Based on a True Story » Tech Tips

Local Internet

Nathan Colquhoun — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:57:44 +0000

As the Internet grew and my time on it grew as well I always found it a great way to meet people, build relationships with people that I couldn’t normally be around and constantly be discovering new and exciting people and things. I wanted to reach as far into the internet as possible and be exposed to everything I could, I wanted to learn and I wanted to meet as many people as possible. The Internet is great for this and is virtually unlimited in where you can go.

My Google Reader started to become full of blogs from every corner of the earth. I am connected to people who I’ve met online because of similar interests. For the first time in history, we have the ability to be completely global in absolutely everything. Most things in my home probably didn’t originate from my country, and with the internet, that now included relationships.

However, my life is intentionally starting to shift to live a life that is more local. I am trying to eat more local, buy as many products as I can more local, get to know my neighbourhood and build better communities around me. As I do this, I am starting to feel a shift in the way I use the internet. The internet is becoming now more and more a tool to use amongst my local relationships. I pretty much only follow people on Twitter that I see face to face, unless they are exceptionally brilliant. My e-mails and Facebook conversations are almost only people in Sarnia. While the internet is still just as global as it always was, I find my use for is is changing. Instead of it being my portal into a new world it has become a tool to help me better interact with the world that I am already in.

Bible Gateway vs Blue Letter Bible

Nathan Colquhoun — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:08:14 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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.

The Inevitable and Awaited Move to WordPress

Nathan Colquhoun — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:27:50 +0000

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.

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Twitter Vs FriendFeed

Nathan Colquhoun — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:10:49 +0000

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.

Websites You Need to Know

Nathan Colquhoun — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:44:14 +0000

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.

5 Photoshop Tips

Nathan Colquhoun — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:42:54 +0000

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.

5 Powerpoint (or Impress) Tips

Nathan Colquhoun — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:41:40 +0000

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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Some Tips for You

Nathan Colquhoun — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:38:04 +0000

Ever since Joe made me his workhorse when I was 14, I have been doing Powerpoint presentations, designs and imagery. I have gotten to be pretty quick at it and I’d like to believe my stuff is a lot better now than it was 8 years ago. I can build websites better and quicker than I used to, I can put together a good looking Powerpoint presentation in less than an hour, and I can fly around the computer a lot better than I used to. Since its 4am, and I don’t want to do any of that, I thought that it would be beneficial to offer a few tips to those of you that struggle your way through computer related jobs.

So I have typed up a few already, and more will come. Some are set to come up one a day and other will come later. I’m going to start up a category on the side called Tech Tips. They are definitely for the amateur but most are amateurs so it will work out. So starting tomorrow look for different sets of tech tips that will help you get along better with your computer.

Surf Like a Pro

Nathan Colquhoun — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:30:25 +0000

Today is a major marker in the history of my life. I had 70 pages of paper in my hand a few hours ago and they were all delivered to the respective classes. That means I’m done for the school year except one minor exam. I am one happy person.

There is a post that I wanted to write for a while but I couldn’t justify it with all the school work. I want to share with you a few tools that I have used or been using online to help get the most out of my internet experience. Some you might be interested in, others you may disregard. Some of them will help you make sense of some of the links at the side of my blog and millions of other blogs. All of them will certainly improve your internet experience.

G-MAIL (nathancolquhoun at gmail dot com)
I had been using hotmail since around grade five, that’s about eleven years. I never really had any massive problems with it except only having 20mb of space. I was able to check it on Microsoft Outlook and it would stay updated with my inbox. However, now that I’ve started using G-Mail, everything is different. Here is why you should switch. For starters you get almost 3 GB of space for your e-mail. That’s 12 times more than hotmail gives you (if you want more from hotmail you need to pay). G-Mail uses Google search capabilities and can bring up an e-mail for you in a second by a few search strings. G-mail uses tags to sort your e-mail instead of folders. So instead of only being able to label your e-mail by one word, you can label it by as many as you want and can sort them that way. It is a way more efficient way to organize your e-mail. G-mail also integrates beautifully with all Google products like Picasa (a handy picture sorter/editor). You can also now sign up your Google account with msn and switch your contact list over in seconds. G-mail keeps your e-mails for viewing as conversations, not as separate e-mails. So if I send 10 e-mails back and forth between my girlfriend, it saves them all in one window to read easy everything that was said. G-mail has awesome filtering features to you can label your e-mail as it comes into your inbox. There is a plethora of reasons of why you should switch, so just do it, you won’t regret it.

