? Beats me), I figured someone would have made a system I could use on my desktop, laptop, and iPhone to track todo lists at home, for Lakeview, and for the Indianag A/G District Office where I work one day per week. And when I’m somewhere else, I don’t really want to see what I have to do anywhere but where I am! And oh yeah, I’d like subtasks support, tagging, sorting, searching, start and end due dates, and due time with reminders built in, and probably a few things I’m forgetting. And can you make it free while you’re at it?

I’ve already mentioned that there are a lot of online todo list web applications. On my renewed search for iPhone-compatible todos, I tried the very well-known Remember the Milk service. It has a nice interface and I thought it might just be as good as everyone seems to think, and it had an iPhone interface. Which I never tried, because although there’s a trial, you have to pay for a Pro account to use the iPhone-optimized webapp; I think it’s $25/year and you get a few other benefits as well. But I kept going back to my preference for “free” and wondered if someone else was doing it better. I’ve bookmarked some of my findings using my Delicious keyword “todo”

The other one with a funny name: Toodledo

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered it, but it was probably a Google search or a post comparing services that led me to Toodledo. The name almost turned me off from looking at it at all. It’s a nice play on words but not as “professional” sounding as I was looking for. But hey, Remember the Milk isn’t all suit-and-tie sounding either, so I gave it a shot, especially because it had a free iPhone interface called Slim. The well-done feature comparison chart also helped to convince me to try it out, given it’s completeness compared to every competitor listed (granted, the chart is a bit out of date per a few forum postings especially in relation to Todoist, which I tried briefly after I was already using Toodledo (always on the lookout for something closer to perfection :-) and if you like using the keyboard extensively it may be an excellent option, although I’m not sure about an iPhone version). Of course comparison charts are intended to be biased towards the company making the chart, but the list of features Toodledo had was impressive by itself.

This is going to get long, so for more information I’m breaking the rest out after the jump if you’re reading this on the web!

And then I gave them money

After customizing the fields I wanted to use (most of them, it turns out) and playing with the Contexts feature which lets you save a location or context for each todo item, I started to actually put a few tasks in for the next few days to get a feel for how to use it in a daily workflow. It clicked. I still find some interface things to be not as easy as they could be, but I like Toodledo so much that I’ve purchased a Pro account for $15 per year to unlock some additional features. The fee is more reasonable than any other pro account I’ve encountered for task management, and although my preference is of course for stuff that’s free, the Pro account just added enough value at a small enough price to make it worthwhile (subtasks and longer completed-task history retention were the two that put me over the edge, but the Scheduler and Stats features are also nice). However I haven’t seen the need for a 1GB file storage area that doubles the price, so I stuck with a Pro rather than a Pro Plus account; the file storage and going from 2 years of completed-item retention to forever are the only additional features for the upgraded plan.

Sidenote: Project Management Still Elusive

The definition of what I look for in a productivity app keeps changing. Universally available todo lists with all the features I’ve mentioned were the biggest need I had and Toodledo fills that void nicely. Some people, especially those using the GTD system, use Toodledo to track projects (GTD defines a project as “anything requiring more than one specific action to complete” while I both like that and have an additional one, something like “something I want to get done including collaboration with others” or something along those lines). Toodledo provides task sharing (read-only unless the other user has a Pro account) and you can use Toodledo’s Projects field to track GTD-like projects, but at work I’m still missing something between todo list and helpdesk.

What I’m looking for is Project Management. Something like Microsoft Project without the complexity, on the web, for one to several people working together on multiple projects to use for tasks and collaboration. There are nearly as many options in this space as there are todo list services! The most well-known of these is probably 37signals‘ Basecamp and their associated services (like Backpack, for todos and calendaring–but it’s not free!). Basecamp is nice but their free account only allows for one project, and their paid accounts are more than I’m willing to shell out for right now, and they don’t offer non-profit discounts (I asked). That’s OK, copycats are a dime a dozen, but the problem is finding the one that does everything the way I want it to, at the right price! Unlike Toodledo, I’ve not discovered the perfect-enough solution for this yet, but I’m still looking. My biggest concern is that most project management systems include their own todo list system, and I want to make sure I don’t split my nice Toodledo system and have to check two separate todo lists all the time! I’m keeping this in mind as I evaluate.

