Bengfort.com

Just a quick update: I realize that after our extremely successful conversation during our “Bengfort.com Seminar” we came up with a number of action items for the site that I have yet to follow up on. I want to assure you that I’m working on these things, and I just want to give you a status report.

Guyana Cooking Video- still in edit. I haven’t had much time to look at it, but when I did, I realized, I’m not such a pro! I’m hoping to have something together and posted by the end of the month, probably via a you tube stream and an embedded link. If you guys have any suggestions, I could use the help!

Individual Author pages. I have been exploring the following three solutions:

• WordPress MU/Buddypress
• Theme edit:
• Site Design edit

As I mentioned during our seminar, these aren’t necessarily hard tasks, but they aren’t very easy either. I would like to get a quick solution, but I also want to do it right. You will see more on the virtues of each of these options in future posts. In the meantime, I have done the DNS legwork, so that the following:

• ben.bengfort.com
• devi.bengfort.com
• bethany.bengfort.com
• jaci.bengfort.com
• winston.bengfort.com

Are all valid, but they just point to the main webpage right now. Soon those will take you to your own author pages depending on how we do it.

Old Post Import: So I have got going on this, you will start to see your old blog posts starting to trickle back into the site. For instance, most of Jaci’s old blog posts are up, but they are password protected (email me if you want the password). Winston’s are all up now too. Bethany, Devi, and My blog posts are sans pictures unfortunately, but we can discuss how to remedy that.

Avatars/Email/Other: A few changes have been made to the profiles section (avatars are now up, you can edit them in your profile if you wish). If you’re having problems with your @bengfort.com email, let me know. I still haven’t found a dashboard style program yet. And if there is anything else, please comment!

I just want to thank you guys again for so lovingly putting up with your technical support geek- I’m really proud of our site and the effort you guys have put into it!

Blogs are great for sharing information with the entire world, expressing your opinion, or being published with ease. We use our blog slightly differently, however- our biggest use is to keep up with the family and have a space for Bengforts on the web. This means that there are times when we have stories to share with each other that we don’t necessarily want to be in the public domain. We have tried using email to communicate in the past, but this limits the discussion- replies might miss people or not be time synchronized. Wouldn’t it be great to have a blog type forum with comments that was private?

Well, with WordPress, you can in fact do this! Publishing posts as private means that you must be logged into the site to see the post and that the post has been published. In order to publish a private post- go to the “Add New” post screen in the site admin. Next to the text editor is a Publish widget (which contains the Publish button)- in this widget is the Visibility attribute of the post. Note, it probably says Public, which is the default. Click the Edit link, and simply change the post to Private!

Note the Visibility edit options

There is also a password protected option.  When you select this option you can add a password to the post, which is required to view the post, whether you are logged in or not. Anyone you give the password to can view the post (even non-registered users), and everyone can view that the post exists becasue they will be able to see the title. This option is great if you don’t want to make the post completely private, but allow more than just registered users to have access- however, you will have to email the password to everyone you want to read the post!

I’m hoping that with the use of private posts, you will feel more comfortable sharing information on our blog with the family. Some things to keep in mind: When adding a private post, make sure you tweet that you put the post up, or we will not know! Also, when you come to the site log on, or make sure you always remain logged on so you can see any private posts that are put up.

If you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them!

The Guyana Cookbook

The Guyana Cookbook- Recipes from the Bengfort Family

The fame and fortune of this website (in terms of folks who aren’t family) is based soley on the content of the Guyana cookbook. I understand that this site is one of the number one hits when you search for Guyana cooking and I have disapointed a lot of people by taking it down (not to mention destroying a lot of links to our site). Therefore I am going to attempt to place the content back on the website for all the fans.

I have been debating on how to do this- you may think this is just as simple as adding the webpages to the site, and of course it could be. However, the new software installed on the site gives us the potential for a more dynamic solution- adding each recipe as its own blog post. By doing this, and categorizing them and tagging them, it would give folks the oppertunity to search the recipes, comment on them, and allow all of us to edit them using the software. This means the cookbook could be better.

