OK, now that I’ve trimmed the blogroll a bit, it’s time to add to it. Here are a few new sites to the list:
Stories about God
This site from Mike Boyink has enormous potential, I think. It’s in a bit of a slump right now, as Mike has admitted, but it’s a tremendous idea. Even though there’s been no new content since December, I’m linking it to show my support for the site and hoping that others will be inspired to go tell their stories. Not to mention to hopefully prod Mike to put some effort into it (hint, hint) We all have stories. Stories that will inspire others and shine the light on God’s amazing goodness. Those stories need to be told.
Boyink Interactive
Mike Boyink’s business site and blog about web design. Mike wrote an amazing piece at Heal Your Church Website on what a church web site should be a while back (which lead to Stories about God). I’ve been popping in his site occasionally ever since. He’s a car nut too, with a ’64 Jeep CJ6 and a ’66 Rambler.
Stephen Meeks
Stephen is a frequent contributer to the New Wineskins blog and I love his posts. So I looked him up and found that he had a blog of his own. He lives on a farm and writes a lot about the spiritual insights gained from that experience.
Preacher Mike
I’m probably one of the last Church of Christ bloggers to link to Mike Cope’s blog. I see his name everywhere on COC blogs and he’s always spoken of with respect. He’s the preaching minister (I think) at the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas.
Nothing Important To.us
This is the blog of fellow ICOC member from the north east, Jeff Morris – aka Danny Kaye. Jeff’s his real name, but he tends to comment as Danny at different blogs. I came across Jeff’s blog not through any ICOC or COC channels, but from seeing his comments at the Thinklings.
Unveiled Face
Mick is from Australia and a member of an ICOC church, or at least what used to be one. He comes by here every now and again to leave a comment. What’s nice about his blog is that he’s blended into the blog community. His site does not (unlike mine to often) deal with ICOC issues nor does he talk about it much. He’s building bridges into the rest of the community, which is a good thing I think.
True Delta
I came across this via Autoblog and I love his blunt analysis of consumer automotive research like Consumer Reports and JD Power. He’s started an ambitious effort at a new way of gathering and analyzing automotive reliability data. Sounds promising. He’s also written over 400 reviews, mostly of cars, at epinions.
That’s enough for now.

Well, now that things are back to normal here with the new host, I need to do some house cleaning. Several sites on the blogroll are no longer active for various resaons, so I’ve removed them.
My friend Paul (pfredy) has given up on his personal blog. You can still find him at his poetry blog, The Pen Master. He’s been writing there since last July.
Paul’s buddy and long time salguod.net JohnE, seems to have given up his blog. He hasn’t written anything there since mid-February. I hope I’m wrong and he’ll be back.
The Happy Husband is still at it, but he’s busier being a new dad than blogging about marraige. When I found his site, it sounded great, a blog that “celebrates marraige”. But shortly after I added them to the blogroll, he and his wife had a baby. His blog has, understandably, taken a back seat. IN fact, just today he announced that updates will be few, so I’m taking off the roll for now.
Lastly, I’ve taken down A Ministry of Reconcilliation. It seems that they’ve moved on to other things as they’ve had only two posts since late November.
I have some new links to put up, but that will have to wait until later.

OK, I guess I may have been a bit premature in declaring that everything was back to normal. I came home today and fired up my laptop and the old site appeared. Huh? Maria, on her laptop in the same room, on the same internet connection, fired up her browser and got the new one. OK, that’s weird, let’s reboot. After the re-boot, I got the new one again. It seems that there are still a few computers on the web that haven’t gotten the memo that salguod.net has moved yet.
Anyway, if you are just now discovering that the site is up and running, make sure you scroll down to see what else is new. I thought it was live for a couple of days now, and I’ve been posting away. OK, well, I’ve posted twice, but they were good. Honest!