Ideally, I’d like a system that coworkers helping me with projects as well as volunteers can log into and update with research findings, progress, and that sort of thing. The ability to collaborate with volunteers is one of the driving reasons I want a web-based system! Projects in this context might be things like:

• Upgrade Microsoft Exchange to 2007 from 2003
• Run wires to X for Y purpose
• Use compressor to blow dust out of all desktops (recurring)
• Upgrade all or most servers to Server 2008 from Server 2003
• Purchase and implement a SAN solution with virtualization

Centrally managing a list like that would be much better than me having to come up with it off the top of my head like I just did! Yes I can just write down a list, and I have a few of those, but that leaves out the collaboration opportunity. One of the few entirely free options I’m contemplating is called ClockingIT. The interface doesn’t seem as clean as some competitors, but it has many features including a Wiki, chat, forums, and files, along with reporting and charting options. And the price is right.

This is one of many possibilities several of us in the Church IT IRC channel (#citrt on the Freenode IRC network) discussed a week or two ago when we went Googling for project management options. No one in the group has a perfect solution but several have none (hence the looking!), and others are using things like Basecamp, Sharepoint (WSS) or Microsoft Project. I refuse to get sucked into using Sharepoint and the other two I’ve already eliminated for reasons above, so that’s why I’m still looking! I’m tracking things that show some promise using my Delicious keyword “projectmanagement” if you care to browse. For churches, TeamWorkLive stands out as another very nice option, although the price is too steep for me right now. I can see this being a great all-church-staff project management tool, if everyone gets on board and you’re OK with the $200/mo for 50 users (or $150/mo for 25 users…there are other plans too).

My Toodledo Workflow

My District Toodledo context (click to enlarge)

This is a brief overview of how I use Toodledo. I have most of the fields except for the sharing-related ones enabled. I used Google’s Chrome browser to create an “Application” out of the Toodledo website so I can easily open a separate Toodledo-only window, preventing it from getting lost amid my many tabs (no, I’m not kidding! Too many tabs to provide an exact count right now though…). I have the same setup on the desktop I use at each office and on my laptop, and I have an iPhone home screen icon set up for the Toodledo Slim iPhone webapp interface (I’m also presently using the Appigo Todo native iPhone app, which is nice, but it is missing several features including subtask and context support that prevent it from being as useful in general, even though it syncs well with Toodledo. Appigo has said they are working to add these features in the near future).

Basics

I have Toodledo set to default to the Contexts tab, since you can select any of the fields to start with by default. This lists all the Contexts I have set up in tabs across the top of the screen, and I can easily select which one to view (the number of tasks in the context is shown in parentheses on the tab but that can optionally be hidden). The main contexts I have (plus a few infrequently used ones) are: Any Computer, Lakeview, District, and Home. I default to sorting tasks by Importance and then Auto. Importance is a foruma defined by Toodledo that takes into account both the priority of a task and how soon it’s due, and assigns each task a numerical value of “importance.” The higher-importance items are shown at the top, and for each task the due date or priority is displayed at the right side (whichever is the reason for the importance level is displayed, due date or priority, per task).

A quick scan shows me what I need to do today and I can pick a next action to work on based on only tasks that I can do (that are in the context I’m presently in; at Lakeview for example). I have keyboard shortcuts enabled which lets me type “n” to create a new task quickly, and I can tab through the fields to set the folder, start and due dates, priorities, context (defaults to the context I’m in) and other settings as applies to that task. The Folder field I’m using kind of as a categorization field and kind of as a “project” field, I’ve not decided 100% how I’m going to use it yet. But that’s an example of flexibility; I can use the Folder field for whatever I want however I want to! There’s also a Tags field which allows for multiple, comma-separated tags which you can view and sort just like any other fields. I’m using tags sparingly right now, but will throw “web,” “order,” “blog,” for categorization, or a person’s name (like my boss) to create an agenda to talk to that person about the next time I see them.

