We’ve just updated the ourchur.ch software to the latest build. If you have any troubles, get a help desk ticket at ourchur.ch/ticket and we’ll get right on it!

We’ve just added in a new Trouble Ticket system to help us track support issues. If you have any issues, please fill out a ticket so we can track the issue in a timely manner.

ourchur.ch/ticket

Email spam is one of the most common abuses of internet technology in these early days of the Internet Age. Spam happens when an unscrupulous party gets a hold of your email address, sends spam messages to you directly and/or sells your email address to another unscrupulous party. Email address lists are hot commodities in the dark underworld of the internet, and a verified, current, valid email address is very valuable.

Like the one you use for your church every day.

How do spammers get my email address?

There are a few ways. Some spammers use dictionary programs to randomly select likely names and just iterate through them all: ajones@ourchurch, bjones@ourchurch, cjones@ourchurch, etc. More often, though, spammers send out “robots” to search the web looking for email addresses. Visit www.turnstep.com for more information

If your email address is posted to a web site anywhere, that address is a ticking time bomb. Search engines are cataloguing that page, and so the address is being copied and repeated over and over again in various forms. And then it’s just a matter of time before a “spambot” finds it and adds your address to its collection. You’ve just been “harvested”, and your email address will be sold and resold and resold endlessly.

How can I keep Spammers from getting my email address?

1. Never, never, never put your email address on a web site. Not in HTML, not in a PDF or Word document, not in newsgroups or message boards, nothing. Google and other search engines can read and catalogue PDF/Word documents as well as other files.The only way to make your email address available on a web site is to encrypt it.
2. Never reply to spam“Commonly seen as part of a spam message: ‘To stop any future mailings, just reply to this message with a subject of REMOVE’. Yeah, right. If you reply to the spammer, you accomplish three things:
   1. You verify an email address for the spammer as valid.
   2. You verify to the spammer that you actually read the mail, and took the time to reply to it.
   3. You demonstrate your lack of anti-spam knowledge to the spammer by falling for this trick.” — www.turnstep.com
3. Never ever buy anything advertised by spamEven if you think you need herbal Viagra or “personal enhancements”, resist the temptation. Go somewhere else. Find another supplier. You are making this spammer money, and justifying their actions. If spam were to become unprofitable – if no-one ever purchased anything advertised via spam – spam would cease to exist.

WordPress Cheat Sheet

By Andy Wibbels

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an easy way for Web sites to share headlines and stories from other sites. Web surfers can use sophisticated news readers to surf these headlines using RSS aggregators.

Jennifer Kyrnin – http://webdesign.about.com/od/rss/a/what_is_rss.htm

Web feeds are a way for visitors to keep up-to-date on the latest changes to a web page. Feeds are often used for frequently-updated content such as news headlines or events. News feeds are sometimes referred to as XML feeds, RSS feeds or Atom feeds, depending on the way the feed is encoded. Regardless of the term used, they are all functionally the same to the web surfer. We’ll refer to them as “web feeds” for this article.

What does it look like?

Web Feeds generally show the headline, date, and a short summary of a news article. This allows the user to quickly scan the headline and see whether he would like more information. Usually clicking the headline will take the user to the full article. The following screenshot is from the popular, cross-platform Flock browser, based on Firefox. (flock.com)

Many news feeds can be bundled into collections, with total unread articles showing.

How do I find a web feed?

Web feeds are generally identified with some common icons:

On the Selkirk College web site, the main news articles have a prominent link to the web feeds for visitors with browsers that do not natively support web feeds. In fact, all Selkirk College “News Pages” have web feeds attached to them.

How do I subscribe to web feeds?

You can subscribe to web feeds using a wide variety of tools. You can use software that may be already on your computer, such as:

• Apple Mail (Mac OS X)
• Firefox (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
• Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
• Microsoft Outlook 2007 (Windows)
• Safari (Mac OS X)

Alternately, you can use web-based tools, such as:

• Bloglines.com
• Google Reader

How can I use Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to read web feeds?

In Firefox, a popular web browser, the standard web feed icon will appear in the address bar when there is a web feed for that page.

For more information on how to use Live Bookmarks in Firefox to read web feeds, visit http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Live+Bookmarks.

Internet Explorer 7 will show the same icon. For more information on viewing web feeds in Internet Explorer 7, visit http://www.ie-vista.com/rss.html. Note: previous versions of Internet Explorer does not natively support web feeds. However, you can still use web-based tools to read web feeds.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia Definition of RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
• Save Time, Know More: Subscribing to Online Information Using RSS. http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/subject/misc/rss.html
• Wikipedia list of Feed Aggregators: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators

If you have a church or parachurch organisation and want a free website, please contact us. We’ll give you your own web site at yourname.ourchur.ch, and an email address yourname@ourchur.ch, completely free of charge. For a limited time only.