[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on Easter morning, 1st April 2018.]
My offering today is half sermon, half reflection. As I pondered and prayed about what to speak about a couple of weeks ago a phrase came to mind. I gave God the opportunity to change His mind but I kept coming back to this particular phrase.
Something else that needs to be seen to be believed …
Some words I like:
gravitas
clarity
chutzpah
appalled
At work we have a website that uses Joomla. The site administrator has left the organisation so the site’s administration is falling to me. I haven’t had much to do with Joomla (or the work website) in the past. I had looked Joomla briefly (along with WordPress, Drupal, Hugo, Grav and Jekyll) last year when considering what sort of engine could best drive the great beast egeiro.net.
As a result, I’ve had to spend time installing/running/checking/modifying/learning Joomla over recent weeks. I’ve loaded it up on several computers locally and accessed it using XAMPP and/or WAMP. These applications run Apache, MySQL and PHP so that web applications can be installed and tested offline.
Last year I posted some brief ponderings about a few different wikis. At the time I was intent on getting to grips with TiddlyWiki. I began doing that and used it within my employment for around 5 or 6 weeks. During that time I migrated my previous notes into TiddlyWiki and began using it to take notes during meetings and to record a range of tasks and activities. Shortly after that, however, I came across what was, for me, was a major hurdle. That hurdle was accessing and updated my wiki whilst I was travelling. Each time I edited and saved the wiki it was another 1+mb of usage on my mobile plan. Even a one-letter change and save would mean the wiki in toto was being resaved to my cloud storage. As a result TiddlyWiki got shelved.
Never seen anything like this:
I really like the simplicity yet elegance of Anders Noren’s WordPress themes. Currently I’m using Hemingway. The only change I make is to show excerpts rather than full posts on the front and summary pages. This is easily done by editing the theme file directly. The change needed is to access Appearance – Editor in the admin panel, select file content.php and change line 65 (which may change) from
<?php the_content(); ?>
to
After remaining resident for some 3 1/2 weeks, the beetle in my ear was removed quickly and efficiently by the ENT specialist earlier this week.
When I first began this blog in May 2017 I wanted to avoid heavy CMS’ like WordPress, Joomla etc. I instead wanted a flat file system and chose Hugo.
I still like the idea or the philosophy behind a flat file approach, but my setup meant I could only update posts from one machine. I think this was somewhat limiting so I reconsidered my platform. After fiddling with Joomla, I have instead gone for WordPress. I have had some limited experience with WordPress in the past with a church website so it was a shallow learning curve.
I picked up a book at an Op Shop this morning called Diary of Kenneth MacRae (no point wasting all that printing on a leading “The”). As far as I’m aware I’d never previously heard of Kenneth MacRae. The thing that attracted me to the book in the first instance was that it was published by Banner of Truth. Banner of Truth is a publishing house based in England whose aim is to make available quality Christian books. They have, for instance, sought out and republished a number of books by puritan authors. The founder of Banner of Truth is Iain Murray – long term associate of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and also MLJs primary biographer.