Working in IT and being in conservative Christian circles has allowed me to have some great discussions on how to implement (or not implement in some cases) the use of the internet by Christian families seeking to follow the Biblical mandate to be “in the world,  not of it”. I want to share some thoughts on this, as well as link to free resources that I have used and recommended to Christian parents who have asked for resources that work.

The internet is an interesting social phenomenon in that there is no central governing agency. Any one government can only control what “nodes” of the internet are physically located within its borders. So any person on the planet can post whatever content they choose to post and as long as that content is hosted in a geopolitical area that doesn’t restrict that particular type of content, anything goes.

As a result, it is up to individuals, familes, businesses and other organizations to “filter” what parts of the internet can be viewed by the computers under their jurisdiction. I’m going to focus on the family and a few best practices that make the use of this tool as trouble free as possible.

Best Practices for Families:

• Parents, take time to learn how the internet works and keep current with any major developments. If you aren’t very technically inclined, ask a Christian friend who is, to keep you updated.
• Parents, use some form of reporting (internet history, reporting software, Vista’s or OS X’s parental controls, etc) to keep family members accountable for where they goes on the internet and for how long.
• Use a form of internet filtering that is effective and can’t be easily circumnavigated. This is not a silver bullet. Parents, train your children in areas of moral purity and in the use or avoidance, depending on age levels and parental choice, of social web applications such as email, IM, blogging, Facebook, micro-blogging (Twitter), and other social media.
• Computer use should be in an open area where parents can easily walk past and see anything that is being displayed on the screen.
• If you can, go on an internet “fast” as a family occasionally, so you can see how the use of the internet affects your family life.
• Parents, make an Internet Use Agreement for your family and post it by the computer or in another prominent area of your home. This is something used even by non-Christian families. Microsoft has an article on this as well HERE.

Free Internet Filtering and Reporting Software for Families:

• Adblocker Plus - If you use the Firefox web browser, install this plugin to eliminate all those flash banner ads, which often promote selfish consumerism and immoral sensuality.
• Open DNS – This filtering solution is easy to implement and can be installed on either individual computers or your router.  The router option is better as it is harder to get around.
• K9 Web Filtering -   Mac/PC compatible software gets installed on a computer and provides filtering and reporting capabilities.
• File Sharing Sentinel -  Prevents peer-to-peer software such as Limewire, BitTorrent, eMule, etc from being installed (Windows only).
• McGruff SafeGuard – Excellent reporting software. Description from the website: McGruff SafeGuard is a service that intelligently monitors kids’ internet activity, including: website visits, chat and instant messaging, search engine phrases, social network profiles on MySpace, Facebook and many others. The Service alerts parents to problems such as Internet predators, dangerous behavior, underage/illicit sexual activity, suicide, drug use, credit card abuse and crime.
• XXX Church’s X3Watch – Accountability reporting software. The free version sends out biweekly reports and you can have up to 2 accountability partners.

Other Books, Articles and Resources:

• Logged On and Tuned Out: A Non-Techie’s Guide to Parenting a Tech-Savvy Generation |  Excellent book by Vicki Courtney who has done a lot of research in this area. You can read a sample chapter HERE (PDF).
• Internet Safety – Building Character and Building Walls (PDF) |  Top-notch article by Focus on the Family that focuses on the core issues.
• Making Space for Character in a Tech-overloaded World (PDF)  |  Another article from the FoF website with some wisdom and insight I found helpful.

Those are the thoughts and resources that come to mind at the moment. Feel free to share your own experiences, insights and other resources in the comments and I will add them to this post for the benefit of others.

I got to use Verizon’s business FIOS in Everett today while configuring a networked printer for a business client.  Wow, I’d be willing to pay a pretty penny to get that kind of connectivity.  Here’s a screenshot with the test results.  15Mb/s down and 5.4Mb/s up!  At home I get 2.8 Mb/s down and about 80Kb/s up on Verizon DSL.