Subtasks

Subtasks, which are a feature of the Pro account I paid for, are nice but not as easy to use as I’d like. Without seeing or using it I’m not sure I could explain it very well so I won’t try for now. Suffice it to say the usability of the interface for subtasks has a ways to go to make it as efficient or easy to use as it needs to be for me to get much use out of it. Like others on the Toodledo forums, I would also like to see the ability to assign an order to subtasks so as each was marked complete, the next one would be “active” until it was complete, and so on. This would make tasks with subtasks very usable as GTD “projects->next actions” which I would like to get into more in-depth as I work toward trying to implement GTD myself (I am currently trying to use some of the GTD concepts but I haven’t dived in to the program all the way). I presently have 55 active todo items in Toodledo, which is the important suff I can’t forget but is not close to the full brain dump GTD requires to really work well!

iPhone

The iPhone interface is mostly full-featured but obviously limited in the amount of information it can display at once, and the lag time for the webapp to refresh is occasionally annoying. However I use it to enter new todo items at least as often as I use a computer, I think, and I edit and mark tasks complete on it as well (it’s nice that I can review pretty much anywhere when I have downtime, without having to be in front of a computer!). The biggest benefit to having an iPhone interface is that I’m more likely to follow through and use the system the more contstant and “anywhere” my access to it is. I don’t want to rely on something that goes away when I’m not at my computer; that’s when I need to be reminded what I need to do the most! Especially as I’m running around the building away from my office. Between Appigo Todo and the Slim webapp, I get what I need to out of the iPhone side of Toodledo access, but it’s not perfect. I am looking forward to the Appigo Todo updates that will add Contexts especially (and subtasks!), and Toodledo developers themselves have mentioned in their forums that they are looking at iPhone native apps themselves but have not released any details about when to expect anything concrete to materialize.

Other Ways to do Toodle

Some other ways that Toodledo provides to interface with their system are email, Twitter, and Jott. I have enough ways to add and view tasks on the go that I don’t think the Twitter integration will be very useful to me despite my extensive use of Twitter. Jott is an excellent service that I’ve used for a long time off and on, but recently they switched to a paid model and left beta status. Basic Jotting is still free but connecting to productivity services like Toodledo requires a paid monthly subscription now. If I get desperate enough to need quick voice-to-todo translation I’ll contemplate a subscription; until then I may use the iPhone Jott app to capture quick items that I can manually enter as a Toodledo task later. Email is one piece that I haven’t really gotten into the swing of using but should be pretty powerful, because you can forward an email to your secret Toodledo email address, changing the subject to the actual todo text (add exclaimation points to bump up the priority, and @context to set a context) and the body of the email becomes the task’s note. This should make creating tasks from emails quick and painless, but like I said I just haven’t started using it heavily yet, even though I need to. The same command-shorthand works to create new tasks via Twitter using a Direct Message, by the way.

There are several other ways to get information out of Toodledo, including iCal subscriptions, Vista and Apple dashboard or sidebar widgets, a Firefox extension and sidebar (the sidebar uses the same Slim interface as the iPhone), and there’s a third-party Outlook Synchronization Tool that does just what it sounds like, using the Toodledo API. I tried this (it does work!) since I use Outlook but the lack of contexts turned me off and I’ve tried and failed to use the Outlook Tasks feature for tracking todo items, so I’m not sure why I wanted to try again :-) You can display your tasks in your Google Calendar in at least two ways (as a drop down item each day to see tasks due that day, or as actual calendar items if you’ve set a due time as well), and you can get text-message or email alerts about an hour before a task with the due time field set is due (for now, you can’t configure how early to remind you, and if on, all tasks with a due time will remind you up to the maximum number of reminders you want per day).

