With SugarCRM, I am becoming more organized and efficient while servicing my customers much better. I dig it.

But… I need to learn more. I’m not in a financial position at the moment to spend over a grand a class for CRM training, so I’m giving SugarCRM for Dummies a try. I’ve really liked the Dummies series for other things I’ve needed to learn about (in fact, that’s how I first learned to make web pages… html for dummies!).

At any rate, SugarCRM could be used for churches, small or mid-size businesses, independent contractors, or… for anyone who needs to track information about customers and organize tasks and responsibilities.

I’m trying to learn more about sales forecasting and such, but even without understanding that facet I’m extremely happy with what I’ve been able to get out of SugarCRM.

Oh, and it’s free for the community version. I love Open Source!

I’ve tried it out, and it works great. Try it, and even if you’re using Akismet, you’ll notice you don’t have the tons of Akismet spam to go through… if you go through it at all.

Eliminate comment spam with wp-spamfree!

So any way, I squeezed a few hours in this morning to have a photo shoot for some new headshots. That way I can audition again, and be even more busy

My favorites from the shoot

Yes… I use a professional name. Please don’t use it in the comments. I separate my acting name from my real name for many reasons, and one is when people want to know about me as an actor, I want them to find information about that if they google the name and not my many, many theological ramblings. Any comments using that name will of course mercilessly be deleted (or not approved to begin with if its your first comment!).

If you do, however, want to help me pick out headshots, that of course is fine

Check out WordPress 2.1 Ella

Now the dilemma comes… Do I try to fix it, or do I part it out?

I’ll make some of you very envious now…

I had saved up a little for either a macmini, a monitor, and a wireless keyboard/mouse, or an imac. I was going to buy one of the nice little refurbs on the mac site. Well, with my warranty running out, I had been pondering waiting a little to buy a refurb’d macbook pro (17″ to replace my 17″ powerbook). Well, with the problems I had today, paired with the fact that I have work I absolutely have to do this weekend, I decided to check out Frye’s and see what they had…

I found an open boxed Macbook Pro, 17″, 2.16 intel core duo for …. 1600 dollars. That’s a pretty darned good price. Of course with the open box thing, it was returned, so I could end up finding some problems myself (I’m hoping it was just returned for a non-hardware issue). It stretches me extremely thin, since I only had about a thousand budget for a new computer. But thankfully I was already looking to buy a new computer, because in my web business I obviously can’t afford to be computerless even for a short time.

And, if I find a buyer for my powerbook or if I part it out, I think I’ll at least make up the difference. After all, it had a new screen put in last July, courtesy of Apple Care, it has a working superdrive which could be sold, the 80 gig hard drive is fine, and it has 756mb of ram I could sell, too.

Of course, if someone wanted to buy it as is for 700 bucks (the screen alone even used is worth that… buying one new is a ridiculous 1400 bucks, or so I was told by Apple when I had trouble with mine last year). I’ll probably put it on ebay as is and see what happens. But if any of you out there are interested, I’ll give you dibs. And it might be just be the power adapter, though the symptoms suggest something internally to me. I’m going to get it checked out this weekend and try to find what it would cost to fix.

It’s been a long time coming, and I thank all of you who encourage me to get the podcasts out there. This podcast consists of some thoughts I’ve been having about the local church’s plan, or lack thereof, to help people become better followers of Jesus

Show Notes:

• 3:50 Google Apps for Your Domain
• 11:43 Battlestar Galactica and Mary McDonnell
• 13:15 Main Topic: The plan to help people become better followers of Jesus
• 35:49 Preaching at Church of God at Bethel in Fort Wayne, IN on New Year’s Eve 2006 (10 am service, 9926 Bethel Rd, Fort Wayne, IN 46818)
• Another conversation podcast… next week! Scot McKnight, who blogs at Jesus Creed

Subscribe to A Different Perspective

Listen to other podcast episodes: http://www.alanhartung.com/blog/index.php/category/podcasts/

The other is a plug-in to serve a mobile version of this website to users accessing the site via a mobile browser. I don’t have a PDA or a cell phone that accesses the internet (it’s supposed to, but alas… no), so if someone wants to check that out and confirm it works, that would be great!

Both WordPress plug-ins were downloaded from Alex King’s website here.

