Tech Tips for Catholic Teens

Technorati, “the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web,” has a way to search only blogs (very much like Google, but for blogs). It is called Technorati Search.

On that note, We added the Catholic Tech Tips blog to Technorati’s database. One of the neat things about this is that now we can track how many people link us to their blogs. This is what Technorati refers to as authority.

Also, if you have a Technorati account, you can add us to your Technorati faves!

I recently found out about this cool new site called PickAFig (www.pickafig.com) from a comment on our site.

Just what is PickAFig?

Think “Digg”, only Catholic!  It is a place where you can “pick” your favorite blogposts, online news articles, and really anything Catholic related.  It is social bookmarking at its finest!

So head over to PickAFig now! (or whenever you have some free time, which is never, so you better go there now ; )

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FeedValidator.org is a great tool to see if your syndicated feed (RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and Atom feeds) ia validated.

Simply enter the address of your feed and click Validate. If the validator finds any problems in your feed, it will give you messages for each type of problem and highlight where the problem first occurs in your feed. If you’re unsure what a message means, click the “help” link next to the message for a fuller explanation.

The important thing is that your Feed comes back as Valid.  There will most likely be listed recommendations, but the main thing is that it is valid.  It is up to you if you want to make the suggested improvements to your feed.  Probably a good idea, but not always necessary.

You can find out more information about Feed Validator on the About page of their website.

• Administrator - Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor - Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author - Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor - Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber - Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc.

I came across the following on Digg and thought I’d share it with anyone who might be interested. It would be great to see more Catholic Christian plugins for WordPress out there!

It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.

There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.

All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Here are some relevant details:

• • Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
  • True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
  • You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
  • Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
  • Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
  • All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
  • Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
  • We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
  • Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

For more details visit: www.weblogtoolscollection.com.

About

The CRE, by Pistos at Catholicism Computes, is a WordPress plugin which activates both Scripture references and references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, showing non-intrusive popups when you mouseover them (I have set my options up so that the popup occurs only when the link is clicked on).

Example

Jesus builds his church: Matthew 16:16-18. One holy, catholic and apostolic Church: CCC 748,750. The ark of the New Covenant: Revelation 11:19; 12:1-2.

Download

Wordpress Plugin

Version 0.8.13 released 2007-11-20.

• Version 0.8.13, without texts zip 25kb | tar.bz2 23kb
• Version 0.8.13, with texts zip 2092kb | tar.bz2 1460 kb

Texts

The CRE needs the texts in order to do its work. If you did not obtain the full package (above), then download these texts and unpack them in your catholic-reference/ plugin directory. They will be stored under catholic-reference/texts/.

• Douay-Rheims Bible zip | tar.bz2
• Catechism of the Catholic Church zip | tar.bz2

You may also download the plugin WordPress Plugins Directory.

Here is a neat widget by Widgetbox called the Blog Badge.

The Blog Badge is completely customized and allows you to add links to some of the hottest web 2.0 communities: Digg, LinkedIn, Mahalo, Twitter, Mixx, Flickr, Delicious, Pownce, StumbleUpon, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Blogger and more. You can choose which to show and adding them is easy: simply enter your user ID or the URL to your public profile (based on the form below).

Tip: If you are adding the widget to your MyChurch.org profile then copy the JavaScript code into your profile settings.