Conclusion

Is Toodledo what I’m going to use long-term? Well, I’ve spent about $25 on Toodledo Pro for a year, and the Appigo Todo and Notebook iPhone Apps. I’ve been using the system for about a month I think, successfully, and with money invested I (hope) I’m nore likely to stick with it longer. Only time will tell! It’s full-featured yet flexible, but it doesn’t quite provide the collaborative project management that I’m also looking for, which may end up being another tool to juggle when I find the right one, rather than replacing Toodledo. Sometimes you just need a nice, smart, flexible list to give your mind some sanity by offloading the “stuff” to the system.

That’s the premise of GTD, and Toodleso is my favorite implementation so far. I just have to be careful to avoid something I recall reading on Merlin Mann’s 43folders blog a while ago (I’m not sure what article) that mentioned it was too easy to spend more time looking at, examining, and setting up a system that you more busy with that than actually using it! I agree, that is easy to slip into sometimes! I guess I’ll just have to stop and use this for while!

I’m using the free WordPress app to compose this post on the iPhone and it seems to be pretty solid so far but it needs some more features like page editing capabilities and not just posts. In time. For now it is good!

AT&T iPhone Status: Shipped!

Yesterday, my iPhone shipped to the AT&T store where I’m going to pick it up. It ships overnight FedEx, which I’m very happy about, because it means I can go in the store and pick it up today! I’ll be going after work this evening. The FedEx tracking number shows that it was delivered at 10:17am to the store, and I’ve confirmed that the phone will be available for pickup later this afternoon!

In order to not bore you with posts about iPhone apps that I find, I’m going to post most iPhone-related stuff over on my personal blog (which I’ve recently redone so there’s not much there), ExistDifferently. I’ll probably make a post or page here with a table of contents that I’ll keep updated as I write stuff, or I’ll pull in the posts in the sidebar. If you really want to hear about a ton of iPhone stuff here, let me know…but it’s going to be more for me than anything, since there’s already a ton of info out there if you want it!

Why did I choose the iPhone? Well, I’m tired of my Treo 650, which is showing its age. I like the multi-touch interface, I like the data speeds, I like the screen size, and I like that, because it’s so popular, people are writing sites and apps (both!) specifically to work well on it. That means I can do more with it than with any other phone, or at least I can do so much so easily compared to other phone options right now. OK, I have to correct myself, will be able to do…gotta get the thing first! Oh yeah, and now it does Exchange ActiveSync with Push email, calendar, and contacts! That’s the one thing that made me sit up and take a look. Before, I at least told myself (and others) that I was OK giving the iPhone a pass–yes it was cool, but it wasn’t truly functional if you need Exchange access. Supposedly, that’s no longer true! It seems that the $30/mo data plan, unlike AT&T has been claiming per my previous post, works just fine with ActiveSync, which makes sense from a technical level.

It’s a 16GB black iPhone, if you were wondering, and I’m going to use it to replace my iPod Classic 80GB I think (the first Apple product I’ve ever owned) which is why I opted for the larger version; my iPod has over 20GB of podcasts and I’ll still have to pare that down to fit on the iPhone! Shouldn’t be hard; I didn’t try on the iPod because there’s plenty of space. I’m already with AT&T (but no longer in a contract), and the monthly plan will only cost me $10 per month more than what I’m already paying as part of my family’s FamilyTalk plan, so while I considered a 2G used iPhone, the 3G made enough sense given the subsidy for me.

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!

I’ve put my recent ‘tweets in the right sidebar of this blog for quick reference. My flight leaves Indianapolis at 8:15 tomorrow morning and I arrive (supposedly) at 11:10 am Oklahoma local time. Once I get my rental I’ll likely try to track down the megachurch tour in progress, hopefully for lunch and the tour’s second half, but we’ll see how things pan out. You’d think I’d have a better handle on this stuff, leaving in the morning and all…

After searching every room of the house for about five minutes, I called my wife (on her way to work already) and asked if she had any ideas. None. More looking. I call my mom to see where she was at, since she was on her way here to pick up Nathaniel, and asked if she had any ideas. “Did you check the drawer of the coffee table?”