(Subscribers: This link won’t work when you get this. Be patient and keep trying.)
Well, I’m back. The migration is complete and comments are open again. With the new host, there should be no more 500 errors when making comments, trackbacks should work and the right hand menu will update automatically again.
Changing hosts is a rather daunting job. Based on my experience with this move, I can’t recommend Total Choice Hosting highly enough. I asked a ton of basic, stupid questions on their family forums, and they responded quickly and graciously. I had to create a couple help tickets as well and they were resolved quickly. I’m much, much happier than I was with the old guys.
Hopefully everything will go smoothly, but let me know if you find any issues.

This is just a post to say that there likely won’t be many posts in the near future. I’ve signed up with TCH and need to spend some time migrating my blog to their servers. I’ve gotta re-install Moveable Type and all my plug ins, back up my database and import it into the new blog and then make sure it all works. Any time I would have spent blogging will go into that.
I plan on keeping up my [Ephesians] series, although as Monday comes to a close I’m now two chapters behind, but maybe not much else. I’m going to do chapters 3-4 tomorrow, I promise.
I’m off to play with MySQL, cmod, FTP, CGI and the like. Wish me luck.

Well, I’ve finally chosen a new host. Actually had them picked out for a week or two. I’ve been dragging my feet because this is likely to be a big pain. I’m going to have to re-install MT and all my plugins, upload the other files (images and stuff) and then upload the MySQL database. If my current host used cPanel, this would be much much easier. But they do not.
Thanks for all the suggestions a while back, I looked at both pair.com and ixwebhosting.com. Pair is actually a MT Hosting Partner, but they were also pricey. The most comparable plan to what I’ve got now, in terms of disk space, bandwidth and functionality was over $21 per month and that did not include the $6.95 per month MT add on. Too much. Ixwebhosting was a bargain, but I was not convinced that they knew MT at all, let alone enough to help me if I had issues.
So I’ve decided on Total Choice Hosting. I’m getting unlimited email accounts, MySQL databases and FTP logins, 850 MB of disk space (I’ve got 500 now), 20 GB monthly data transfer[UPDATE: I haven’t even posted this yet and I find out that they are about to upgrade the bandwidth and disk space on all plans. Cool.] and 2 domains registered for less than $6.50 per month. They’ve got MT instalation instructions on their site as well as an active Family Forums with plenty of TCH representatives who quickly respond to questions. They’ve also got a good reputation at the MT support forums, which is where I learned of them.
I’m not going to get into the thick of the changeover until next week, although I may do the actual sign up sooner. I’ve also decided to purchase a new domain, salgoud.net, since it seems spelling Douglas backward isn’t as easy as I had thought it would be.
Salguod.net: Friend of mis-spellers and bad typists alike.

I’m having some issues with my host right now. I’m getting a lot of 500 errors when doing anything with the site, including posting comments. I’ve got a support request into my host (1 and 1) on it, but I’m not holding my breath for a resolution. They’ve been less than helpful in the past. Even though my hosting is paid up through the end of the year (I’ve got a 3 year free promotional plan), I’m actively looking for a new host now. You’d think a free introduction would give them an opportunity to shine and win you over. Not in this case.
What that means is sometimes the ‘recent comments’ list doesn’t update and you may get an error when posting a comment. Hopefully I’ll get it resolved soon.
Meanwhile, I’m 9 comments away from 1,000 comments. Who will be the lucky one to post the 1,000th comment? Hurry, there may be a prize! (Not likely. 🙂 )

One of the things lost on my recent upgrade to MT 3.2 was EasyComments, the comment formatting buttons and real time preview. Well, I took some time this week and put them back in, with some tweaks.

• First, I put the real time preview next to the comment entry box so you can more easily see it when you type. The old preview was below the entry box and got lost under the bottom of the window.
• Because of the narrower box, I simplified the buttons a bit. I changed the button text to be shorter and eliminated the ‘close all’ buttons to make each row shorter.

