arotau

I’ve been planning to do some software updates to my web server for a while. Over the last couple of days I’ve been slowly doing bits and pieces - slowly because I had an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome and can’t use both hands. So far I’ve done the following:

• Upgraded Wordpress to the latest version - fairly simple process.
• Automated backups of the site and databases.
• Added Xcache to my PHP installation, which Ubuntu makes a very simple process.
• Installed Awstats - again very simple under Ubuntu.
• Added Google analytics, just to try for a while, using the Google Analyticator WP plugin.
• Added the Google XML sitemap generator WP plugin - Google doesn’t seem to have picked this up yet.
• Switched my web server from Apache to Cherokee. Cherokee is designed to be small and fast, and as I’ve been having some memory usage issues on the server I decided to give it a try. It’s a bit of a pain to get working with Wordpress, but I eventually figured out the correct redirection rules and got it up and running. Pages are now being served much faster, and memory usage on the machine is significantly lower.
• Added the TanTan Flickr plugin for Wordpress, which seems to be better maintained than Falbum (which I was using previously).

I’ve been working on a web site for the last couple of weeks for a book that will shortly be published by IVP called Pierced for our transgressions. One of the authors is a friend of mine called Andrew Sach, and it’s on the subject of penal substitution.

Today I sat the second of my regulatory exams, on securities and financial derivatives. The results will come through on Thursday, but I’m being cautious about whether I passed or not at the moment as having a cold over the weekend didn’t exactly help me study effectively. Tomorrow might be a bit of a shock to the system as I switch back to getting up at 6am.

Interesting to see that The Register’s ad hosting company was serving up ads containing a virus that could infect Internet Explorer — just browsing a popular news website could, through no fault of theirs, result in your PC being infected! Sounds like yet another reason to follow CERT’s advice and switch to Firefox.

People following the Steve Chalke debate might be interested in reading the statement recently released by the Evangelical Alliance. The statement concludes:

For these reasons, we do not believe that penal substitutionary atonement can be rejected as it is rejected in The Lost Message of Jesus, and as Steve has persisted in rejecting it since. While affirming the many gifts which Steve has to offer, we urge him, as a much-loved brother in Christ, to reconsider both the substance and style of his recently expressed views on this matter.

About 60% of the people who visit this site use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as their web browser. If you’re one of those people, you might want to have a look at Firefox, a free web browser with better security and features than IE. (Note that it’s free — I’m not trying to sell Firefox, I just think it’s better!) It’s not a big download, and if you’re like most people then once you’ve tried it you won’t want to switch back to Internet Explorer. Two of its best features are tabbed browsing and popup blocking. Have a look at the full list of features and download it if you think it looks good.

If you’re using Gnome 2.8 and the Firefox web browser then you might like Industrial for Firefox, a new Firefox theme. Note that it looks terrible on Windows though.