Duh. No! Of course I hadn’t checked the place Nathaniel constantly puts everything from pens to coasters to remote controls! Sure enough…he’s never moved my mouse or mouse pad before (and knows better than to touch them if he remembers), but apparently that changed. A few seconds later they were packed and ready to go. But who knew moving a mouse and mouse pad five inches lower than their previous location could cause so much trouble, and hilarity?! :-D

(cross-posted to Nathaniel’s Blog)

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.)

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm Eastern is the next episode of the Church IT Podcast, hosted on TalkShoe by Jason Powell, the King of Church IT (if you were at the Fall Church IT Roundtable last year where I accidentally coined that nickname, that joke might be funny :-) Don’t miss it if you can make it (I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not, unfortunately I may not have the opportunity this time). There is still the option to download a “Classic” Java client for TalkShoe chat, but they just introduced a new Web version that does not require a download ahead of time and looks more like an IRC chat window. It’s in alpha but looks nice; you can use either one you want.

Speaking of chat, if every two weeks is just too long to wait for the Podcast, you can jump in to the IRC chatroom “24/7 CITRT Roundtable” set up on the Freenode server (IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, has been around forever, or just about, in internet terms, but is not quite as common as it used to be). Justin Moore posted a couple of excellent posts talking about the #citrt chat room and about how to use IRC. He also links to Jeffrey Thompson’s screencast demonstrating graphically how to install the ChatZilla Firefox extension and join in the chat. If you’re a Church IT person, you need to be in there at least from time to time and build your network of geek friends while sharing technology tips!

So, there’s three ways you can get involved in the Church IT community without giving the seat of your chair the opportunity to rebound from your butt imprint. Go!

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

This doesn’t always happen; I have been included on this via phone announcement before, and I think they even remembered to tell me personally once. Actually, that may have been for a group lunch, not for a go-home-early party. At least they have remembered before… :-)

So I am switching all of my domains (mostly mine and those of some friends, but I have hosted a Lakeview website on this server for over a year as well) over to a shared account on DreamHost, which is inexpensive and allows for unlimited domains and more disk space and bandwidth than my dedicated server, should I need it. They also offer a cool new service called DreamHost Private Servers, which lets you move from a shared server to a server with dedicated resources (CPU and RAM) that can not only spike above your guaranteed minimums as the server has capacity, but will also let you reconfigure (and pay more for) more resources incrementally at any time for that Private Server, with the change taking place in minutes. You can choose from regular and MySQL Private Servers, or both (they split out MySQL servers onto different machines than the web hosting files on all accounts). Each Private Server starts at only $15/mo for 150MHz processor and 150MB  memory guaranteed resources, and goes up from there depending on how many resources you want (you are only charged for your resource usage at each setting for the time you are at that setting).

I am in the process of moving the hosting for all of my domain names to my DreamHost account, and the process is going smoothly. However, there is a lot of useful information on the dedicated server that I’d like to keep for posterity, preferably in an accessible format and not just an archive file. It doesn’t have to be on the internet, but having it running as a virtual machine on my local computer would rock! My main limitation in converting the machine to a virtual server is that I can’t reboot it into a special CD or something, since it needs to remain running and accessible to me remotely at all times via SSH. The hard drive on the dedicated server is 60GB, but only 20GB of that is used, so it will take a while to move everything but it shouldn’t be too bad.

I have done a little bit of research on moving a Linux machine into a virtual machine, and have found interesting articles here (especially in the comments as far as doing a hot-copy), and here. I haven’t done the research to decide for sure, but I like the idea of installing the same or similar Linux distribution on a virtual machine and using rsync to copy the changed files from the physical server. This would likely reduce the amount of data transfer by an order of magnitude. Then I still have to determine all the fun details of how to get the virtualized server to recognize the new hardware properly and get all of those tweaks done, which is harder to find information on due to the differences between specific Linux distributions.

My goal is to complete this as well as the transfer of all my remaining domains over to my DreamHost account by the end of this month so I am not billed for the dedicated server next month. We’ll see how that goes. If you have any bright ideas (especially if you’re a Linux guru), I’m certainly open to suggestions and recommendations!

