RussHutto.com

In my quest, to simplify how I do things this year, I redesigned my blog at the beginning of the year. I actually built the theme from scratch. The guts weren’t pretty, but it looked and worked fairly good to me. After about a month I decided I wanted to have a cleaner white theme. Enter Simpl3 by Human 3rror. He released this theme just as I began searching for a new theme. (Thanks, John!)

So, if you’re looking for a clean theme check out Simpl3. If you’re a little knowledgeable about themes and css you can tweak it a bit and give it your own fresh look.

I also implemented the Disqus comment system which a lot of my blog buds have been using with great success.

Posted yesterday from my mobile phone…but sadly I couldn’t find the publish button so I had to save it as a draft. I’ll be looking for a wp-admin mobile plugin. Anybody know of one?

today I left the internet behind…well, I left the wifi and cable modem behind.

I’m blogging from my phone.

tonight our leadership team is hiding away in a woodsy retreat complete with a lodge and a lake.

in a few minutes we’ll be sharing our guts about this thing we call leadership here at hoj.

we’ll be planning for our next year (february – january), revisiting vision, mission, and focus.

if you don’t mind shoot a prayer our way as we seek to wrap our hearts, minds, and lives around doing this thing in the most impactful way possible for our community this year.

I just wanted to take the time to share how I believe that technology (teh intarwebz) can bring people together in a very divine way.

City of Heroes

I play City of Heroes an online game (MMO). I play a few hours a week, sometimes more. In the last 2 years I’ve made online friends through the game. Much like I have with some of you bloggers out there that share a little bit here and there in my journey.

We’re a tight knit little group and the majority (if not all) of us have never met in “real life.” However, we talk with one another while blasting evil doers. We share life while super jumping from city zone to zone in our colorful tights, masks, and capes. I enjoy it (my wife thinks too much sometimes).

Connections

But, seriously, I believe that I’ve made some genuine connections. Without going into a whole lot of detail, there’s a couple that I play with regularly that has a young daughter who has Cerebral Palsy. She just had to go through a major spine surgery the day before yesterday. Because I have been friends to this couple I was able to offer my prayers, which were much appreciated.

The mother said that they meant so much to her especially in this time. I don’t know the ins and outs of this couple’s hearts but I do know this: they needed prayers in that time, and I was there to offer mine.

I may never get to meet them face to face, but I thank God for the opportunity to connect with people on the other side of the country and the privilege of praying for this sweet little girl.

Prayer

If you would today, please remember Ashton and her family in your prayers today.

Congratulations, Mike Mahoney on being the 900th commenter at RussHutto.com!

1) I highly recommend Firefox for web browsing. If you’re on a PC and you’re using Internet Explorer, baby Jesus is weeping. End of story. Safarion Mac is ok too. But for the purpose of this post we’ll be looking at Firefox.

2) Firefox is very customizable. Themes, extensions, and plugins that make your browsing experience your own.

One thing I love about Firefox is the Bookmarks Toolbar.

To save time and space, you can add the sites you’ve recently visited to your bookmarks. When you place them in the Bookmarks Toolbar they show up across the top of your browser right under the nav buttons and address (location) bar.

A quick and easy tip to save even more space in this toolbar is to delete the name of the bookmark in the properties of said bookmark. When you do that it shows only the favicon (icon) for each bookmark taking up a fraction of the space it would if you leave the name in the properties.

To do that:

Right-click (ctrl-click) on the bookmark icon in the tool bar.

Select Properties.

Hi-light and then delete the name.

If you’re like me and you really value browser viewing real estate you can even tweak your userChrome.css file to have the Boomarks Toolbar be hidden unless you mouse over the area where it normally lives. Be warned though whenever you mouse over that area it shifts your browser window down about 3/4 of an inch and then back up again when you mouse off of it. If you have motion sickness it might send you over the edge.

To “hide” your Bookmarks Toolbar and make it mouseover-able:

Install ChromEdit Plus on your Firefox browser.

Restart Firefox.

Open ChromEdit by selecting Tools > ChromEdit Plus > ChromEdit.

Copy and paste this code at the very bottom of the userChrome.css file:

#PersonalToolbar {display: none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #PersonalToolbar {display: -moz-box;}

Restart Firefox.

These are tips that seasoned browser hackers can do in their sleep, but I thought it would be good to share a tip that helps save time and space when I’m doing my daily browsing.

Sites that I include in my Bookmarks Toolbar:

• Google
• Google Reader
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups (our worship team’s version of service planning software and networking)
• The Worship Community’s forums
• The CMS Flickr lab
• twitter.com/russhutto
• My Facebook
• YouVersion for daily bible reading.
• biblegateway.com for more in-depth bible study, versions, etc.
• YouTube
• And other sites that I need to log-in to daily. these would include all the Dashboards for the sites I manage.

Occasionally, I go through and prune my bookmarks, deleting the ones that I might have added because I thought the site was cool/helpful/informative at the time, but notice that I don’t visit regularly. I’ll move those bookmarks to another folder.

Hope these tips are helpful.