Author Archives: mhick255

OneManOffice: WordPress

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I’m starting a new series of posts today, to share some of what I’ve learned about great software for running a low-budget, single-person home office.  They will be grouped together under the category OneManOffice, pending the creation of a catchier, less sexist name.  (Suggestions welcomed here.)  

For the first post in this series, it seemed right to begin with the software that I use to manage this website: WordPress.  There is lots of other software out there that will let you write a blog or manage a website, but I have been very pleased with WordPress.  

What’s so good about it?

  • It’s free.  WordPress is open source software, which means that downloading and installing it is completely, 100% free.  You can either create a free WordPress blog on WordPress.com, or install WordPress on your own website (more on that in just a moment). 
  • It’s easy to use.  WordPress offers a straightforward dashboard for writing new posts and pages.  It was recently updated to version 2.5, which (IMHO) improved the dashboard quite a bit.  If you want to try it out, I would suggest creating a free blog at WordPress.com so that you can get a feel for the software before committing to it.  
  • It’s highly customizable.  WordPress has an enormous community of developers and designers who create themes and plugins for it.  A WordPress theme lets you customize the layout, colors, and overall look of your website, and there are hundreds – maybe thousands – of themes available for free.  (For example, my theme was created by N. Design Studio.)  Plugins let you add new capabilities to your website, like podcasting, stat-tracking, or linking to related content on the web, like I do with my Sphere Related Content plugin. 

Like I said above, there are two options for using WordPress.  The first is free blog hosting at WordPress.com.  If you would like to have your own website (like http://www.mikehickerson.com), you will generally have to pay for it, but the prices are low (e.g. $10/month or less) for a personal website.   We’re not talking CNN.com here, so there’s no reason to pay an arm and a leg. A lot of website hosts will install WordPress for you, and, as long as the hosting company meets the minimum requirements, you could install it yourself.  WordPress provides a list of recommended hosting companies, and there is also a group of WordPress experts who can install WordPress for you.

To keep it easy, I’d recommend finding a web hosting company that provides a “one click install” of WordPress.  It’s just like it sounds: you click a button, and the hosting company does the rest.  I use DreamHost, and I have been very happy with them.  (P.S. If you sign up for DreamHost via this link, I will receive a 10% referral fee for the life of your account.)  But DreamHost is just one of many excellent web hosting companies.  Shop around so that you can find a decent price and the features that you think you’ll use.

More Free Stuff Online: Lectures and PBS Shows on iTunes

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A while back, I wrote about free books online.  Another great resource available for free is iTunesU.  Universities from around the country, including MIT, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Yale, Reformed Theological Seminary, and about 30 more schools, offer free lectures – even entire free courses – for download oniTunes.  I’ve recently listened to Thomas Friedman talk about the ideas behind his book The World Is Flat (liked it so much I went out and bought the book) and Merlin Mann of 43 Folders speak about managing your time and attention.  Great stuff.  And now you can download free content from PBS through ITunesU.  These are incredible materials for you autodidacts (like me) who couldn’t fit all the classes you wanted to take into your college schedule.  And, if you’re still like me, now you can add unlistened-to lectures and unwatched documentaries to your guilt list of unread books. 

So Much for the Information Age…

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The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a recent article (sorry – subscription required) called “So Much for the Information Age,” from a college professor lamenting his students’ deplorable grasp of current events and world history. This professor teaches journalism at one of our countries’ top universities, yet here is a sampling of what he found when he surveyed his students:

Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.

I don’t think this is all that surprising, and it probably says much more about our nation’s primary and secondary educational systems than it does about the university world. 

The professor goes on to express concern about our nation’s future, and about how we as a nation have failed our students, by considering them “educated” when they can’t discuss the front page of The New York Times.  

I hope that Christian students are taking a different approach to their studies, and educating themselves whether or not the system is.  After all, we worship a God who made the world, who loves the world, and who loves the people of the world so much that he sent his Son to die for the world.  That same God then calls us to emulate Him and be formed in the image of Christ.  

Since God loves our neighbors and the world they live in, so should we.  And the first step is to learn about the world in which we find ourselves. 

Registration Open for Following Christ 2008!

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You can now register online for Following Christ 2008, including the first Emerging Scholars Network National Gathering.  Register online at the Following Christ website. 

Following Christ 2008 will be held in Chicago, from December 27 to 31.  Plenary speakers will include N. T. Wright, one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, and Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and outspoken Christian.  Other speakers will include Carmen Acevedo Butcher, MaryKate Morse, and Jeff Van Duzer.  Part of Following Christ will be devoted to discipline-specific tracks, devoted to understanding how following Christ affects our daily work in the arts, business, the humanities, healthcare, and more. 

Technology and Sex Selection

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The use of abortion to choose the gender of a child has long been a concern of the pro-life movement, especially in countries like China or India where cultural and legal norms make both gender selection and abortion more acceptable.  A new study is suggesting that some ethnic groups – specifically Chinese, Korean, and Indian – in the United States may also be using abortion to choose the gender of their children. William Saletan of Slate.com has a good writeup of the study and some implications. 

However, the conclusion of the article is a bit confusing, 

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to theenvironment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

OK – I’m good with that.  I thought that “technology=progress=unlimited good” went out with the Victorians, but that’s fine if people are just now waking up to reality.  The rest of that paragraph is a bit odd. 

But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn’t a newfangled perversion. It’s a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that’ll be real progress.

Eh?  Perhaps some pro-life conservatives base their position of “patriarchal custom,” but I’m not aware of custom or patriarchy or tradition – much less Chinese, Korean, or Indian tradition – being used as a foundation for pro-life arguments in the United States.  

This recent story – about a Vietnamese man who runs an orphanage for unwanted children next door to an abortion clinic in Vietnam – notes that he receives donations from “Christian and Buddhist organizations.” I have not encountered any Buddhist or Hindu approaches to abortion – either for or against – so I would be very interested in learning more about how non-Western religions regard abortion.Â