Could You Pass the U.S. Citizenship Test?

Hey I'm proud of myself.

You answered 85% of questions correctly.

Check it out. Find out if you could you pass the U.S. citizenship test?

Harry Potter Video

So you wanted to be entertained some more? I see. Try this Harry Potter video on for size. This may take just a moment to load. Please wait.

If the video above does not automatically begin, choose the play button. Double-click to open 'full-screen.'

WhyQuit - the Internet's leading cold turkey quit smoking destination

Blogger Posting RSS.xml Files?

I may be scooping the world on this one as I can find no one talking about it on official or unofficial channels. There is a new technical feature of Blogger's software that I just noticed tonight as I was updating a few posts. This involves the syndication feed that the software publishes. Normally, Blogger will only post an Atom formatted feed. The same help article states near the bottom:

Notes:

• If you would rather have RSS, give FeedBurner a try.

But as of my last posts, there is also an RSS Feed file being posted at the same time. I cannot find any reference in Blogger Help or anywhere else like BloggerForum.com. Did I notice it first? Yea me! *insert golf clap here*

Update: Digging a little bit further into Blogger Help, I found this reference about RSS that although possibly outdated, makes it clear that at one point you would have been able to post your feed as ATOM or RSS based on if you had a Blogger Pro account.

Note: This is a Blogger Pro feature only; to use RSS as a non-Pro user, try FeedBurner.

Back when Blogger became part of Google, they made all accounts free and phased out the "Blogger Pro" stuff, so I don't know what's going on.

2006-06-11 Update: other bloggers have caught on as well. The dates they posted about it is also listed here. Some scooped this news first, some did not.

• FreshBlog - Blogger adds RSS? | 2006-06-05
• phydeaux3 - Blogger Now with RSS | 2006-06-05
• Digital Inspiration » Blogspot now provides RSS 2.0 Feeds: Easter Egg | 2006-05-31
• Singpolyma - Blogger Supporting RSS? | 2006-05-31

New Project: Ministry

An idea I first blogged about in a post titled Ministry is now starting to take shape. Ferguson Christian Church is going to have a website. I am going to be --for lack of a better term-- the leader and lead designer of this project.

I can't talk much about this as of yet, as there isn't much there right now, but I'm very excited. What you might see there right now is a default template that I used experimentally to see how Network Solutions ImageCafé software would work for this feature, even though I planned from the beginning to build the template from scratch. It's kind of stereotypical and bland for a church website, a spiritual artistic sunset with a soft-focus bird of peace accent. Needless to say, I don't like it.

My next steps will be to take the design concepts that were approved and discussed at our meeting with the adult leadership team at the church and add the changes as requested and get them uploaded to the server.

Aside: ..and off the subject, if you have been attempting to email me without success, you have my apologies as things are not working 100% right after the recent DNS transfer. Trying to look professional and email the church leadership with a broken mail server is frustrating. Not fun.

Firefox 1.5 Coolness

So I upgraded to the most recent version of Firefox, and although the noticable differences are minor, I did find my favorite new feature. If you click a link directly to an image, the Icon on the tab will be a thumbnail view of the image. You can see the history of this feature at - Use Image Thumbnails as Favicon.

Compare this -

- To this -

It's time that you Got Firefox!