Phil Gons

Bible & Tech

You are here: Home / Archives for Technology

Technology

How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts

by

Greek Manuscript

If you use Greek and Hebrew in your blog posts, here’s a tip that will help you make it look good and give you the ability to make changes across your entire site in just a few seconds. There are two main things you need to do.

Step 1: Add Styles to Your Style Sheet

The first thing you need to do is find your style sheet. Your style sheet is the global control for how your site looks—text, colors, images, and more. If you’re familiar with creating styles in a word processing program like Microsoft Word, then you already understand the concept. You create and define a style, apply it to various units of text, and then when you edit that style in your style sheet, all of the text tagged with the style is instantly updated.

Find Your Style Sheet

If you use the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can find your style sheet in the admin panel by going to Appearance > Editor. Your style sheet is most likely named style.css. Click on it to load it, and then scroll to the bottom to add your new styles.1 You can access your style sheet via FTP2 by going to /public_html/wp-content/themes/{your-theme-name}/style.css. I typically use Dreamweaver to open and edit my style sheet. Other blogging platforms should be pretty similar.

[Read more…] about How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts
  1. Some themes provide you with a secondary style sheet for adding your custom styles so you don’t lose them when you upgrade your theme. In these cases, you might be looking for a custom.css file instead. [↩]
  2. FileZilla is a good free FTP client for Windows. [↩]

Open an ING Checking or Savings, Get $25

by

ING DirectFor the last two-and-a-half years I’ve been using ING Direct as my primary bank for checking and savings. They offer lots of great benefits, and they’re all free. Since I pay just about everything online, I have less and less need for a traditional bank. In addition to paying nearly all of my bills, I can send money to people via direct bank transfer or paper check (that they send postage paid). I can even mail most checks in and have them deposited in a couple of days.1 That’s the single reason I keep a traditional checking account. I deposit the few checks and occasional cash I get into a checking account with Chase and use ING’s website to move money to and from any of my accounts—again, completely free of charge.

If you’re looking for a new checking or savings account, I’d encourage you to check out ING Direct. If you open an account with as little as $250 by the end of the month through my referral link, you’ll get $25 deposited into your new account. In full disclosure, I’ll also get $20. :)

Send me an email and let me know if you’re interested in opening a checking or savings account, and I’ll send you the referral email.

  1. I say most, because some checks can’t be deposited. [↩]

Subscribe to Any Page with Google Reader

by

Have you ever come across a webpage that you wanted to subscribe to in your RSS reader only to be disappointed to discover that it didn’t have an RSS feed? Perhaps it’s the occasional “blog”1 that for some strange reason lacks RSS (e.g., Tim Keller’s or David Alan Black’s).

Well, Google Reader has come to the rescue with a new feature that allows you to subscribe to any page even if it lacks an RSS feed. Simply click on the “Add a subscription” button and input the URL for the page that you want to subscribe to. If Google Reader can’t find an RSS feed, it will offer to create one.

Create a Feed in Google Reader

Once Google creates a feed for that page, the next person who tries to subscribe to that same page will be able to do so automatically without being asked if they want to have Google create a feed.

What pages are you going to start subscribing to now that you couldn’t before?

HT: Mashable

  1. I put quotes around it because I’m not sure I’m willing to recognize a site without an RSS feed as a true blog. I’m half joking. [↩]

Wasting Time with Technology

by

Josh Harris shares some good and convicting thoughts about wasting time with technology.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EzxmMvbBilM

I need to be far more intentional about how many times a day I check email, Twitter, and Google Reader. Life is fragile, and every moment is a gift from God to use for His glory and the good of His people. Thanks, Josh, for this needed reminder.

Ref.ly Makes Sharing the Bible Easier

by

Logos Bible Software just launched a new website called ref.ly (think bit.ly). It allows you to share Bible verses as links via Twitter and other places where you have a limited number of characters and want to keep the URL as short as possible.

Enter a Bible reference, and ref.ly will instantly generate a short URL linking to the passage at Bible.Logos.com. Since ref.ly uses Bible references to create the URL structure rather than a random bunch of characters like most URL shorteners, you can create the short URLs yourself without having to visit the site every time.

[Read more…] about Ref.ly Makes Sharing the Bible Easier

OpenLibrary.org: “Every Book Ever Published”

by

I knew that would get your attention.

Internet Archive, a site I use regularly for researching public domain books, just announced their newest project: OpenLibrary.org. Here’s the site’s description:

One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.

To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

According to the homepage, the current numbers are 22,845,290 book entries and 1,064,822 books with full text.

[Read more…] about OpenLibrary.org: “Every Book Ever Published”

MS Word Tip: How to Replace Hyphens with En Dashes

by

Though most people don’t know (or care when told), the correct character to use for a range of numbers is the en dash (–), not the hyphen (-). Even if you’re committed to using en dashes between digits, hyphens are a tad easier to type,1 making a find and replace necessary at some point. If you’re diligent and use the en dash faithfully, you will undoubtedly get a rogue hyphen in there somewhere if you do any copying and pasting from the internet or other documents that don’t consistently use the correct character.

A simple find and replace (- for –) would do the trick—if you wanted to replace all hyphens with en dashes. But you don’t want to do this, since hyphens in hyphenated words are correct. :) Alternatively, you could run that query but, instead of replacing them all at once, replace one at a time only the ones that appear between digits. But this could be time consuming on a large document like a dissertation. Another option would be to set up a query to find 0-0 and replace it with 0–0, then 0-1 with 0–1 and so forth, but that would require 100 different searches and probably take longer than the previous method! The previous method could probably be simplified by dropping the second digit since there aren’t likely to be any instances when you’d have a digit followed by a hyphen not followed by another digit. That would make only 10 find-and-replace queries. So this is as least doable, though still not ideal.

Fortunately, there is a better solution than any of these.

[Read more…] about MS Word Tip: How to Replace Hyphens with En Dashes
  1. To type an en dash in Word, you can either use the default key combination Ctrl + – (the one on the keypad) or create your own shortcut. My shortcut is Ctrl + – (the one on the main part of the keyboard). [↩]

Get CrossOver from CodeWeavers Free—One Day Only!

by

CrossOver Mac is one of the several ways to run Windows applications on a Mac. The advantage that it has over Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or Boot Camp is that it doesn’t require a copy of Windows. The downside is that not all applications will work.

CrossOver Linux is a customized, commercial version of Wine, the popular software that allows you to run many Windows applications on Linux (e.g., Ubuntu, et al.).

On October 28, 2008, the folks at CodeWeavers are making either of these products—in its downloadable, professional version—free of charge for one day only (though I successfully downloaded it tonight at at 8:00 PM PST).

Here’s what they say,

We are giving away all of our software for free on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008. This is a fully working, fully supported copy of either CrossOver Mac Professional, or CrossOver Linux Professional. No hooks, tricks, timebombs, or gimmicks: it’s the real deal.

[Read more…] about Get CrossOver from CodeWeavers Free—One Day Only!