However, this method has its drawbacks- folks couldn’t link to one webpage for the entire cookbook- they would have to link to individual recipes, which would be treated like any other posts by the software. This might make the recipes harder to find, and maybe decrease our page rank on Google. I am determined to come up with a solution for this, however, even if I take both methods- a static web page and add recipes as posts. Needless to say, recipes as posts is one key feature so…

Expect to see recipes for our favorite foods posted over the next couple days so that we have a database of Guyana recipes!

You probably have already noticed that the design of the Bengfort.com site has changed dramatically overnight. I wish I could take credit for this design and programming, but unfortunately I have simply given up with the custom site that I was building myself, and installed a prebuilt blogging software- WordPress. In the end, I just didn’t have enough time to continue to update the site on a regular basis, and continue the maintenance of the software I was writing. School had to take the priority, and even though I felt like I was writing good software, the external design was suffering as you all noticed (no more red and white!) Therefore I just moved to the more effective solution, and I think we will all benefit from it in the time being.

This is not so dramatic as it seems- the software is installed on our server and is very customizable, and I have started customizing it already adding plugins and even writing my own add-ins to the site. There are some downsides, which I will discuss in a second, but the interface is better designed, you can upload pictures, user management is improved- as well as security which is huge! You can comment and participate in the blog now, and everything is fully functioning- the software I had wrote had some gaps that I kept intending to fix, but just never got around to it.

Hopefully you guys can embrace change as we move forward. I still have your old blogs archived, and I will work on re-posting them to the site so that you can have them documented. However you will note some overall structural changes to the site that are necessary because of the software. For instance, we all blog on the same page- there is no separation by author. This might cause you some concern, but hopefully we can all collaborate together to generate awesome content! I will post some recipes, so they will appear as their own post rather than as a page. And some of the other applications, like the photo albums application isn’t available- and we’ll have to use tools like Flickr to share our photos.

Using this software may take some learning, and if you need any help getting around the interface or with blogging on the site in general, please let me know and I would be glad to help! If you are a user of the Bengfort.com site, then please register as a subscriber- this will mean that I don’t have to moderate your comments. Users from the old site are already on here- so you guys should update your profiles! And everyone should be blogging! Enjoy!

New email addresses! That’s right folks, come and get them- your new @bengfort.com emails! Feel that cold chill of fear at getting a new email address? Of course you did- and really you shouldn’t! Let me tell you why in today’s installment of Bengforts on the Web.

Do you have an ISP email address? ISP email addresses may not be around forever, relying on @comcast.net as your personal email could leave you without the ability to receive mail if say Comcast got bought by SBC or something like that. More importantly, a personalized email address is just the thing to impress everyone else.

Have a business email? Well same thing as the ISP email address- you might not work there for very much longer. But more importantly- you should only be using your work emails for work! Your employer has full access to all emails that you send and receive and the right to read through them any time they want- and why would you want to be sending personal emails when there is the possibility that you could send it to your entire office by accident!? Not only that, but you are restricted to the private policies of the company when it comes to email- you might not be able to make full use of the power of email.

Your email is your identity- you use it as a username on many websites. Folks you give your email to know more about you from your domain (having @bengfort.com makes you seem like a sophisticated and knowledgeable internet citizen). And because your email is your identity it can be attacked- why put yourself into a large group of targets with an email like @hotmail.com?

Have an @gmail.com account? Great! You have a secure account on a website that will ensure your data protection and give you access to many different applications including docs, chat, and calendar besides email. The Gmail web interface is one of the most well thought out, well designed interfaces of all email (better than Outlook). If you have a @gmail.com account then you have proved your internet saavy. So why switch to an @bengfort.com account?

@bengfort.comm email is provided by Google! Yay! The same interface, the same applications, the same data confidence will continue to be yours – all continuing to be free, but with the added benefit of an Internet identity that won’t be lost or broken! Basically, an @bengfort.com email is the best of all worlds. Not only that, but you have increased confidence because we own the @bengfort.com domain and can back all of our own stuff up!

