… is sweet to the soul.

So says Pr 13.19a. I wonder if we take that out of context, considering the parallel phrase in Pr 13.19b, but…

But I just finished a massive amount of re-coding our Thru the Bible html index project.

Between August of 2005 and April of 2007 we took our church through a marathon chronological Bible reading and preaching project. We read the same passages together, worked through study guides, and preached messages covering the material we were reading each week.

I created Thru the Bible 1.0 with just the Old Testament index. It was kind of clunky looking, basically really really old-fashioned HTML, back eons ago when the web was young (and ugly). This index contained only our written material.

Tonight I finally finished the re-write of the whole project, OT, Intertestamental period, and NT. It looks much better than the earlier effort, although I am not sure it reaches the level of what the geeks call “Web 2.0”. Anyway, it looks a lot better than the first version.

And it contains all the audio files.

I plan to burn these on DVDs, and will make them available to anyone who asks for the cost of postage. (These will be on basic cheap DVDs, if you want a “100 year” DVD, it will cost $5 plus postage.)

I still have to double check all my links, but praise the Lord, all the coding is done.

Now its time to go to bed. How many late nights has this been?

UPDATE: DVDs now available!

I cannot even count the ways…

My laptop died. Not an agonizing death, but a slow, whimpering, desperate kind of death that allowed me to save my files while the patient suffered on life support on the operating room table. It is not dead beyond repair, but the cost to repair would be about half the cost of a new machine.

So… new machine it is. I now have a Dell XPS 1530 courtesy of Future Shop. It is apparently last year’s model. I was looking at a Dell model that had 4 GB RAM and a 250 GB HD, for $749 (loonies). They had this other machine on the shelf with a price marked down to 849, I think. The sales guy asked if I would be interested if they could get me a good price… it has 3GB RAM and a 250 GB HD… and a fingerprint reader… and a cool slot for the dvd-rw… and originally listed at 1098 loonies. So he got the price down to 649 loonies (40% off!!!) and had a deal.

The machine is very nice.

But it  has vista… need I say more?

Continue reading →

I wrote the most recent post in a new blog editing tool I discovered, Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. The tool is free (but in beta) and allows you to edit your posts in a WYSIWIG window, but adds many tools and features not available in Blogger’s editing window. For example, I can insert tables like this:

I can insert a map. Here is a map of our church’s location:

We are at the corner of Brock and Matson above. The map comes as a road map, or in aerial view as below.

In the aerial view, our church building is the black-roofed building just above the green playing fields, with a few gary oaks behind. The oaks are mostly gone now, we have 14 townhouses as our ‘back-door’ neighbours now.

I can also easily insert pictures, hyperlinks, and videos, all without leaving a fairly intelligent WYSIWIG editor. There is an option to insert tags, one which I don’t understand. The tags are somehow related to Technorati, or Flickr, or deli.icio.us and others. These are things I have vaguely heard of but I don’t really know what they mean.

I can format text in quite a few different ways, like this:

Heading One

or

Heading Two

or

Heading Three

or

Heading Four

or

Heading Five

or

Heading Six

I can add colour to text, strikethrough, and other formatting settings.

So far I am quite pleased with this editor. It makes posting so much easier.

I can save these posts as drafts, to work on later, or I can publish directly from this editor to my blog without entering its editing features.

Try it, you might like it…

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3