Disclosure: The link to DreamHost above is an affiliate link. If you sign up through that link without using a promo code, I get the referral credit, which I would of course appreciate but is not required. You can visit www.dreamhost.com directly yourself. Or you can get $50 off an account and give me the credit and some of the referral amount by using promo code SZP50OFF, which is a better deal for both of us :-)

Wednesdays and Thursdays my mom generally watches my son while I work because my wife works part time. However, with my dad in the hospital that didn’t work out this week, so I stayed home with him yesterday. He was tired and clingy (wouldn’t let me put him down all day) and when my wife got home we discovered that he had a fever. He didn’t sleep well last night (but he’s sooooo tired!) and although he’s a bit better today, my wife and I both stayed home and have been alternating taking care of him and sleeping. And I’ve been contemplating the homework I have due tonight and tomorrow night that I haven’t started yet. We’ll see how that works out.

Long week.

UPDATE at 11:30 pm Thursday: Surgery is at 7:30 am EST tomorrow (Friday) morning, and will take 3-4 hours (and possibly some extra time for prep). It will be a double, triple, or quadruple bypass, but they won’t know until they start. He will be in the hospital for 4-6 days afterwards and will be at home for at least a month after that. As for my son, he is still running a fever but no other symptoms, so the pediatrician said wait it out or call back if there are more symptoms or it lasts longer than a week.

UPDATE at 10:40 am Friday: My son’s fever seems to have broken overnight and he was sleeping when I woke up! He kept us up a lot again last night though, and I just woke up about a half-hour ago and have been waiting to get ready to go until he and my wife woke up, since they were both sleeping (and they both just woke up). My dad’s surgery started on time at 7:30, with no updates yet. My mom is supposed to know more sometime around 11-noon, and he will be unconscious for two hours afterwards and in ICU for two days, with 5-7 days in hospital total and then a month where he can’t drive. He likely won’t know who is around him until dinnertime tonight, or possibly later.

UPDATE at 11:30 am on Friday: My dad’s out of surgery and it went well! It ended up being a double-bypass; although there were three blockages the surgeon said the third one was not a primary artery and wouldn’t be an issue (for some reason they couldn’t do the bypass on it but like I said it doesn’t matter). My mom will be able to visit him in 45 minutes or so. Thanks again to everyone for your prayers; obviously the surgery itself is over now but it’ll be a week before he’s out of the hospital, so if you remember to send some prayers his way in the coming week they would be much appreciated.

UPDATE at 11:15 pm on Friday: My dad is doing OK but because he lost some blood during surgery, his blood pressure was low and thus his vitals were not stabilizing after the surgery and he kept moving around too soon. So they had to give him two pints of blood and knock him out again. So far his vitals have not stabilized enough for them to let him become fully conscious yet, although he is conscious enough at times to know that my mom and brother are there. I will be visiting tomorrow, although I think I may have to wait a couple of days before he’ll be interested in my new iPod (it came today!). My son’s fever and accompanying lethargy came back all afternoon but went away again a couple of hours ago and he just went to sleep. My wife and I are following suit, but I may have to listen to a podcast or two in bed first, now that it’s so easy :-) Thanks for your continued prayers.

UPDATE at 8:00 am on Saturday: Found a text message this morning that I got overnight saying that my dad was up and talking with breathing tube removed at 2:46 am!!! Also, my son was a bit fussy this morning and is asleep again after his morning bottle, but he does seem to still be fever-free.

UPDATE at 5:00 pm on Sunday: I got to visit with dad for about four hours yesterday and it went well. He was still drugged up but was still talkative and making his usual jokes. Some were funny (I thought most were). As many as usual anyway :-) Will go again this evening. They moved him to a new room and out of the ICU today! My mom tells me he is tired from the move, but doing OK.

UPDATE at 2:25 pm on Monday: The surgeon stopped by to see my dad and said he can go home tomorrow! That’s faster than expected!