But what about my old accounts? How do I move everything over? Asking these questions? Well you should- but the fact is because @bengfort.com is hosted by Google Apps, this is as simple as forwarding your old email account to the @bengfort.com account (or adding the new account to outlook) then passing on the new email address to all of your close contacts (let everyone else send to your old account, you’ll still get the emails in your @bengfort.com inbox), then just start using @bengfort.com for all your stuff! Done- no data loss, no switchover hangups!

And also- please ask me if you need help with all this stuff, I’m perfectly happy consulting to my family for free!

So head over to mail.bengfort.com and get started with your last email account you will ever need!

Yesterday I mentioned that the Internet was the Wild Wild West, well folks, our own covered wagon that is Bengfort.com recently got mobbed by a pack of angry bison. That’s right- if bison get angry, they attack! Ok, maybe they don’t, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a pack of angry bison- or one angry bison for that matter (NDSU students are mostly just cold). But I can imagine that if you left food outside your covered wagon, the bison would show up and take advantage of you.

Now that I have you properly thinking: “what?” I guess I should let you know what happened. Bengfort.com is our covered wagon- the bison are spam comments delivered to us via robot, and we my friends just got spammed on the way to Oregon. You have probably heard of spam emails, but what in the heck are spam comments? Well, they are basically the same thing, but instead of being sent to you via email- they are posted on the comments section of the blog- so if you were wondering about all those comments about Viagra, don’t worry: its not your post!

You may or may not know that I have been working hard on ripping out the internals of the site to add better and new code- things that you can’t see in real time since it takes a lot of development work on my part to get anything ready to go. Well, on Monday while I was working on it, I happened to query the comments portion of our database- only to find that we had 4268 comments on the blog! While this is my dream to someday have that kind of participation, it struck me as odd considering no one has really been blogging as of late, so I checked it out, and it was comment spam!

Everything from “love your post, want to buy a car…?” to “free viagra, get longer faster” was on the comments section, and really the only thing I could do was delete the entire table from the database and start from scratch- so I did so, vowing to make the problem go away. The next day I checked again (without fixing the problem) and there were 278 comments on the blog! Well- the Bison had our number, so I had to drop the functionality completely (for now).

So in the future, you are probably going to have to sign in to add a comment to the page, which means that the site is going to have a lot more members, or else a lot of permissions work that I’m going to have to do, but out here in the wild wild west, sometimes you have to pay a guy just for the water rights (watch more westerns if you don’t get that!)

For now, please comments via twitter or email!

Well, I woke up in a blizzard this morning here in the frigid tundra of the North! The blizzard wasn’t particularly significant to anyone here because it was too warm for the snow to stick, but the wind is enough to turn your bones to ice! I was glad that I got a lot of the website development work done yesterday, it makes the work for this week a lot easier, in terms of wrapping up the bugs, etc. And also because it means that we don’t have to do the winter chores today (clear the gutters, put up snow fences).

Winston has no idea what to do with the wind. Every time he goes outside, he just runs in a complete sprint in laps around the house. He has a decidedly displeased expression when he finally slows down enough to go to the bathroom (note- not stop!), then he races back onto the porch to get back inside as quick as he can! He is doing good, we had a training session yesterday, so he is relearning all the lessons he learned in Oxford, and getting out of some of his bad habits.

School has been taking up most of my time. I get up at 530 and head to school to get to the gym by 7, then workout for an hour, shower, and I can get to my office by 9. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have classes pretty much all day, including the class that I teach. Tuesday and Thursday I have most of the day off to work on coding (unfortunately not for the website, rather for my software engineering class), but I do have a class in the afternoon. I get to leave usually around 530 or 6, but sometimes much later depending on my projects, and I get home around 7 or 8. So it is a pretty long day.

We just got home from church- for you non-Lutherans out there, today was a special Sunday celebrating Martin Luther’s 95 thesis (he posted them on a door on October 31, so we celebrate the Sunday before). Basically that just meant that we sung A Mighty Fortress is our God, and had a sermon about Luther. The coffee is brewing, the paper is bought, and dad is making sausage biscuits and gravey, which Winston is very interested in.

So here is to a first real blog post, in hopes of many more!