FLICKR (my flickr album)
I’ve mentioned this a little bit already. Sign up for FLICKR for free and set up your own online picture gallery. You can sort and label them like you would e-mail in G-MAIL, with tags instead of folders. Friends can leave comments. You can make some private and some public. Easy to integrate with web development software (like the FLICKR board at the side of my site). You can also upgrade ($30 a year) and get up to 2 GB upload bandwidth a month and unlimited space. I already have 3500 full res pictures uploaded. It also works for a great back-up for all your pictures in case something ever happens to your hard drive.

DEL.ICIO.US (my delicious account)
This one may be new to a lot of you. Imagine your bookmarks/favourites folder online. Instead, once again, sorting it in folders, it sorts it in tags. So you can take for instance www.nathancolquhoun.com and tag it as ‘friend church articles design’ etc. and you could go on forever. Check out my delicious site for an example of how it works. You never lose your favourites using this and you have access to them absolutely anywhere. Also, you can search other people’s favourites to see what they have saved or what tags they use.

FIREFOX
We all know what internet explorer is because that is what comes with windows. I knew a lot of people used firefox, but I was hesitant to use it. When I tried it out, I only needed about 5 minutes and I was sold. Firefox is a web browser that is essential for anyone who does a lot of surfing. You can change skins to suit your need (I currently use IFOX SMOOTH). You can add and pick from hundreds of extensions to make it do exactly what you want. For instance, I have SAGE READER installed and with a click of a button it automatically checks every blog I read and gives me the latest updates on them. I never miss reading a blog. There is also a DELICIOUS button so that when I stumble on a site that I like, I just hit the button enter a few words and it automatically saves it to my site. There are hundreds of extensions to choose from to help you with whatever whether it is research, blogging, graphic editing, humour, news or just straight up blog reading. Firefox is a definite must get if you want to have better control over your surfing.

PODCASTS (my podcast)
To understand a PODCAST think about a radio show that is made once a week. They put this radio show online for people to download. If you subscribe to the PODCAST then it will automatically download to your machine whenever there is an update. I switched over to itunes to make it easier to do. There are some great podcasts out there, and you will like what is for you and probably not what I like, but there are thousands to choose from. You don’t’ need to have an IPOD to listen to podcasts. The benefit of the IPOD is that it will stay updated with all your latest shows (they have video podcasts now too) and you never have to ‘transfer’ them over every week/day. I think every church should have a podcast of their weekly sermon, I know that theStory will have that when there is a message, why not make it available online for everyone at anytime? So find some podcasts that you like and subscribe to them and see where it takes you. You can even subscribe to mine at the side bar.

FEEDS (my feed)
This is more of an explanation of what they are. A feed (like you will see in my sidebar) is a link that you would insert into your feed aggregator (like SAGE in FIREFOX). When you insert my feed, the reader will check my feed every day or so for new updates and inform you when there is some, you can also get a feed for the latest comments left on this blog. Most blogs, including blogspot blogs, have feeds to its really nice to have a good collection of feeds (I have almost 50) of blogs or news sites that you like and they will always keep you updated.

TECHNORATI
You might have noticed the words at the bottom of each post. TECHNORATI tags are tags that link to other sites that are talking about the same thing. So for instance, if I do a post on biblical inerrancy, I would tag my blog with that title and then you can click on it and it will take you a list of other blogs or people that are talking about the same thing. It also works vice versa to bring people to this site that are looking for information about a subject that I’m talking about. You can set the same thing up on your blog.

So maybe this will help you understand what’s going on in my sidebar and enrich your internet experience a little bit better.

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