I got back from Florida on January 8th. My time in Florida was super blessed. I was able to spend a lot of time with my family and got in touch with The Potter’s House church, who I hadn’t seen in many years.

I’m almost done making the quiz and grading functionality for Armory. I was surprised to find that there’s really no tutorials online for making this kind of thing, which made it kind of hard to figure out exactly how to do it. So, after I finish the feature, I’ll be writing a tutorial explaining how to do it. It will be comprehensive, going from the forms for making a quiz, how the model associations should be laid out, the form for taking the quiz, and different strategies for storing the responses.

A few weeks ago in church, Hassan (one of the pastors at Calvary Chapel Horizonte), said something that made me think. He read from Isaiah 1:18, about where God says, “Come, let us reason together. Though your sins be like scarlet, they’ll be as white as snow.” God doesn’t have to reason with us. He didn’t have to give us the Bible or even die for our sins. He’s God. He’d be perfectly just to tell us, “This is the way it is. You can go to heaven or hell. Good luck.” But of course, He doesn’t do that. Instead, He reasons with us, explaining why things are the way they are, giving us a way when there is no other way. That’s love.

But it doesn’t end there. He’s not only loving toward us, but faithful and patient. He works with us, teaching us to live for Him. In Psalm 119, there are many places where the author asks God to teach him to follow His ways. Like in verse 12, “Blessed are You, O LORD! Teach me Your statutes.” And God does teach us and enable us by His grace to follow Him, if we’d only let Him do it. Maybe you’re feeling convicted that you’re not that close to God. You can’t understand how these other christians can genuinely seek after the Lord with their whole heart. It is possible. Tell God how you feel. Pray to Him, confessing that you don’t love Him like you ought and ask Him to help you. I guarantee you He will answer that prayer, because that’s His will, that you come to know Him.

Then, begin to spend time with Him, praying with the Lord and studying His Word. It’s important to realize that there are habits that should change. Starting a daily devotional doesn’t just happen. It takes some discipline on your part to make it happen. Trust in the Lord, ask Him to help you, and then go for it!

As you know, I recently migrated my blog from tumblr to a more custom solution. I was watching Google Analytics and noticed that several visitors were going to pages that no longer exist. When I went to view the default 404 page, it was just “Sorry, I couldn’t find URL”. I wanted to provide a better 404 page with links to certain things they might be looking for, like the Armory Source Code.

So, I did some research and found out it’s super easy to add a custom 404 page to Octopress or even plain Sinatra. In your config.ru file, you should have:

This weekend, I posted about setting up my free blog with Heroku and octopress. I’ll be posting in more detail in a few weeks about how to do that.

Anyways, shortly after I started using octopress in this way, I got tired of having to do git add ., git commit -m "message", and then changing directory to do the same thing and upload to heroku. The way I set-up octopress, I have two repositories, 1 for the source code and octopress itself and 1 for just the generated site to push to heroku. Since this was tedious, I wrote a quick rake task and added it to my Rakefile. Here’s the gist:

I was racking my brain yesterday and today trying to figure out a javascript error I’ve been having on Armory.

The Problem

No javascript would run on any page. Dropdowns, modal windows, nothing would run. I couldn’t find any weird errors in the dev console on Chrome and had the same effect in multiple browsers. The problem would remain whether I include the js from an external file or inline anywhere in the file.

So, I’ve made a new blog again. I know, I can’t stay content with the same blog, but I think this one will stay for a while. The reason for the change? I wanted a free platform to blog on and tried tumblr and wordpress.com, but was sorely missing the ability to customize every aspect about my blog. Also, I’ve been using Markdown a lot lately and wanted to be able to use that (tumblr allows it, wordpress.com does not). For the curious, here’s a page explaining the basics markdown.

Then I came across this blog post on pacbard.tk and realized it was better than what I was wanting. In the post, the author describes how he brought together various free platforms to make a fully functioning blog backed by a CDN and with a free domain name! Since I wasn’t familiar with all the systems used to make it happen, it required a bit of research on my part, but here it is. My new blog is hosted on the internet completely free and fully customizable. It should handle any traffic I get, since I don’t get that much traffic anyways. If you don’t understand a word I just said, basically I put together a blog for free much like you can put together a light meal from all the samples at Costco/Sam’s Club!

So, if you don’t live at the Bible College, you might not know it but I’ve been praying to see if it’s the Lord’s will that I go to Guadalajara to start an extension campus of the Bible College in Ensenada. Here’s how it all came about.