-Obama Receives a Daily Devotional on His BlackBerry

President Obama told a gathering of religious news reporters today that he receives a daily devotional including a prayer from White House faith director Joshua DuBois every morning on his Blackberry.

He said that the “wonderful practice” started during his presidential campaign.

Response: This is good example of one type of internet ministry that can be helpful to thousands of people—devotionals. Particularly those that can be emailed or available for subscription. There are a lot of good ones out there already available. However, your church or ministry might want to consider making a regular devotional, prayerline, or Bible study available to your members and/or the general public on the Internet. Thousands could potentially be touched and blessed by your efforts.

Book Review: “WordPress for Dummies, 2nd Edition”

Second Edition is quite an improvement over the already excellent original. It is the essential book for those using WordPress in publishing a blog. This edition is updated to feature version 2.7+ which reflects the last major program change.

The writer introduces one to the basic WordPress blogging program. Then follows with a section covering the WordPress hosted service, next a section on how to set up a ’self-hosted’ blog with the WordPress.org program, and finally, a chapter covering the WordPress MU program used in setting up and hosting entire blogging communities.

This is a great book for all those starting out with WordPress and explains in detail everything one needs to know to properly administer and publish on a blog using the program. For those who have been around a while, it outlines procedures for adding plugins and widgets to a WordPress site—also where to find the best WP themes.

Then, for the more advanced blogger, the book gives tips and procedures for making a blog unique and shows how to customize themes and templates. In easy to understand fashion, the writer presents all the basic CSS code needed to make changes that will make your WP blog different from all the rest.

WordPress For Dummies 2nd Edition is the most complete manual for using any WP program to date– providing good detailed help no matter whether you are just starting out, been doing it for a while, or more advanced—this is now the one essential book.

If you are just starting out however, you might also consider getting: "Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read" by Scott McNulty. It is the easiest and best illustrated book on WordPress for complete beginners though it does reflect the earlier WP 2.6 rather than the current version. Nevertheless, WordPress For Dummies 2nd Edition is the best single overall book for all WP purposes.           *Top

45+ Essential WordPress Plugins

BlogPerfume Provides a list of essential WordPress plugins along with evaluations and images for each one. This is one of the best articles that I have ever seen on the subject—check it out! Lots of useful info!           *Top 

Blogging: 5 More Mistakes to Avoid Starting Out

5 more mistakes to avoid when starting out blogging—another excellent post by Melanie Nelson: “Beginning Blogger Checklist: 5 MORE Mistakes to Avoid”

Here’s the first 2:

1.  Mistake: Choosing an uninteresting or redundant blog name.

2.  Mistake: Not owning your domain name.

<<Read the rest>>

Re: WordPress 2.8 Upgrade

I just upgraded all of my WordPress blogs to 2.8 last night. As usual I have a ‘testsite’ that I try everything on first before proceeding to make sure everything works. Also, a good database backup is always in order.

WordPress has a list of plugins that are compatible with the new upgrade and also a supposed list of themes. It would be a miracle if the theme you actually use is on the list in anyway—mine never are which is why I run the new upgrade on a test site first just in case. Here’s an article that I found helpful before I proceeded:  “Wordpress 2.8 And 10 Things That You Should Know Before/After You Upgrade”

If you are upgrading from 2.7 or 2.71 you might try out new one-click ‘Automatic Upgrade’ option. It takes less than a minute to complete the whole enchilada. I literally upgraded my 10 blogs in less than a 1/2 hour—quite smooth! Of coarse if you don’t trust the easy option you can always do it the ol’ fashion way.

So far I see only a few differences from 2.71 which was a major upgrade over 2.6. Here’s what WordPress says about the new features in 2.8:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

And Even More

You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!