Phil Manser

You’ve kinda caught me at an inconvenient moment. A moment in which I just wiped out everything that was previously on this server and replaced it with a shiny new blog engine, which should be a lot more exciting than the engine I was previously using.

So if you’re revisiting the site, sorry for making everything disappear. I’ll fill it back up, in time. Don’t worry, since you’re coming here, you must have lots of it.

If you’re visiting the site for the first time, you missed a bunch of cool things. There were some awesome things here. Too bad.

please leave your message after the beep…

I didn’t realize how cool “Backpack”:http://www.backpackit.com/ really was, until I recently decided to throw some things up there to make for some quick organiztion. The more I use it, the more I think every blog/CMS(Content Management System) should be like it. With many systems, there’s this seperation between publishing and subscribing because it is assumed that a person will be doing (more of) one or the other, not (equal amounts of) both. But Backpack makes it very easy to edit what you’re seeing, without needing to jump through a series of ad hoc pages.

I think I should do something about this….

I was just thinking. It was a kind of “Oh no! You’re going to change what you said you were going to do, again, aren’t you?” moment.

Yep. I’ve decided that I’m not going to build the user interfaces for the church site. Instead, I’m going to build the site around a Textpattern installation and add everything via plugins (which I will create). Actual coding of this will probably not begin until next spring, which means that I’ll have to continue to manually edit and maintain the site until then. In the meantime, I’ll study Textpattern, see what I can leave as is (because of course I’ll want to change everything) and see what I need to add.

There are a couple of reasons why I think this is a better solution than building the interfaces myself. First, because I’d be building off of a strong admin GUI that is pretty well thought out, instead of slowly working towards one myself. Second, I was planning on integrating some blog engine into the site to handle the Article’s section anyhow, so instead of watering down Textpattern to meet my needs, I’ll be using it at it’s full strength.

I should note that, although I say Textpattern is my choice, I will still consider a couple of other blog engines like, Wordpress and GreyMatter. I think that I will ultimately choose Textpattern though.

Excerpt from an email I sent the pastor and deacons of my church:

bq. As I was assembling some information for a
part of the site, I noticed how many Scripture
references there were and thought, “Wouldn’t it be
convenient if the user could click on one of these and
read the passage?” I then began assembling a way to
tell the user’s browser to do this (turn a Scripture
reference into a link) and I’m happy to report that it
is nearly finished.

bq. “Scripture Links test page”:http://www.ambassadorbaptist.com/about/pastor/signs_of_the_times.php

Here’s the fun part, “take a look”:http://www.ambassadorbaptist.com/scripts/nuScript.js at the regular expression that finds the passages.

(Please pardon the dust.)

I gotta change my church’s server. For two days I’ve had no FTP access, and I only know this because I’ve been trying to upload for the past two days. Who knows how long it’s really been down. Thank God I can finally access the web control panel. It may be cumbersome, but it’s the only thing I got.

I’ve been looking at a bunch of different servers, maybe I’ll post my findings someday soon about which are the best (as far as I can determine without direct experience). I imagine it could be useful for someone who doesn’t want to do a lot of work choosing a host or doesn’t have the knowledge to do so.

Could be useful.