An update about what’s been happening with car related stuff:

• Although I didn’t post it on here, I had problems with the insurance company regarding the settlement for my car. I got a call today, and after consideration (read: three weeks of waiting), the good news is that they will pay out the full insured amount for the car!
• In the mean time, I was given another car (from someone I don’t even know)! A slight downgrade from the ‘96 Rover I had, I’m now driving an ‘88 Toyota Corona.
• My current line of thinking is that I will not use the insurance money to buy a new car, but stick with the Corona for now. The insurance money will go into my staff ministry account, which I’ll use so that I can be on campus as soon as it starts, giving me some time to raise the monthly financial support that I need. This means I can get a good start to the year.

That’s about it for now.

Quite literally. Right before the New Year, I saw a Wordpress update was available, and decided to install it. All went well until I went to delete the old files that were no longer needed. And then I typed something ever so slightly wrong into the command line… an extra asterisk ensured that the contents of the public_html/ directory on my website disappeared.

After a restored backup, everything should be back to normal. I would have wished you a happy new year before now, but without a working blog that wasn’t really possible. Anyway, happy new year!

I’ve taken some time to update and add to several parts of this site. The about page has been updated, and contact information separated into it’s own page finally.

I’ve also taken the time to integrate the online version of my presentation about work — Serving With Student Life — into this site. Expect more updates on this in the near future (for now it has just been a transfer of information with minor changes, from the previously hosted-elsewhere version).

I’ve taken the time to modify this site so that posts now include tags. A tag cloud is available in the right-hand column. I may modify things slightly as time goes on, depending on how this ends up working out.

For anyone interested, two pages I found useful for getting this up and running were:

How to add tags to your current theme
Wordpress tag cloud (Wordpress Codex)

For those of you with your own blogs, do you tag? Having recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 to power this site, I’m considering enabling tagging (the ability to tag my posts with keywords, and then have a tag cloud or some such to allow searching by tag). But I’m wondering if it’s really worth it? I mean, with a simple site such as this — where a few categories and a search box are provided — is there any need for tags? One advantage I can see for tags is that having a tag cloud can spark the interest of a user, potentially bringing them to read posts that they otherwise wouldn’t have read. What do you think?

Anyone who still reads this blog would tell me that it has been way too long since I last updated. I would consider that to be a true statement.

To keep people up to date: Yes, I still intend to continue my series on “Online MPD Presentations” (a series aimed at CCC staff). Since I have a very busy next week or so, I’m not sure when exactly my next post (in general, not just the MPD series) will be, but my intentions are that it will not be too far away! (Realise of course that intentions are merely that…)

Tune In, the North Island student conference begins today! I’m really looking forward to this week (yes, it runs for an entire week!), which will be full of both fun and learning. Personally, I’m in charge of the Day of Outreach (we talk to residents of Matamata about spiritual things, and get to share the gospel with them!), as well as photography. I’m also giving two talks, one on sharing the gospel, and one on living in the grace of God. I look forward to sharing with you how the conference goes upon my return!

With this in mind, I won’t be blogging for the next week. I do intend to continue my series about online support presentations when I come back.

Have a great week!

I was checking out the stats for subscriptions to my RSS feed today. It turns out that there are 5 of you who are getting updated when I post, through apps like Google Reader etc. While I can take some guesses as to who you are, I think it would be better if you’d pop over here and introduce yourselves. So, why not take a minute now and tell us who you are in the comments of this post?!

After many months of never getting around to it, Digitalfishbowl has finally been relaunched. If you’ve been here before, you may notice that I haven’t copied over any of the old content; and indeed I have decided not to simply chuck in all the stuff that was here before. Rather, I decided that it would be nice to start afresh. (That doesn’t mean that some of the old content won’t make it’s way back over time however).

With the new site you can expect posts along the following lines:

• Things God has been teaching me.
• Things God is doing at Waikato University (where I work).
• Web/tech stuff as it relates to ministry, or at least aimed for people who are involved with both ministry and web technologies.

Feel free to comment on content as it appears; I hope that you find this site useful in some way!