UPDATE on Tuesday evening: My dad came home today and my parents are settling in. I stopped by on my way home from work for a couple of hours. There is enough to do tomorrow that I will still be staying home to watch my son while my wife is at work, although my mom will probably be able to watch him on Thursday. We believe my son had Roseola, based on the rash he’s had after his fever, but it’s about gone now and he’s back to his normal, happy self! Thank God!

The iPod Classic 80GB I just grabbed should take the 15GB of podcasts I currently have sitting on my laptop in stride, with plenty of room for a few tunes when I feel like a break (and also a few videos here and there). I keep running into podcast episodes that run over the 74-minute mark (1hr 14 min), and thus won’t fit on a CD. Plus, I’m tired of burning podcasts onto CD, not just because I only listen to them once, but because burning them to CD (fitting as many as possible in each playlist and labeling each disc) is a royal pain. The podcasts I listen to are good enough to be worth the effort, and I’ve patiently waited for over a year to have the money available for an iPod. It’s part Christmas present from my wife, and part me getting rid of about half of the 31 domain names I own (~$10/yr for one is not much, but ~$310 for 31 makes a much bigger dent!).

The domain names I am not renewing are, sadly, some pretty nice domains. Some are reasonably old, and all are reasonably good if you have an interest in the genre (ranging from Christianity to long distance services to Star Trek, and a few others in-between). If I let them expire, they will probably be registered by some domain-squatter and used for advertising, which I’d rather not do. So, I am considering the best way to dispose of the domains from our budget without literally tossing them out! Should I list them on a domain auction site? That’s probably not a bad idea, but I could also list them here. I’m not necessarily looking to make a killing, but a few bucks on top of the registrar transfer fee would help to offset the years I have paid for the domains (some just a few years, but my first domain is from back when Network Solutions had a monopoly and charged $100 for two years up front!). Any thoughts? Should I list them here? I have ten domains that I am for sure not renewing, and they all expire within the next year (some as soon as December).

The basic principle you must use to compare to your potential spouse is what I call the Toilet Paper Principle, or TPP. The principle is very simple. Do you and your potential mate agree on whether the toilet paper rolls should be placed on the holder so it feeds over the top, or down underneath? If so, it’s likely that you will be able to find other areas in which you both are obsessive, but about the same thing in the same way, which is a key to surviving at least two years from my experience. For example, you may discover that you both have a passion for correct grammar and spelling. If one of you discovers a spelling or grammatical error in a document of some sort, the person discovering the error may enthusiastically complain to the other about what a lousy job of proofreading the document’s creator has done, why can’t they use a dictionary or at least Word’s spell check, etc. and can count on their partner to heartily agree and possibly join in with a corroborating comment. This comes in particularly handy when writing; everyone, even perfectionists, make mistakes and typos, but when you have such a wonderful partner to rely on as an uninterested editor (and believe me, depending on the topic, I do mean uninterested!) to pick up your slack.

This sort of interplay with common obsessions is very important if you are to survive each other for any length of time. Because inevitably, you will discover areas in which you both have passionate opinions that don’t line up with each other. People who are OCPs I’ve noticed tend to be stubborn and opinionated. Some of them are outgoing, and everyone will recognize this immediately. Others may be people-pleasers and thus hide their opinions from the general public.

When you get married, however, you will share your opinions with each other. Stubbornly. After all, you’re always right. Or at least, your wife is. According to her. You may even be fooled into thinking this has something to do with hormones, especially if you end up with children rather quickly. Just give it 9-12 months you think, and convincing your wife to change her mind will be a lot easier. You think this because, as a guy, you’ve already forgotten the dating and engagement portion of your relationship, where she was just as stubborn.

Guys aren’t allowed to defend themselves against women if they’re gentlemen (this applies to physical contact but should probably extend to verbal onslaught as well), so they have to use other defense mechanisms. The easiest (and thus generally the most popular) is to simply forget things quickly. This usually comes without much effort, and it gets easier with practice. Fortunately, practice is easy to come by, and hey, if you really can’t remember what it is your wife said while you were in the middle of contemplating which good science fiction domain names might be available to register “just in case you need it,” you have a good, honest defense should you be accused of forgetting your wife’s statement. Of course, you won’t really get away with it, because how could you possibly not hang with baited breath onto everything your wife may mention in passing, unless she is completely unimportant and disposable and you’re a horrible person?

