This week I have officially made the switch over to BlueLetterBible.org for all my online reference, linking and reading needs.  While this may seem juvenile to some, this is a big deal to me on a number of levels.

1. Bible Gateway used to be my choice of reading online but in many ways I feel taken advantage of on their site.  I don’t want to be advertised to while I’m reading and studying the Bible.  In the past year, Zondervan bought Bible Gateway and is adding it to their machine of products they “can have more impact on the Internet.”  I have already mentioned here that I don’t necessarily appreciate Zondervan, so that didn’t help.
   
2. BlueLetterBible has a web ethic I love.  ”We desire to operate the Blue Letter Bible as a ministry. This is a zero revenue project. There will be no charge for any services, nor are there any banner ads on the website to generate revenue.”  While I am not opposed to making revenue through websites (after all, that is my career) I do think that some things should not be used to further a capitalist agenda.  So props to you BlueLetterBible.
   
3. BlueLetterBible is just a way better website with more features and real study tools.

• The lexicon is by far the best one I’ve seen online and has helped me in numerous studies.  Simply go to your verse normally and click on the C and you get a screen that looks like below.  You can click on any of the words and it will take you to a definition along with a list of all the other times that these Greek/Hebrew words show up elsewhere.  There is nothing easier than this.

• The copy to clipboard feature is amazing.  Whenever I’m trying to get text onto a Powerpoint I always have to delete all the numbers and footnotes.  With BlueLetterBible you can select copy options in the top left and choose the style of text you want to copy, hit copy and move it right into whatever media you need.  Smooth and beautiful.
• It also comes packed with study/commentary tools including audio and video which I haven’t even begun to unpack and they are all searchable as well.
• They also have a great mobile version of the site. It’s a little less feature rich (you can still view the full site on your phone if you need the features) but it’s quicker and cleaner.  You can see the mobile version at mobile.blb.org
• The only thing I think I will miss was how in Firefox I could add a Bible Gateway search bar right into my browser (anyone know if you can do this for Blue Letter Bible?) so I didn’t have to navigate to their home page first.

It’s enough for me to switch.

Warning: This is an extremely nerdy post which most of my readers will care nothing about.

This has been a long time coming.  When I first started my site in 2004, I didn’t really know much about websites, design, blogs, PHP or anything.  So I used the first blog engine I could find and I made my website.  It was b2Evolution.  It was a great engine at the time and in my opinion was easier to use and customize than the others I saw so I chose it.  I outgrew it fast but stuck it out because of how much work it would have taken to move it to another engine.  With the amount of posts and comments that I had, doing it manually was out of the question.  WordPress was looking more and more appealing every day and I designed numerous customers websites with it.  I even taught a workshop on WordPress at the last Free Methodist general conference.

So earlier on this year I paid a coder from Rent A Coder to build me a script that would automatically convert all my posts, comments, categories and permalinks over to WordPress.  So $40 later and she worked her wonder and she was able to do it.  (If anyone is interested I have a script that will convert B2Evolution 2.4.5 install to WordPress 2.7, I’ll sell it for $5 for anyone that asks, just e-mail me).  After learning a few tricks with my .htaccess file I was able to make sure all my links were properly redirected and my new links looked nicer than before.

I’m not completely happy with the new design just yet, but it will do for now.  I thought about using Thesis (which I’d recommend to most users), but I decided I wanted to do it all manually anyway so I went a different route.  I’m also going to try to integrate my photography a little more into this site so I actually have a portfolio somewhere of my shots.  I figured this would be a better idea than starting up an entire new site with a new brand since I wanted to keep it away from Storyboard Solutions.

I used this tutorial to get my flickr badge looking cool, this plugin for Google Analytics,  Share-This for the cool share button at the bottom of each post, ProudBlack is what I started this theme off of.

Twitter for the most part is annoying. The last thing I want to do all day is sit in front of my computer and use one of the eight million or so add-ons/programs/features of Twitter to follow my friends and what they are thinking/doing every last minute of their lives. E-mail works fine for communication, at least meaningful conversation. There are good uses for Twitter though. I thought it was a great tool for the conference. It was cool to see all the thoughts throughout the day be compiled real-time. The most useful thing I find for Twitter though is how it keeps track of my online activity. When I put up a new post it would auto-post to my Twitter account, and I saw the benefit of it instantly.