Why I like the thought of using GMail for even the basic user:

• Their spam protection is amazing.
• 2 gigs of storage means you can leave messages in your account even if you download them to your local computer. If you don’t have your laptop with you, or you have a desktop at home, all of your email will be accessible to you whenever you have an internet connection.
• Your email address is still your email address… I configured alan at alanhartung dot com to work with gmail. Nobody really knows the difference but you!
• If your registrar has Total DNS Control or another interface to modify your MX records, you can configure your email at the domain level. That may have lost some of you, but I’ll explain it like this: Unless Google’s servers go down, your email will always work. If your registrar doesn’t provide that, transfer it to my service and I can do that for you! In fact, you could have email without a hosting account that way come to think of it.
• GMail is a better web interface than any other webmail I’ve seen, hands down. I’ve got a couple of really good webmail programs on my server, but nothing really compares to GMail in my opinion. Honesty, right?

I would add if you’re considering getting a gmail account because it’s so cool, you won’t have to have two email accounts! The email at your domain will be your gmail email!

Google Apps for Your Domain

If you’re among the many, many people receiving spam which has as it’s subject “It’s name : )” where name is a different name every time, you can write a regular expression in cPanel’s email filter which will stop those emails from being delivered.

I know I lost some of you with the term “regular expression” but you don’t really need to understand it to use it. Here’s what you need to do:

Login to your cpanel and click on the “Mail” icon.

Click on “Email Filtering.”

Click on “Add Filter.”

In the Filter line the default should be “Subject.” Leave that the way it is. Change the box that defaults as “contains” to “matches regex.” In the input box, type: It\’s (.*) \:

Click the “Activate” button.

This will filter out any email which starts with “It’s” and then contains text and then has a colon. I tested this filter, and if I used the subject, “It’s a doozie” that message was still delivered, while “It’s Alan : )” was discarded. The filter works properly.

Of course if someone actually sends you an email like that it will filter it out, too, but it’s pretty unlikely they would start it with “It’s” and have a : later in the subject line.

So that little filter should greatly reduce the spam you’re getting if you’ve been hit with the “It’s name : )” spam deluge that’s been rocking the web.

Something we Mac users have been screaming for has finally come to the new Firefox… you can now close each tab with an “x” on the tab instead of it being all the way to the right of the browser. It’s a little thing that just makes sense.

Nearly all (if not all, I’m not sure) of my Firefox extensions either transferred over or an updated version was available. All of the ones I use on a regular basis are there, and that makes me happy.

Now, if a site requests to open a link in a new window, a new tab is opened by default. I’m sure you can change that setting, but I’ve wanted that functionality for awhile now. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure that was not even an option in the 1.5 version of Firefox.

I’m still playing with it, as I’m sure there are more features added that I’m not yet aware of. Anyone else have something about the new Firefox that makes you all giddy inside?

If you haven’t tried Firefox before, now’s the perfect time. Click the link in my right column underneath all of the RSS feed icons. If you’re already using Firefox, I think the link just takes you to a Google Toolbar page, but there’s another link in there to download Firefox (under system requirements).

Enjoy Firefox 2, it’s worth the download!

Yesterday, we reloaded the OS, and wouldn’t ya know it, there were more complications. Websites and email were down for many people, and there was nothing I could do but wait for the techs to find the solution. I lost three customers, and it could be more. I don’t blame them, of course. I’d be tempted to leave a host with two incidents within a month (although they were both really the same incident spread out as we tried to recover from the first).

In the evening, I had done all the work I could do and most of the sites were back up and fully functional. My friends had a play opening up, and since all I had to do was wait on the techs, I decided to go. I could barely stay awake (I didn’t get hardly any sleep the night before when the reload was started). Right after the play, a friend I hosted the websites for called me and let me know the good news that all the minor glitches I couldn’t get fixed myself were taken care of!

The strange thing (and if you’re reading this far I appreciate it!), I had a real sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence at the beginning of the play and felt God tell me everything was working out with the server. I know I had several people praying for me consistently, and when I got the call I just smiled for a moment remembering that God had whispered to me. In the most difficult times of my life, God has let me know He’s there. I’ve never taken it to mean everything will work out the way I want it to or expect it to, but it’s been comforting to know God’s presence hasn’t left. When I went through my divorce, I had a profound moment where God had spoken to me in such a way that it could not have been my own imagination. I didn’t take it as a sign my wife was coming back to me, but it clearly let me know that nothing had taken God by surprise. And no matter how dark it seemed, the Holy Spirit was with me through it all.

Though this pails in comparison to divorce, it has been one of the hardest times of my life in recent memory. It’s nice to know God’s still there, with me through it all.

Breathe. Inhale. Exhale.

Okay…

Please continue to pray for me, especially my mental health!

By the time you read this, much of my stress will be relieved. But right now, I’m at the end of the worst birthday ever.