At least you can take comfort in knowing that you truly don’t remember her telling you–that thing she says she told you, until you forget all about it ten seconds later. And then, who cares? On to the next thing! How about mounting touch-screen computers and keyboards around your house to fold out of every wall on adjustable arms and connect to your existing terminal server session on your central server when you authenticate with the built-in fingerprint reader to pick up your web browsing or to-do list creation (to help you remember) where you left off in the last room? Sounds like an excellent project for that spare several thousand dollars that you…already spent on other necessities (ahh…a geek can dream…). Oh well, at least there are plenty of spelling and grammatical errors you can go find and share with your wife, and she’ll commiserate. And you won’t have to switch the toilet paper around the next time its use is necessitated, because your wonderful wife will have replaced the roll in the correct direction for you. And her. And you’ll both live happily ever after (until your kid hits his teens, so I hear).

(I make no claims as to the reality of any of the above (much of humor is exaggeration of reality, after all), but you know enough of it rings true to–ring true. At least if you and your wonderful partner both share OCP traits. Thanks to my wife for two AWESOME years and for many more to come! Happy Anniversary Sweetie!)

Today was an excellent day at the Granger Church IT Roundtable! I’m not sure when/if I’ll have the time to post specific notes, but Brett Anderson has posted three entries of notes already.

I’m still at Granger Community Church, and the Roundtable folks are filtering out now that the pizza is gone. It looks like it’s about time for me to pack up and start the three hour drive home. And then, sleep. Only got about 3.5 hours of that last night, so it’s time to catch up!

So tonight is the first night we sleep in our house. We’re exhausted, and boxes are everywhere, there is still more work to be done than I can comprehend right now, and I finally got my paper draft turned in for my class about four minutes before the deadline tonight. Tomorrow evening: do homework due Thursday night. Unpack and organize more stuff. Get curtain rods and put up curtains and shades. Sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

Tomorrow during the day: Try to do three days of work in one. Not likely to happen, but I’ll have fun trying. Or I’ll fall asleep trying, which is more likely. Fortunately, my work keyboard is a nice, ergonomic Microsoft Natural keyboard with a big wrist-rest. If I can position myself correctly, my forehead will be cushioned by this when I fall onto it, asleep. Let’s hope.

The Church IT Roundtables at Granger Community Church in Granger, IN on Sept. 26th and at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, MO on Oct. 3-4 are fast approaching, and I’m going to both of them! I’m looking forward to attending them both. No time to link to them both tonight, but if you can’t find them via Google or other Church IT blogs, you don’t deserve to work in Church IT. No, really. Exceptions granted on a case-by-case basis, post your reasons :-)

So, on day two of my unplanned time off tomorrow, the plan is to finish painting the one bathroom that didn’t get painted, and the one ceiling that didn’t get painted. Also to move smaller boxes and prepare the furniture to be moved by some local movers we hired who are coming tomorrow evening. And clean the apartment so we can turn in the keys. And a few other things I’m too tired to remember.

But the exciting thing today? Our phone and DSL internet work! It only took me an hour and a phone call to AT&T to get the DSL functional but it’s up and running and what I’m using to write this. Much more speed and signal strength than the random open access point I had found (shhh!). Still no cable, which is supposed to be in by 5 pm but they only have 20 more minutes and thus confidence is not being exuded.

But the paint looks great (even if my arms will fall off if I attempt to paint another ceiling — that means they’re falling off tomorrow!), and we’re happy to finally have a house. Now, if I can just get my paper written tonight (due tomorrow night) while my wife’s at work and my mom watches my son, I’ll be all set. Until Thursday night when more homework is due that I have not yet begun!

Nope…no pictures yet…you think I’ve had time to download pictures from my camera? I’ve barely had time to take any! (And not many, at that.)