After months of putting it off, I finally got around to changing my header graphic to a nice dynamic slideshow of some of my photos utilizing Flash and a little PHP magic.  I went and downloaded the Flashfader Plugin and then had to find the magic spot in my header.php file to place the code.  Then came the resizing of the photos and uploading them with the plugin management tool.  45 minutes later, I had a nice header with enough photos in the “repository” to keep any of you blog viewers from getting bored looking at the same old header graphic all the time

I was having a heat issue with my laptop, so I went to find something that could monitor and control the temperature and fan speed to keep things from melting down.  I discovered a great little utility that fit the need perfectly.  It shows up in my control panel err… System Preferences in mac speak and keeps things cooler if a little noisier.  I like the fact that the fan has an infinitely variable speed compared to my old laptop which had 2 speeds on its cooling fan which turns on and off every few minute and is rather annoying.  Well, I’ve rambled on enough about such an uninteresting geeky topic.  Here’s a screenshot to finish off.

Open Office 3.0 is officially available today.

I wasn’t able to download it from the official site, because their servers were so slammed by traffic, however there is an alternative download at the University of Utah.

I was smiling when I read this on the Open Office website which is stripped of its usual graphic-laden appearance in an effort to keep it up and running:

Apologies – our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are
trying to come up with a solution.

Thank you for your patience.

Yesterday, I started a new blog, and I thought I would document all the technical details of setting it up, partly for my own future reference and partly to help out others who want to go all out and do this thing properly.

This step-by-step is for the Wordpress blogging platform:

1. Register a domain name and sign up with a web host. I currently use Lunarpages. They have great hosting plans at very competitive rates with good technical support when you need it.
2. Install Wordpress.  You may need to download it from wordpress.org.  If you are using Lunarpages, they have a simple click through installation using Fantastico.
3. Explore the thousands of Wordpress Themes available and pick one you like.  A good place to start is the Wordpress site.
4. Download the theme, unzip it, and upload it via FTP to your “blogdomain/wp-content/themes” directory. For FTP, I use the FireFTP plugin in combination with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.
5. Now comes the fun part, customizing your Wordpress installation.  For a detailed look at what all you can do to customize everything from timestamps to maximum comment links, check out the Wordpress Codex, Blog and Forums.
6. Something else you’ll want to look into are plugins. There are way too many of these all waiting for you to bloat your blog with them. Here are the ones I use regularly and find very useful:
   1. Akismet spam blocker. This does an excellent job of keeping comment spam at bay.
   2. Google Analytics for Wordpress. A best-of-breed website statistics suite. You’ll need a Google Account.
   3. Wordpress Stats. For when you just want to see simple statistics in a very elegant way. I actually prefer using this over Google’s most of the time. You’ll need a Wordpress.com account.
   4. Google sitemap generator.  This tells the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how to list your website in their search results.
   5. All-in-one SEO Pack.  Used in conjunction with Google’s keyword tool, you can drive more search engine users to your website with carefully crafted page titles, meta tags, keyword rich content etc. This is just one tool in a Search Engine Optimizer’s toolkit of wizardry.  It works quite well.
7. One last step I usually take is publishing a feed using the Feedburner service.  This gives you detailed statistics on who has subscribed to your blog with a feed reader of their choice (example: Google Reader) or via their email.  There are many more features to this service, but statistics is what I mainly use it for.
8. Once your blog is set up, you can start posting about whatever fires you up to start writing or linking, or embedding media from other websites.  I may write more about this last process in a future post.

Looks like the browser wars are far from over with Google jumping into the market with their release of Google Chrome today.  I downloaded it about an hour after they released it.  It’s pretty quick and I love the simple intuitive interface, but I’ll stick with Firefox for now.  Firefox extensions make it the killer app for the internet.

Firefox is trying to create a world record of the most software downloads in 24hrs with their release of Firefox 3. I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively (except for testing sites I design, since 2005). Join the crowd by clicking the graphic.

I discovered the PicLens Firefox Plugin today and was impressed with its abilities to pull photos from a Picasa

Web Album or Flickr collection and on the fly create a fully 3D photo browser.

From the website:

PicLens provides an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the supported sites listed below and on sites that support Media RSS.

Sites that support the PicLens Firefox Plugin

Apparently there is a plugin that will enable its use with Wordpress as well, but it requires PHP 5 which I don’t have on my hosting platform right now. I may give it a spin at a later date.

I upgraded the Wordpress installation on this blog to version 2.5 today.  There are more changes in this update than in any previous one that I’ve encountered.  My favorite is the media browser that allows you to view all your uploaded audio/images/video in a very elegant way.  Of course the entire admin section has been re-designed.  It is much cleaner and loads faster, though it took me a few minutes to find some of the common features, since I didn’t know where to look.

Overall very impressed.  For its simple elegance, Wordpress remains my favorite Content Management System to work with.