ELCA Web and Multimedia Development Blog

Tips and other useful ideas

Sites Update: New Homepage, Spam Protection

Posted on October 7th, 2009 by Len Mason

A couple of new items have been implemented today. We are now highlighting the five latest posts from your blogs at http://blogs.elca.org. Have a look! The more you post, the more homepage face time you get! (MU developers: this was done using the sitewide recent posts plugin.)

Secondly, in addition to Akismet comment spam killer, I have installed some more protection. This should kill a lot of spam before it makes its way to you to have to approve or deny it. It also adds CAPTCHA to the comment field. You’ll notice the “churchy” words I picked if you take a look. (MU Developers: I used the Farms comment spam pack to accomplish this.)

Happy blogging!

Special thanks to @andrea_r for her help!

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ELCA WordPress Users Support

Posted on October 7th, 2009 by Len Mason

I am starting a new category of posts that I hope will help our growing number of Bloggers. In case you did not know, the ELCA has a new platform for our blogs. WordPress is very versatile and has already proven to be an upgrade from our previous solution.

We are also rolling out a custom ELCA theme for congregations and synods to create small- to medium-sized Web sites with the church’s branding and useful features. WordPress is not only a great blog platform but an excellent Content Management System.

This category of posts will automatically update into the Dashboard of our in-house blogs, and primarily be geared towards helping our churchwide office users and admins use and maintain their new blogs. But it is also my hope that these posts help those outside of the churchwide offices to gain a better understanding of how to use and implement WordPress in their setting as well.

If you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, please take the time to do so. And please tell others who are interested in Web Development to sign up also, won’t you?

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The AFP RedBerry Goes Tech

Posted on October 1st, 2009 by Len Mason

I’m sure you’re familiar with the little red book Augsburg Fortress puts out called the, well, Little Red Book. A pocket daytimer, the LRB is for those who like to keep it “old school” and write down their appointments. Around the office here, we have come to affectionately refer to it as a “redBerry.”

Well, a friend of mine, Andy Arnold (@adnyla), has made me aware that there is now a downloadable version of the LRB. He has written some instructions to sync the LRB to Google Calendar. Take a look!

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