I enjoy this stuff because I have to play around to figure it out and therefore I learn some HTML and CSS along the way. Fun.
If you want EasyComments for your blog, you can grab a zip file of EasyComments 0.2 (that’s just like the old version with all the buttons), here. It’s made with Movable Type in mind, but it really should work on any web page with a comment form. Your mileage may vary.
I may refine it some in the future, so if there’s something you’d like to see it do that it doesn’t, let me know. The one thing I’m thinking of is figuring out how to make it more intuitive for folks who don’t know HTML, especially the lists. That would require learning a bit more java script so I really understand how this works

Well, it’s time to update that blogroll again. A bunch of changes. Some sites to add and some sites to remove.
Jared, of Thinklings fame, has given up blogging for this year. Well, mostly, sort of. He’s still lurking at The Thinklings, and can’t seem to resist the occassional post and comment, but his two solo blogs, Mysterium Tremendum and Shizuka Blog are not being updated. I had just added them back in a couple of months ago after his last hiatus, but now they come off again. Hopefully he gets novel #1 published and novel #2 finished and he’ll be back soon.
I’ve also removed Didymus, the blog of Thomas Rasmussen. He announced that he was going to close it down soon. He also blogs at Ministry of Reconciliation, although updates there have been non-existent of late. (What’s up guys?)
Since I don’t use the Scode plugin anymore and that version is outdated (improved version for MT 3.2 here), I’ve removed it too.
I’ve sadly removed the link to Heal Your Church Web Site. It seems Mean Dean is too busy with Blogs4God to finish (start?) his planned move to Word Press there. I miss his snarky take on the church’s presence on the web and his helpful, if sometimes inscrutible, hints on web design. [Nevermind. He’s back. Three days after I de-linked him, he’s back. Who knew I had such power?] I’ve left the links to his awesome tools, the Email Obfuscator and Scripturizer.
Speaking of Mean Dean and Blogs4God, I’ve added it to the blogroll. It’s an agregator of a large number of Christian blogs, including mine.
I’ve also added the Dilbert Blog, run by Dilbert author Scott Adams. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve lived at least some of Dilbert. I like Scott’s humor and his blatant honesty. Be warned, it’s not always the cleanest or the kindest discussions in the comments, but not too bad.
Also in the ‘Fun Stuff’ category, I’ve added a link to Quest Experiences. This is the online business of a friend at church, Joe Dean. He designs and sells kits for themed parties, scavenger and treasure hunts. They are all PDF downloads and are pretty inexpensive.
I’ve also added MTLookup to the Website Resources section. It indexes a bunch of sites that are dedicated to Movable Type plugins, tutorials and articles. Want to find out what folks who know Moveable Type have written about it? Go there to search.
Also new in that section is Planet Movable Type. It’s similar to MTLookup, except that it aggregates several MT themed blogs onto one page. It kinda makes the other MT blog links (Learning Movable Type & Movalog) irrelevant, but I’m going to leave them up for now.
I guess that’s it for now. 😀

When I first installed MT 3.2 about six wees ago, I wasn’t real impressed with the new anti-spam plugin bundled with it, SpamLookup. The instructions are very sparse and not clear at all and the keyword moderation had no keywords in it, I had to go to a WordPress site to get a list. I had to dig around the web to figure out how it works and how to configure it, this article at Learning Moveable Type helped a bunch. As the days went on it seemed like it wasn’t really doing it’s job as a few comments were getting through. Not too much trackback spam, though, but wait until the spam bots re-discovered my site now that the secret code was gone.
Little did I know that it was working hard without me even knowing it. There are two kinds of spam flags in SpamLookup, Moderation and Junk. If a comment or trackback is moderated, I get an email. If it’s junk, however, I get no notice. Checking my site today I found something like 250 junk comments and nearly 1,200 junked trackbacks. That’s over 30 pieces of spam silently junked every day for the past six weeks. In fact, between deeting them at lunch and typing this now, SpamLookup blocked 50 more trackbacks and one comment. Wow.
I had thought I was going to end up going back to the secret code thing (which was highly effective) but now I see no need.