In preparation for my return to the blogosphere (yes, I say that every December/January and July/August), I’ve been doing some under-the-hood things to the site. This post is about the most recent geek-change.

In the world of URL shorteners, it seems bit.ly has the edge for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, I prefer the j.mp service (which is actually powered by bit.ly, but obviously has a shorter domain name). I’ve been using Alex King‘s Twitter Tools to announce new posts on Twitter for a while now. As of version 2.0, Twitter Tools includes a plugin of it’s own to shorten URLs with bit.ly. This is better than nothing, but not exactly what I want.

Since the technology of bit.ly and j.mp is essentially identical, I think that a bit of find-and-replace PHP hacking will allow me to post using j.mp. I’ve made those changes, uploaded the file, and activated my plugin. Essentially, this is the test post. We’ll see if it works!

Edit: About 20 seconds after posting this entry, the following tweet appeared on Twitter:

@lenflack New post: Custom j.mp Plugin for Twitter Tools http://j.mp/7hRziR #fb

Success!

This is actually just a test post, posted using BlogPress from my iPhone. I may very well delete it.

However, I thought it may be nice to share a cute picture of my daughter, Moriah, playing with her friend, Natalie. (Moriah is the little one.)

I hope the post works well, and that the graphics match the style of the site. It would be nice to post from my iPhone… It may mean more regular posts.

Although I’m not quite sure why, over the years I’ve had a handful of opportunities to be featured on television, radio, podcasts, and other forms of media. With the exception of one incident, all of them have been enjoyable experiences. But none compare to my first-ever media appearance.

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The Watertown Daily Times is reporting that Dr. John W. Deans (left, with Congressman and current SECARMY-Nominee John M. McHugh) is expected to be named today as the Interim President of Broome Community College. Dr. Deans previously led Jefferson Community College as President from 1992-2002 and again on an interim basis in 2006.

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Since late 2004, when my wife first bought me a copy of the English Standard Version, the ESV has been my Bible translation of choice for most applications. I pre-ordered the ESV Study Bible when it was announced, and was very pleased when it was released last fall. It’s an incredible resource, and I highly recommend it to any of my church members interested in seriously studying scripture.

Crossway has released the ESV Study Bible materials for a variety of platforms, including Accordance for Mac. (Incidentally, it’s not available for the cross-platform Libronix Library System, which I love… but I digress. [Edited 7/29/09: As Kent pointed out below, Logos is now offering the ESV Study Bible Notes on Pre-Order, with or without the ESV text.]) However, I don’t have Accordance, and didn’t want to buy a different application to use it on my Mac.

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