Then I stumbled across FriendFeed. FriendFeed is by far the type of aggregation tool that I would rather use. It compiles my Evernote Quotes, Google Shared Items, Tweets, Delicious Bookmarks, Flickr Images, Youtube Uploads, Facebook updated, LibraryThing Books etc. I love it because I don’t have to add yet another item to the list of things to do and update, it just knows and does it for me. Twitter is extra work, work that I don’t really care about doing. FriendFeed does the work for me and compiles what I want for me, and I don’t have to think about. Conveniently it auto-posts to my Twitter Account (which auto-posts to my Facebook Account) for me anyway.

This is really what I needed. Twitter in no way helps me sort anything, communicate anything worthwhile or adds anything to my life. Evernote sorts my quotes and keeps them organized and easily accessible, Library thing my books, Flickr my images, Youtube my videos, Delicious my bookmarks, Google posts and resources. Twitter didn’t really do anything for me besides give me yet another way to tell everyone about everything I’m doing but didn’t really add anything new to my online experience.

So I guess I’ll keep my twitter account only because it is grabbing my feed from FriendFeed anyway.

It is extremely important to know your way around the web. You need to know where to go when you need something instead of spending your time surfing, cause surfing is a time consumer when you need results. I wrote a post a little while back about some helpful sites in my computer saturated life. You can read it for info about Gmail, Firefox, Delicious and Flickr. Also, the list on the side of my blog labeled resources will usually come in handy. I only put links there that I personally use. For instance are you still using Getty Images with that stupid watermark and blowing it up so it distorts for your images? Why not use SXC, its free, they are full quality and its actually legal. Or you can use IstockPhoto a pay $1-3 for great high quality images. I use both almost every week. Everyone knows about Bible Gateway, but what about Blue Letter Bible, complete with commentaries, lexicons and everything you need to study the bible a lot deeper than just straight text. Or Vista Print for your printing needs, cheap printing of your even postcards or your business cards. Google doesn’t stop impressing me, with Google Notebook, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Blogger, Gmail…I use them all. And all the while Delicious keeps it all organized as a beautiful bookmarking system.

1. Cropping is your friend. Most pictures need about 7/8 cut out of it for it to look right with what your trying to go for. You will be amazed how zooming in on the part of the picture you want, the off-centering it a bit will add to your design as opposed to just showing the entire pic.

2. Transparency options always give a variety of surprise effects. When you want a change just scroll through the different transparency options and you just may be sold on one of the outcomes that you never even thought of.

3. Resolution is what most people screw up on. If your designing for a computer monitor (Powerpoint, web design) than 72 DPI will work, but if you are designing for print, try and design it around 300DPI, print quality is a lot better than screen quality. Blowing things up disproportionate always looks bad.

4. Layers are your friends. Do everything in layers. The more layers usually the more control you will have. Have 3 duplicate layers and make two invisible and then toggle them on and off to see what one you like best. Change the blending options on some layers to add borders or shadows or transparency.

5. Actions are your friends. You can record your steps of what you do to an image and then implement those actions on other images that are yours. Or you can download actions sets online. Just type in “Photoshop Actions” in Google and you’ll find all sorts of cool actions.

Here is five helpful tips for Microsoft Powerpoint or a free open source piece of similiar software called Open Office Impress.

1. Never delete your presentation, I guarantee that slides from previous months, weeks or years will come in handy down the road. I can’t count how many times I simply copy and paste slides from other presentations that fit perfectly in the current one.

2. Label properly. There is nothing worse than trying to find that slide with the quote from Leslie Newbigin on Stories only to go back to your library and see your files named by dates for the last few years.

3. If you do a lot of worship songs, save each song as a separate file with no background behind the text. Then all you need to do is add the whole presentation to your current one and change the background. Much easier than searching through past presentations or typing it all out again.

4. Get a second monitor, for a desktop its a 10 dollar video card and a cheap monitor (or that video card sends to the projector. You can edit while your presenting. People catch typos, but when the slide comes up and the typo is gone, you know that the Powerpoint guy knows what he is doing.

5. Stop using WordArt. There is this annoying function in Powerpoint called Wordart that gives your words a cheesy and embarrassing amateur look to your text. If your going to use it, edit it well so you can’t tell its the typical look, or just use your basic text. You’d be surprised how much better white Arial on a black background can look compared to those horrible Wordart text options.

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