• MediaLayer So far they are doing great!
• DreamHost I had a pretty good experience with them. Support was good, services ran fine. But over the last year or so they have made a number of sloppy mistakes with a varying level of severity. They have also oversold themselves quite a bit so web response times have been somewhat sluggish.
• Believer's Networks (they later changed their name to Eversible) I used them for web and shell hosting, but at that time web hosting was a little more limited than I wanted.
• Cedant A terrible experience throughout. Seeing as how that was 4 or 5 years ago they may well have improved since then.
• Yerot.com. Torey (yerot is his name backwards) was a friend at MSU who had a hosted Linux box. He gave accounts to various people so I put my website on there.
• Cyberearth. Cyberearth was a machine in my dad's office at MSU. It was used for work but he let me put a personal website on there as well.
• Ra. Ra is (was? Looks lightly used these days) the primary unix machine at MSU. It was the hub for student web pages and for student email. Everyone had an account and it was actively used by many students. I ran my personal page from here for a little while. I got my first Ra account while still in High School and I think Ra was the first place for me to set up a website.
• SHS server. Starkville High School had a unix machine donated to them by MSU. A small handful of students ran websites on there. I don't remember if I did much with this web space, I just remember having it. Around this time Ra would have been my main web home.

I have been on the internet since my freshman year of High School in 1992. I remember using gopher to look up information. At Starkville High the internet connection was through several dumb terminals hooked up to a machine hosted at MSU, later moved to the high school. My first computer job was with the ERC at MSU my junior year of HS. Prior to that I got my first Ra account and around then would have set up my first website. I remember discovering the World Wide Web while working at the ERC. The browser of the day was the snazzy Mosaic. From then I switched to Netscape and pretty much stuck with it during the infamous Netscape/Internet Explorer browser war. I switched to Firefox while it was still pre-1.0 and remained a faithful Firefox user until recently when I bought my first Mac. I now use Safari.

My websites were always silly things that served as blogs in the days before blogs. There was no blogging software back then, but I would post articles on my website in a way similar to blogging. The designs were usually horrid things. I only remember a few of them but I can feel my eyes start to melt as I remember the website with six frames, lots of colors, animated flames, etc. Hopefully I have improved some over the years.

I started officially blogging around five years ago. My first ever blog was one I wrote myself, piecing it together using PHP. It came along nicely but when I learned about WordPress I decided to abandon my blog software and use something already developed. I think WordPress was pre-1.0 at that point, but I am not sure. I have been using WordPress ever since.

With the release of WordPress 2.5 my loyalty has been challenged. Since I host some WordPress plugins I get frustrated every time the WordPress developers make changes to the database or the APIs within WordPress. And they do that a lot. 2.5 hasn't affected the plugin too badly, however. Some things don't work and I still need to fix them, but I was surprised that it still worked at all. The problem with 2.5 is the developers let a color blind rat design the look and layout of the admin tools. Some things have improved - the overall arrangement of what menu is where is better with 2.5 but once you get within various menus things go downhill. The main problem is with the tools to write new posts and pages. A lot of users are thoroughly baffled by the changes. Developers have yet to explain themselves and about all I've heard is that the developers don't care that the users are unhappy.

So I decided to try something new. Since resurrecting Seek the Holy I have been using Movable Type. Exploring the Mystery is still WordPress and will continue to be WordPress but for now at least my new blog site is Movable Type. There is a lot to love about MT, but it is not perfect. The main thing I miss is the way WordPress does design templates. It is much easier to design a site for WordPress than it is for Movable Type. I also miss my plugins, of course, though I may see about writing versions of them for Movable Type. But I might not, particularly if I switch back to WordPress.

I am currently wrestling with the decision of staying with Movable Type or switching back to WordPress. Only time will tell.

On the plugin, it appears to partly work with WordPress 2.5.1. I need to do some fixes so that it can work for those wanting to make the changes happen when saving a post. Other than that, it and Tippy appear to work fine.

If you want to try something else out, however, the Logos folks have written RefTagger for use with any website. They have a WordPress plugin available but because of the way RefTagger works no plugin is required, just a tweak to your page heading.

There were a couple of other minor glitches that were my own fault.

I've had one report of a strange problem that I haven't yet been able to track down. One user reported that when he installed the plugin he no longer had access to his admin tools. I have not been able to duplicate the issue. Has anyone else had the problem? Please let me know what version of WordPress you have installed, whether you installed both Tippy and the ESV Plugin, and what web browser/browser version you were using. Thanks!

Edit:
I'm sure you all can find them, but I forgot to link to the plugin pages:
WordPress ESV Plugin
Tippy Plugin

The Bibleref plugin will search your posts for any Scripture references and will wrap them in <cite> tags with the intent that this will make it easier for web search engines to find Scripture references being discussed in your blog.

This kind of modification is called microformatting. A discussion on Scripture reference microformatting can be found at The Semantic Bible.

At this time, the plugin will only look for references not already wrapped in tags. If you manually link your Bible passages to something like the Bible gateway, the plugin will not cite those references. In the future I will consider modifying the plugin to automatically handle references within links.

Download and get more information at the Bibleref plugin page.