Technology

It's now over three years since I first started using the services of Mollom to keep spam off the comments and e-mails from this site.

I posted about it at the time, but at that moment Mollom was yet to block a single item of real spam on the site. As I said, the jury was still out as to how effective it is.

The Software section of this website has been somewhat neglected of late. It is intended to be a directory of software that I have written, or that I use and would like to recommend.

I've just discovered (a little late in the day), that Opera Mini 6 came out a couple of months back. So I've added an entry for it. A big improvement on the web browser that ships with most mobile phones or portable devices, and I highly recommend it!

Back in June, I changed my web hosting provider.

As there are a fair few pitfalls to choosing a new web host, I thought I'd put this post up here to help others through the issues. I'm sure there are more worthwhile tips out there, so please free free to leave a comment.

As this has turned into a fairly lengthy post, let's start with:

Contents

1. Separate domain registration and hosting
2. Choose the country for your web servers to be in
3. Read the reviews of others

I've recently been experimenting with a technique known as HDR Photography, short for High Dynamic Range.

Here's the idea: Not long after I arrived in Kemsing, I took a photograph of the interior of the church to use on some printed materials. I used an ordinary digital camera, and took a single photograph. The result is below:

I've discovered a relatively new, and absolutely brilliant website for anyone involved in picking hymns for congregational use.

Visit http://www.hymnary.org

It is an online database containing an index of texts and tunes of all the hymns found in most of the major hymnals, developed by the same people behind Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Where MIDI files of tunes are available online, there is a link (so you can hear the tune). You'll get the hymn number in all the major hymnals too. You can search for tunes by name, composer or meter; you can search for hymn texts by title, by a full-text search, or by Scripture reference. Really, really useful stuff.

(It also happens to be a wonderful example of the CMS Drupal in action. There is no direct credit to Drupal on the site. I can tell that it's a Drupal site, but the fact is well-hidden by the good theming and the many custom features.)