Categories
Cousins meta technology

A Central Family Website

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Photo by James MacDonald

Starting  right after my dad’s funeral in May I have had multiple conversations with multiple cousins and siblings wondering about creating something online where members of the various families could share news together to help us all stay connected. One suggested solution was to create a Facebook page but seeing as the common theme seems to be having a place exclusively for family news and considering that not everybody uses Facebook (despite what it sometimes seems like) the feeling has been that Facebook has two drawbacks: it leaves the news mixed in with anything shared by the many other friends any of us may have on Facebook and it completely locks out anyone who isn’t on Facebook.

While I haven’t started any of the conversations on this topic that I have participated in I have the advantage of having conceptually designed just the kind of collaborative family website that would allow family members to easily share their news to a central location. I began designing the concept a few years ago in anticipation of my own family growing up and becoming geographically dispersed. The two key features I wanted to ensure were easy content creation and easy content consumption.

Categories
meta technology

Hiding the Castle Gate

After reading a post about WordPress login security by J. Max Wilson I finally took the step of adding a security plugin to protect my site from brute force attacks. Since installing the plugin I have been made aware of the attempts to hack into the site. If I had not been warned in the original post about how such attacks are more frequent than expected I would have been worried when I started to see the frequency of such  attempts.

Over the months since installing the plugin and being made aware of the details of the attacks I was facing I have come to one conclusion about a simple trick to make sure such attacks do not compromise your site – don’t have a user named “admin.” With one exception so far, every attack on my site has tried to login as “admin” and so all such attempts have been futile since I have never had a user by that name. (The one exception was when they tried to login as “david” which also does not exist on my site.)

No matter how weak your passwords may be, an intruder will be unable to log in if they are trying a non-existent username. Of course this does nothing to protect you from the problems of server resources being consumed by repeated login attempts so I still recommend having plugins or other methods of securing your site against such intrusions but if you have a user named “admin” get rid of it. If you need help with how to do that look here. That resource should have suggestions that people with various levels of skill and access to their server can make use of but if you have direct access to the database the simplest thing is to change the username for the admin user at the database.

Categories
culture life meta politics thoughts

Limiting Politics


photo credit: RSzepan

Over the course of six years of writing online I have been asked why I focus so much on political issues and not so much on promoting a moral society. I think it’s a great question and I have thought much about it. The short answer is that my focus has been mainly on the political system and how it impacts society as well as how we can have a positive effect on the system that is currently in place.

For some time now I have found myself falling back in private political discussions to the position that all the best efforts and intentions with regard to political activity are no more than a bandaid over the ills of society and that true progress and stability in society are utterly dependent on the underlying morality or righteousness of the society being governed. It is exactly the same with a wound: a bandaid can help keep it clean and impede further infection but real healing is an internal function of the body. From outside the body the most we can do is create an environment that is conducive to healing.

Categories
culture life meta

Change is in the Air

I’ve been feeling the need to reorient my online (and offline) activity for a while now. It has been interesting to work through the process of identifying what needed to change and how. There may be some person out there who noticed yet another title change. I never was particularly comfortable with the previous title, but as I identified the kind of purpose and image I would like to pursue I am very excited about “The Zion Chronicle” as it captures what I am working toward and seems fitting. I expect to be doing a lot more here writing about life and society in a quest to identify and promote the development of Zion in my own life. Hopefully others will find some gems that can bring them to Zion (or Utopia, Shangri La, Eden, or whatever other name you might assign to your ideal for human society).

As part of this change I started using Stats Counter to have some idea of what is actually happening besides me writing and people commenting. Interestingly one of the first three searches that landed someone here at my site after I signed up for stats counter was a search for “sister beck conference talk.” I don’t know if my Canadian friend was looking for Sister Beck’s most recent conference talk or something else but they landed on a post I wrote in the aftermath of Sister Becks incredible talk “Mothers Who Know” from the October Conference of 2007.

As it had been so long since I wrote it I took the time to go read what I had written about the talk. When I read the post I was, quite frankly, disappointed that someone might see that as indicative of who I am. At the time I was so busy trying to keep my site from being overly religious in an attempt to foster an open political dialog that I said almost nothing of consequence and I completely failed to convey what an inspiring and inspired talk it was. That talk is a beacon to those wishing to establish a Zion rooted in a strong family culture and I managed to water down my reaction to the point that it sounded like little more than a breath of fresh air.

