The beta version of Bloo is about to be released. I was originally just going to do some tweaks, but ended up adding quite a few new features and really concentrating on spam protection (since many of the Bloo alpha testers are being overrun by trackback spam now. Spammers are evil).
I have added some layers of protection here – including a new SnapOn spam filter that I'm trying out tonight. It's already nabbed some trackbacks (trackback spammers are the evil gnats on the backsides of the evil comment spammers.)
I hope to get back to regular posting too. This has just sort of consumed me.
Bloo is shaping up into a decent little blog software (if I do say so myself). Miles to go still, but the functionality is expanding.
The life of discipleship is not a perfectly upward trajectory. It's messy. It's bumpy. It's confusing. There's times of joy and times of pain. There are times we feel close to God and times we feel very far away from Him. There's times we are sure of our salvation and times we wonder how God could ever be interested in scumbags like us.
You can't lose your salvation, because you didn't win it in the first place. Jesus won it for you, and once you are in His hand, nothing can snatch you out (including yourself). The Bible says nothing can separate us from the love of God; not height nor depth nor angels nor demons nor the present nor the future, etc. When it says "nothing" can separate us, I assume it means nothing can separate us.
One reason for my absence here recently: I’ve been working on the beta version of Bloo. Just adding some much-needed features and spam controls. Some I will be trying out in this space in the next few days.
I love writing software. It’s one creative outlet I have where I actually have some skill (if I may be so immodest). I’ve got some great alpha-testers too, who took a risk on using a brand-new and not quite ready for prime-time blogging tool.
Besides this, I’ve been in a pretty long and involved conversation with an atheist over on Thinklings, along with some other people. It’s been tiring, but illuminating too. It all starts at comment 210 or thereabouts. I don’t think I’ve gotten through to him at all. But we’ve been good and civil and that’s cool.
Finally, some randimosity: I don’t know what you think, or thought, of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. They were big back in the 1970s, but their success was cut short by a tragic plane crash in 1977:
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s legend is grounded in a plane crash that occurred on October 20, 1977, three days after the release of Street Survivors. A chartered Convair 240 carrying the band between shows from Greenville, South Carolina to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana crashed near a forest in McComb, Mississippi. A damaged magneto in the right engine resulted in the plane literally running out of fuel. The resulting crash killed singer/songwriter Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, vocalist Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray. Other band members were injured, some very seriously. Drummer Artimus Pyle crawled out of the plane wreckage with several broken ribs, yet ran nearly a mile to a farmhouse to try to get help. The farmer Johnny Mote, on first seeing the wild-haired blood- and mud-encrusted drummer babbling incoherently, greeted him with a (non-fatal) shotgun blast to his shoulder. Only when Mote realized that this person was connected with the plane crash he had just heard did he call for help. Allen Collins suffered two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and both Collins and Leon Wilkeson nearly had arms amputated as a result of crash injuries. Wilkeson suffered severe internal injuries and a punctured lung and had most of his teeth knocked out. Gary Rossington broke both of his arms and both of his legs in the crash, and took many months to recuperate. Leslie Hawkins sustained a concussion, broke her neck in three places and had severe facial lacerations.
Only pianist Billy Powell was relatively unhurt, but he nearly had his nose torn off and suffered severe facial lacerations.
The thing about the shotgun blast just blows me away (no pun intended). That and the “relatively unhurt, but he nearly had his nose torn off” line about Billy Powell. That’s nuts.
Lynyrd Skynyrd was a band of good ol’ southern boys (who named their band after their old gym teacher), and I like their music. They actually put out anti-drug and anti-gun songs back then, which was pretty unusual (especially the anti-drug ones).
If you’ve never heard the song Freebird, you might take a look at the youtube video below. Freebird is a poignant song, and it ends on one of the best electric guitar arrangements ever. Here they are live in Oakland in 1977.
I'm testing this now here on Out of the Bloo – will be releasing this as well to all my loyal alpha testers soon, after I've kicked the tires a bit.
The part you can't see: I'm composing this post in a Rich Text editor, rather than posting in html. I'm using the new RichTextPostEditor SnapOn that I've created, which is a wrapper to the excellent TinyMCE rich text editor.
