KevinPierpont.com

Read this interesting article at rationalchristianity.net to learn several easy ways to keep nonbelievers from visiting your Christian web site. The author took an informal survey of nonbelievers asking them to rate the annoyance level of some of the following on Christian run web sites.

Christian-themed backgrounds (crosses, fish, etc.)
Commercialism – prominent ads for online store, “buy my book,” “make a donation”
“Vote for this site” buttons
Using “webservant” in place of webmaster
Infighting – “Why Catholics/Protestants/etc. are wrong”
Prominent Bible verses (e.g. a theme verse at the top of the home page)
Written prayer (“Lord, please use this site…” or “I pray that this site will help you…”)

A few comments at the end of the article are also enlightening.

UPDATE: The article points out that these are things you should AVOID if you intend to appeal to a broader audience.

Google helps hackers turn up medical records. Not so cool.

One of these could make a PC guy want to switch–come on, OS X is based on FreeBSD.

More MovableType tricks for future reference; Drop Down Menus. This code works pretty well for implementing drop down menus in MovableType. I may try it soon here or elsewhere.

I’m getting tired of hunting for the solution to the Internet Explorer browser bug that causes MovableType sites with their default style sheets to truncate the pages. Every time I help setup an MT site it seems I run into this problem and must try to remember the cure, so this link is more or less for my future reference. If you develop sites with MovableType you might find it useful also. FYI–using the following code before the closing </body> tag does the trick for me.

<div style=”clear:both;”></div>

So I’m checking out Joshua Claybourn’s site who recomends I go check out The Agitator who got this link to the Social Security administration’s list of top baby names for 2001 from the Beltway blogger and I discover two of my boys are on the list. They weren’t born in 2001 but that’s beside the point. Gotta love the internet.

10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site at the Web Credibility site is a helpful list for creators of web sites. Anyone building a web site should review these guidelines and refer to them every few months. I can see I now have some work to do on our church site and my own.

One might get the impression from this article that Microsoft is just a wee bit concerned about the pressure being put on them by Linux and other free software.

Want to know when your favorite web site has been updated – like this one? I found a handy site that meets my needs for tracking when a site has changed, so I don’t have to remember to go check it out or be concerned that I’ll forget about that site I once thought was so great. I’ve been using changedetection.com for a few weeks now and I’m pleased with what it does. Getting started is simple – start by copying the URL of the site you want to track, go to the monitor page at changedetection.com, paste the URL, add your e-mail address and click next. Note that you’ll be sent to the next page that will let you sign up for junk e-mail — just hit the skip button here and you are done. Now the next time that site you wanted to track changes you’ll get an e-mail notifying you of the change. You can also turn monitoring off for that site from a link in the e-mail you get notifying you of a recent change. Webmasters can also add the change detection feature to their web pages for visitors to track their site for changes. Hey – you could test it by trying it out this site.

This interesting piece at the USA Today site about The Homeless Guy also includes a quote from Jordon Cooper, both fellow bloggers.

Now this is my kind of switch. If I had to use a Mac this is the way I’d want to do it. Like the Apple switch campaign Edd Dumbill bought a Mac. Unlike the Apple switch campaign he installed Debian GNU/Linux.

Today’s LangaList newsletter brings to my attention an XP security flaw that I think is important enough to repeat here. First of all you need to know that if you’ve already applied Windows XP Service Pack 1 you’re system is not at risk for this particular vulnerability and it would be a good idea for you to apply XP Service Pack 1 to your system. In the mean time Fred Langa points out a great, free utility to secure your system easily from this particular threat. That utility is made available by Steve Gibson and his site has all the gory details. Here’s just part of what Steve Gibson has to say about the XP security flaw;

“Ever since its release, Windows XP has contained a critical flaw that could be trivially exploited at any time by any malicious hacker. By causing any Windows XP system to process a specially-formed URL (web-style link), the XP system would obediently delete all or most of the files within any specified directory. (That’s not good.)”

“This flaw is considered critical because these malicious URLs could be delivered to any XP user through any means: via an eMail solicitation, a chat room, a newsgroup posting, a malicious web page, or even processed automatically without the user clicking anything by merely visiting a malicious web page. (That’s bad.)”

“Curiously, Microsoft was informed of this easily-demonstrated, quite significant, and trivial-to-fix, Windows XP defect back in June of 2002, but chose not to proactively address the significant vulnerability created for their users until the September 9th, 2002, release of Windows XP’s first service pack.”

OK – this one is for technogeeks. It’s a combination of wireless and voice technology that make the voice OS and “Isaac” sound pretty cool. I can’t wait till someone creates it and it’s cheap.

If you spend any time on the web – and you must if you are reading this – you owe it to yourself to use a decent browser. Mozilla is shaping up to be a decent browser and I’m impressed with the latest release, Mozilla 1.1. Mozilla beats any version of Netscape all to pieces is giving Internet Explorer a serious run for it’s money. It is well worth the download. Link via WorldTimZone

Very cool to find out this morning that The New York Times, in an article about weblogs mentioned blogs4God.com. (You’ll need to register to read the article if you haven’t already done so, but it’s free.)

OpenOffice.org, hits version 1.0.1. OpenOffice.org is the free Microsoft Office replacement and a nice one at that. If you aren’t familiar with this free office suite you may want to check out my previous article, How Does Free Sound?.

I don’t mean reading blogs I mean reading about blogs. Blogroots has realeased chapters 3 and 8 of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs with the remaining chapters due to be published online in the future. Link via Bene Diction.

Martin Roth’s Christian BlogList moves to Blogs4God.com. Martin says “this is a portal site, supervised by several moderators, that gives visitors the ability to search for blogs from a range of categories. It is an exciting development.”

Indeed it is.