Since that time I broke my political writing off into another site and actually found that I was not comfortable maintaining the kind of political neutrality that lead me to give so little praise to such a wonderful talk. I have been pleased with the outcome of abandoning that neutrality in my political writings and now I am looking at refocusing on some spiritually significant topics here (some political others apolitical). I hope that others will never have any excuse to wonder at the depth of my feeling for the topics I address here like they might well have done when reading what I wrote in October of 2007.

Categories
culture life meta pictures technology

Speed Affects Lifestyle

Preface

I was laying in my bed at 5:00 AM (when most people should be in bed) and my brain started reviewing the images of the roads I commute on. I began to think of how such a complex road system would be entirely unnecessary if we were not able to travel at the average speed of today’s normal commute. Consider this a stream of semi-consciousness about the impact that our speed of movement has on the kind of life that each of us lives.

Then

Let’s place the year 1889 as the baseline of a slower lifestyle. I choose that year because it predates the advent of the car, it is late enough that we had the ability to move faster than horse and wagon with the use of railroads, and it’s 120 years ago – a nice round number.

In 1889 most travel was done by horse or on foot. As I recall traveling 30 miles in a day was generally about as far as a person could expect to go. In the late 1870’s the Transcontinental Express was able to average about 35 miles per hour traveling across the country. That would appear to be the functional limit of traveling speed for that time.

Now

Today people regularly travel 70 miles per hour on their daily commute (outside of rush hour) only because we have created an artificial speed limit of 65 mph on our roads – without that speed limit most vehicles could easily travel at 90 mph.

For the sake of simplification let’s consider the differences that we would see if we were to limit our physical traveling of people to 5 mph (a fast walk) with a limit of 30 miles per day, as compared to today when I can comfortably make a trip of 600 miles in a long day and regularly commute 20 miles each way to work.

Comparison

In our modern situation the only real limitation on where I work (physically) is how much time I am willing to commute – I can choose to live 50 miles or more from my place of employment so long as I am willing to take the time to commute. In the slower lifestyle if we assume that I am willing and able to spend 6 hours of my day commuting in addition to the 8 hours I need to work then I could work as much as 15 miles from home.

From a community standpoint I could not reasonably interact with anyone outside a 7 mile radius on a reagular basis in the slower community whereas in the modern-speed community I could with no more effort interact with people anywhere in a 100 mile radius. If we had an even population density over that whole area that would mean that I have access to 204 times as many people on a daily basis. If we assume that there really is a limit on how many people I can know well then there I can really only know ½ of 1% of the available information about those I can interact with on a daily basis compared to the slower society

Conclusion

I am really not trying to suggest that our society has gone all downhill since some utopian point in our past, but I do like to think about the real results of what we think of as progress. As I was looking around (on the internet – there’s a new kind of speed there) I discovered an entry in Wikipedia on car culture that focuses on cars and addresses this same mindset of “what has really changed with this progress.”

What are your thoughts on the effect of rushing about in our society?

Categories
life meta pictures technology

Kiva

For those who wish to help others but who have limited means to do so Kiva provides an opportunity to give a little (as little as $25) and help people around the world who have business plans to lift themselves up economically. Loans from individuals get pooled as necessary to fund people. I have been very impressed with this system that allows people to help others by using small means to make great things happen.

I was very happy to take the opportunity to take the code written by Connor Boyack and turn it into the Kiva plugin for WordPress so that people can raise the visibility of Kiva by displaying loans in the fundraising stage with a link to donate.

version 1.1 (2/10/2009)
More options over which loans to show

Latest Version 1.2 (2/27/2009)
You can now use a text widget with the shortcode SHOW-KIVA (enclosed in square brackets – []) to display the Kiva plugin in a widgetized sidebar.

Options include:

  • Number of posts to show.
  • Display format for loan list – Image only displays the image for each loan linked to the donation page, Both displays the image and text information, Text only displays name(linked to the donation page), business, country, and fundraising level/goal for the loan.
  • Gender – you can restrict to only show loans for men or loans for women.
  • Region – you can show loans only in one of 7 geographic regions.
  • Sector – you can only show certain types of loans such as retail or agriculture.

To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Kiva page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later). Place the call show_kiva(); anywhere in your page templates or use [ SHOW-KIVA] in a text widget.