The part you can see: You can get a taste of it yourself by commenting on this post (since I've also implemented it in the comments). So, if HTML isn't your bag, you can get those nifty editing features you're used to in your fav word processing software, right here on lil ol' Bloo!
Both the Post Rich Text editor and the Comments Rich Text editor are SnapOns (of course), so I can enable them or disable them at will.
Something else that I've added (this is for Phil at Brandywine Books) is the "More" functionality on posts, so that long posts can be shortened with a "Read the rest of this entry link", like so:
Tonight I created a new theme; one that looks suspiciously like a blog-friend’s theme, but hopefully she doesn’t mind and won’t get her marine-husband to come over here and snap me like a twig for pilfering her excellent site’s look and feel.
I was getting tired of the old look.
I figure this one will scare most of my three readers away, as it features a picture of my homely mug in the banner.
In the meantime, I continue to work on a major refactoring of Bloo in advance of the beta release, continue to do my day job, continue to delay the writing of Molly’s birthday poem (sorry sweetie! It’s coming!), continue – at the moment – to listen to my daughter Bethany’s loud and raucous slumber party – why do they call them slumber parties? There’s very little slumbering going on I tells ye!
I also continuously wonder why God blesses me so much.
I’m going to eat a bowl of cereal. G’night blogosphere. God loves you!
I’m only going to leave it on for a day. And I know it’s spelled wrong (should be “smileys”) but I’m leaving it the way it is out of pique. Because cute smileys make me want to do this:
I now have a spellchecker for comments. Based on the excellent GoogieSpell.
This will be a standard SnapOn delivered with Bloo alpha build 9 and later. Build 9 is coming out in a few days.
Also added recently is a Scripturizer, which converts all Bible references in posts into links to the ESV bible website. This was based on a handy javascript found here.
As you may already know, there are some excellent blogs represented in my bloogroll.
And, now that I’ve upgraded Bloo to alpha build 9, it’s easier than ever for you to check them out. Just click on the “View Bloogroll Posts” in the sidebar and you’ll see the latest 30 posts from bloggers in my bloogroll. Which is a lot cooler than reading what I write! And who knows? You might see something you just wrote.
I’m seriously pumped about this enhancement. It took awhile to get it the way I wanted it. But I’m finally there.
Go ahead and click that link. C’mon, you know you want to!
(to my alpha testers – I’ll be rolling this release out in the next few days, after I’ve kicked the tires a bit. We’re about to go beta!)
I have upgraded to Bloo build 8. One new feature in this build is the SimpleHumanCheck spam filter. It’s mindless and probably really irritating, but I’m putting it out there as a stopgap because I’m being inundated with spam.
If you leave a comment, you will be asked a question only a human being (in theory) can answer. This is probably pretty easy to crack if some spammer wants to do so, but since I can change the questions around (heh heh) I can stay a step ahead of them.
Note my overconfident air . . . pride goes before the fall, of course. So I’ll probably get swamped.
I just created a new theme called “Paper Towel”. It’s now the default.
This was the first ever Bloo theme (that I know of) created on the fly from within Bloo. The ability to create themes on the fly is one of the major enhancements in the latest version of Bloo (alpha build 7).
It’s still confusing to do, though, and the docs are non-existent. So I think I’ve scared off the other alpha testers from trying their hand at theme-creation.
Plus I found a few bugs that have to be gotten around for now. And fixed soon. *sigh*
But, all that being said, I kind of dig this latest theme. Hope it’s ok on your eyes as well.
I’ve upgraded this blog to Bloo alpha version 7. The other alpha blogs will follow soon – thought I’d kick the tires here first.
There’s not much new to see on your end – a lot of the enhancements are on the back-end of the blog (administrative sections). But I did add the ESV Daily Passage SnapOn (you can see it in the sidebar). Aside from that, this version allows the blog administrators to create new themes on the fly, so I think I’ll create one pretty soon here, just for the hoo-hah of it. 😉
If you’re interested in testing this blog software out, you can download it and install it yourself (just go to my Sourceforge Project page. I also have space for another blog or two here at outofthebloo – so if you’d like to alpha test let me know (leave me a message in the comments).
