Trailblazin Ministries Blog

Ramblings

Changing How I Do Things

Written by LaRosa Johnson
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Filed under: Ramblings, Tech Stuff

Admittedly, I'm a bit frustrated at the moment. I have an idea of what it is that's frustrating me, but I can't exactly put my finger on why it's bugging me so. On the one hand there's the issues I have with technology; and, on the other hand, I'm discontent with my spiritual walk. I'm trying to find a remedy to both, but I'm not sure how to go about doing it.

On the technology end of things, I guess you could say that I'm content, but not satisfied. Recently, I've been attempting to change my work flow and computer use because I continue to find myself wasting time online doing idle things. That's not a very good thing for me because I have quite a bit on my plate and I'm not being such a good steward of my time. One program I've downloaded to possibly help in this arena is more of a toy than anything else, but I'm trying to use it to help my productivity. The application is RK Launcher, which mimics the OS X Launch bar. The reason this helps me is because I've always been one who likes a clean desktop & taskbar, therefore I never let my Quick Launch toolbar have more than 5 or 6 shortcuts at any given time (which mainly consisted of FireFox, Bible apps, and Zune player). RK Launcher lets me ditch the Quick Launch toolbar and have multiple icons floating @ the top of my desktop, and is a lot cleaner and more functional than simply having desktop shortcuts. Along with this, I have also downloaded the Prism plugin for FireFox so that I can run applications such as Gmail and my Trailblazin Ministries admin panel as standalone "programs," which helps to keep me from pushing Ctrl+T to open a new tab and start surfing other websites. Both of those have seemed to help somewhat.

At the other end of this spectrum though, I'm still at odds with how I want to go about writing my devotions and which application to use in doing so. I had been using Windows Live Writer of late to do my devotions and it worked great because I was able to do all of my formatting and have it carry over with no problems whatsoever. Plus, with that, I was able to work locally (i.e. offline, although I'm always connected) and not have to depend on it being stored on some server that I could not get to for whatever reason. Well, that all changed recently when I discovered the Bibleref Markup when doing some reading up on Logos' Reftagger script. This seemed to be a great use of XHTML markup and something that would help take Trailblazin Ministries one step further in helping to push Bible standards on the web. Using this markup came with a catch though, because I could no longer use Windows Live Writer because it was just too cumbersome to have to manually enter the Bibleref tags. So, I decided to move back to using Movable Type via the browser to input my devotions, and I even found a nifty plugin that allowed me to put a button on the menu to do the Bibleref code. This wasn't so bad, but it required manually coding some things and having to work strictly online. Of course, there were other options, such as writing in Windows Live Writer (or even WORDsearch 8) and then merely cutting and pasting into the browser when I'm done, and manually marking up the tags. That too seemed cumbersome.

Update: while in the midst of writing this entry, I came across a plugin for Windows Live Writer that allows me to create my own sets of template code, which works perfectly for inserting Bibleref tags. The plus on this is that I can just highlight the text, have a couple mouse clicks, and have it prompt me to type the Bible reference. This, in all actuality, worked much better than the MT setup I had just created. So, I guess I just resolved that dilemma.

I was going to write about the spiritual side of things tonight, but I think I'll leave that for a post tomorrow or the day after. I'm just glad I got Windows Live Writer back to a place where it's workable with the new things I want to do, along with all of the other changes I'm making. I'm hoping it all works out for the best. Definitely keep your boy lifted in prayer! One!