Categories
meta technology

OpenID Enabled

I have been using OpenID for quite a while to comment on various blogs at Blogger. I never really considered it necessary to use here since I don’t require registration of any kind here – totally anonymous comments are fine becauseof great spam protection. On the other hand, people often want to leave some information and if they have an OpenID they might as well be able to use it. Because of that I finally installed the plugin called OpenID which not only allows people to use their OpenID to leave comments, but also allows me to use my own site as my OpenID – no more third-party site. (It would also allow people to make user accounts here with their OpenID’s if I allowed outsiders to register accounts on my site.)

I don’t expect that this will have any major effect on anyone, but if anyone finds OpenID useful because of this then I am ahppy to have shared. For myself, I like the fact that I have full control over my online ID and that I only have to remember my own domain name at many other sites.

Categories
culture life meta technology

It Takes a Village

Most people have heard the proverb “it takes a village to raise  a child,” especially since it was made more famous by the book “authored” by Hillary Clinton when she as the First Lady. (Personally I doubt that she “actually wrote the book” as she claims. She probably commissioned it, helped edit it for content, approved it, and wrote the acknowledgment section.) Of course, Mrs. Clinton meant that society was very important in raising a child – which is true on the surface – but the real value in the proverb is not what it means about child-rearing as what it means about society. What I take it to mean for society is that we must build societies that are large enough to provide the support necessary to raise a child to adulthood and intimate enough that each child is more than a statistic in the process. That’s the main problem with the government approach – government solutions must reduce everyone to no more than a statistic. A village, in other words, consists of those outside the immediate family who are familiar and trusted by each other (both children and adults) and who have an interest in the successful raising of the children in the village.

A perfect example of the village approach occurred last night. We went to see a performance of Annie being put on by Bountiful High. Soon after we arrived we ran into my cousins, JP and Marie Feinauer. The kids were well behaved for the first song, but then their ages began to catch up with them. Isaac started running up and down the aisle. He wasn’t very noisy, but with the light coming from the open doors at the back he cast a long (and distracting) shadow. Mariah was pretty good, except that she had to keep switching laps. Alyssa could not seem to stop herself from changing seats, bouncing, and talking (without her whisper voice). Savannah was perfectly behaved. Considering how late it was (late for young children) we decided that we needed to leave at intermission, but that was really not fair to Savannah who was enjoying the show and acting appropriately. This is where JP and Marie, members of our village, come into our story. At intermission I asked if the Feinauer’s would be willing to drive Savannah home at the end of the show. They agreed.

Because they were there, and were trusted by both us and Savannah, we were able to take the three home who were not acting appropriate to the setting while allowing Savannah to stay. Not only was this fair for all of the children, but being able to make that distinction showed in a very tangible way what behavior was appropriate at a public performance. I honestly expect that at the next public performance we attend Alyssa will act appropriately (and possibly even Mariah) because of the lesson from last night – made possible because of some help from our village.

Categories
life meta

Backfilling

When I came back to WordPress in February of 2007 the focus of the site (Recovering Technophile) was technology and social/political commentary. I imported my writing from the blogger blog I was leaving and those posts which fit that focus from my earlier blogs. After the technology portion withered and the politics portion blossomed I spun off the political blog – what had become Pursuit of Liberty – and removed most of the posts from that spinoff that had no connection to politics. Here I could now focus on personal, spiritual, and other topics without reservation. In that spirit I finally got around to importing my posts from those ancient blogs (2005 and earlier) so that I have over 100 “new” posts here (an additional 12.5%) in the last 24 hours.

Those who are curious can poke around my archives, but I suspect that I will be the only person who recognizes any benefit from this. I will be tagging and categorizing those posts (since tagging was non-existant and my categories from multiple blogs are disorganized) but I have all the old blog posts here now that I am ever likely to get (I would say all of them, but I leave open the possibility that some have been lost in all the shuffling). I will also be going through my journals and making some old journal entries available here as I see fit so my archives are going to start stretching into the past – potentially as far back as 1980. (That’s about when my earliest journal entries are – I don’t know yet what I will be making available.)

Categories
life Local meta politics

Cleaning Up

I’ve been working on a blog for Becky Edwards, my state representative, that she wants to use to communicate with constituents. As part of that I have been looking at themes and plugins to help implement the features she is looking for. That led me to Subscribe2 which offers email subscription functionality through the blog. I have decided to try that out in place of feedblitz and see how it works. I figure it will be easier to tend on my own site.

I’m hoping that it is a positive experience for my few subscribers.