From the middle of May, I'm taking sabbatical for 3 months. This is something that the Church of England encourages all its ordained ministers to do, somewhere between every 7 and 10 years. It's an opportunity to recharge, to refresh, to wind down, to have new ideas, to study, to rekindle the love for the Lord that so easily fades with the pressures of ministry day-in day-out.
I have a number of things planned.
Earlier this week, our Deanery Synod had an excellent 45 minute presentation from one of the clergy in our deanery, Revd Dr Lorraine Turner. Lorraine's doctoral thesis was on the subject of bullying as experienced by clergy, and her subject with us was bullying.
Clearly, 45 minutes is far too short a time for anything other than the most cursive of introductions, especially for someone who has studied this with the thoroughness required for a PhD. Nevertheless, it was extremely helpful, for reasons including the following:
This article offers a simple tool and some instructions to help anyone with the following problem: You've obtained a copy of Microsoft Office (for Windows) via Microsoft's charity donation scheme, only to discover that you have to use their Volume Licensing system to install it. This means that you don't get a nice, easy setup wizard to follow; instead, you find the process less than straight forward for those who don't live and breathe technology.
On 31st January 2014, I paid £2.42 to Google Play for a copy of Swype Keyboard. (That link is broken, unless you too bought it). At that time, it was by far the best onscreen Android keyboard that lets you trace the word you're typing with your finger.
It is a great privilege indeed to belong to a Christian church, and so to the Christian church.
This last weekend, I reached the milestone of 10 years serving the churches here in Kemsing and Woodlands, also a great privilege.
That gives me cause to look back on the many churches I have belonged to over the years. Each made its mark in different ways, and the person I am today is undoubtedly shaped by the time spent in those churches.
I'm taking a 3 month sabbatical starting in May. This is something many Christian ministers find helpful. The Diocese of Rochester, within which I serve, used to recommend this every 7 years (although I see that their guidance now says 10 years).
Control panels make a web server a sinch to use. If you sign up for shared web hosting, you'll be given a login for the control panel to manage just your account. Even if you run a whole server (virtual or dedicated) there are great advantages to using a control panel. Some control panels are free (like VirtualMin), and others you have to pay for (like cPanel).
After my earlier post on setting up Lighttpd for simple sites, I thought I'd follow up with how to add SSL / TLS / https to your lighttpd setup. Increasingly, search engines and browsers are encouraging the use of https for all websites, so this is becoming more important. These instructions continue to be for Debian (or suitably similar) flavours of Linux.
In February 2017, General Synod refused to take note of a report by the House of Bishops on human sexuality. I wrote on this at the time: It really is time to choose.
From time to time, I want to run a simple website on a server as cheaply and simply as possible.
That usually means running on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with as little memory as possible. It therefore means not using a web hosting control panel such as cPanel, because that comes with its own RAM requirements (usually, 1 GB as an absolute minimum) and may have license fees as well.
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