Evidently, because I host many websites with Christian affiliation, my server was targeted for an attack, and the attack was successful. cPanel is an amazing piece of software, and they issue regular security updates. If you are one of the unfortunate and very few to get hit before a security update is automatically installed, much mischief occurs. In my case, each domain on my site’s index pages were affected, along with a few other files. Which means on my b-day, I’m bouncing messages back with my techs, when I’m not on the phone with them. And I’ll probably see (or at least be aware of) the sunrise tomorrow.

Oh, since you might be wondering, the propaganda page they placed up referenced the catholics, the pope, and I think the arminian genocide which muslims in Turkey vehemently deny. It happened, and denying it and attacking people’s servers does not mean your ancestors were not heinous murderers. There are few cultures, if any, which would be able to claim they had never been the instigators of mass murder.

I’m waiting for a response from my techs before I can do more work, which is the only reason I have time to type this post…

A lot of you know I’ve had an extremely rough year. Some would say an extremely rough decade

At any rate, I feel like a lot of things are starting to turn around. After losing a couple of big clients to bad circumstances (especially for me), I’ve had a difficult time recovering financially. If I did not have such good friends, I would’ve been forced to either be homeless or move back to the midwest to live with my family. That’s what happens when you make just enough money to support an artist’s lifestyle and two-thirds of your income vanishes by no fault of your own.

The past few months, I’ve had web leads coming out of the woodwork. I’m actually in a position where I might turn down work, because I’ve got too much going on. It’s a good feeling to have. I had meetings with two different clients, and they both have more work for me. One I knew would have more work, as we just agreed to a six-month (and probably much longer) contract for search engine marketing, and the other was a pleasant surprise.

So any way, I know I haven’t blogged much lately. It’s been a combination of bad internet connections in San Felipe and having a lot of web development work. The combination of the two means the paying work gets the internet time…

Thank you to everyone who’s praying for me. I’m certain your prayers are bearing fruit both in material and spiritual ways. God bless you all.

Filed under: Software, Productivity

No, you aren’t hallucinating: Macworld UK is reporting that a truly native version of OpenOffice (not the java-powered NeoOffice port) will be shipping next month. OpenOffice’s journey to running on Mac OS X in a native format has been a rollercoaster ride over the years, with a post on their site in January of ’05 basically nixing a native port altogether.

However, the stars have realigned and the port will see light of day after all. If you need visual proof, one of OO’s developers posted some native screenshots on his blog. As far as when we can get our hands on a non-X11 OpenOffice package, we’re tossing our chips in with Macworld UK’s that we’ll most likely see this release at September’s OOoCon. Stay tuned.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

I’ve been waiting for this one. I hope it actually happens. So many people ask me how to get Microsoft Office for free… it’s not that hard to figure out, but wouldn’t it be nice to not have to use anything Microsoft… whether you pay for it or not?

San Felipe has been booming over the past several years, and there’s a lot of interest in this fishing village turned American hotspot.

I do have an agenda with this blog, as I plan to sell advertising to the growing number of San Felipe businesses. But I do love San Felipe, and I think the blog will be an excellent source of material for those who visit the town or just travel in baja california in general.

The San Felipe Blog

Not really a big deal, except all of the extra information was in Spanish… until I tried to change it to what I thought was English in the preferences (all the languages were listed in Spanish, and none of them liked like what I thought was English in Spanish). So I changed it and changed it a few more times. Now I have no idea what language it is!

I know, I know… no sympathy about me complaining that while I’m in Mexico by the pool my internet searches are lacking a little…

But I’m actually working. I’m housesitting in Mexico, and so I’m working by the pool. Right now I’m just giving my brain a rest from dealing with a VERY difficult website which has consumed way too much of my time (and of course it was a flat rate for the site… I think I’m making minimum wage on this one).

All righty then. Peace out

Gecko-based browsers are now at 37% market share… (Firefox is Gecko-based and would be the most common)

Designers who only check in Internet Explorer should be wary. Believe it or not, there are still quite a few out there!

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard IE won’t be attached to Vista the way it was too XP. I have heard they might even discontinue Internet Explorer, which would be the best for everyone, imho.

Unfortunately, it’s a non-union spot that doesn’t pay very much (although it’s decent for a spec, but that means you probably won’t ever get to see it, unless I’m allowed to post it on my acting website).

As you can see, I’ve changed my theme. Connections was breaking on some pages, and to be honest, I was a little bored with having a theme that a million others had. I’ll probably start finding sites with this theme all over the place… but this summer I’ll have time to design my own. Which is the way it should be, since I am a web developer and all