Phil Gons

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Writing Standards for the Web

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The Yahoo! Style GuideIs it e-mail or email, Internet or internet, Web site, Website, or website? In a new book that deals with standards for writing online, Yahoo addresses these questions and many more. Coming in at 528 pages, The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World is available for pre-order from Amazon for $14.84 and is scheduled to ship on July 6. Some of the content is also available online, as well as supplementary content not available in the book.

Standard guides like The Associated Press Stylebook1 and The Chicago Manual of Style will remain useful and worth consulting. But there’s a lot these tried and true guides don’t cover, and I find them to be a tad dated when it comes to keeping up with the fast-paced world of the Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. For example, AP just recently switched from Web site to website.

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  1. The new 2010 edition isn’t available at Amazon yet. [↩]

How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts

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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.

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  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. [↩]

Subscribe to Any Page with Google Reader

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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. [↩]

Ref.ly Makes Sharing the Bible Easier

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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.

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OpenLibrary.org: “Every Book Ever Published”

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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.

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GAudi: Google’s Audio Indexing

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Google’s new audio indexing, GAudi, looks very promising. Finally the ability to find what you’re looking for in audio or video without listening to the whole thing! This has huge potential for sermons and lectures and could really make audio and video more accessible sources for academic research.

I wish I had access to this technology when I was running down this quote.

Check it out: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.

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Customer Appreciation Sale at CVBBS.com

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Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service is a wonderful place for picking up Reformed books. They carry a wide variety of titles and offer very competitive prices.

Right now they have their annual Customer Appreciation Sale going on. Save 10% on your order, and get free shipping with a $50+ purchase.

Christian Greetings!

Just a quick reminder that our Customer Appreciation Sale starts tomorrow, Wednesday, September 3, 2008, and runs thru Thursday, September 4th. This is your chance to save an extra 10% off our already discounted prices on everything we carry and this time there is an added incentive as well. We are continuing our popular free shipping offer for orders over $50 in addition to the extra discount savings. So be ready tomorrow for discounts on top of discounts and free shipping besides at www.cvbbs.com.

We thank you for your continued support and patronage.

Todd Jennings
cvbbs

They don’t always beat Amazon, but they’re worth checking out.