New Hosting Provider

Posted by admin on January 12, 2024

If you noticed any irregulrities with the website this week, it is because I have moved the website to a new hosting service. I made the move to take advantage of reduced cost in maintaining the website. It doesn't make good sense to spend money needlessly! The move was easy and seemless on my side with the new hosting service doing all the work for me. But I fear you may have seen some notices like security issues, files not found, etc. That was just part of the move. The last thing I did today was transfer the domain name to the new provider. Hopefully that will also go well.

The new location does not change the look of the webstie. Everything should work the same. However, If you do seem some irregularities, please let me know and I do my best to address the problem.

As always, thank you for finding my website useful to you as you worship God in song.

Take care and may God bless you in all that you do.

Ted

More Website Changes

Posted by admin on July 20, 2023

I finaly finished teaching the class on Romans. That has got to be one of Paul's most interesting letters. Its'masterful construction proves that our faith must be an obedient faith. I would encourage all to study the letter in detail. One process that I use is to copy the letter to a word processor and then section the letter into thoughts and then title each thought. When you are finished you can easily see what paul is teaching. It is also helpful to lay the pages out on a table and take several chapters in at once since his teachings on a particular topic may cover two or three chapters. Romans is surely the "meat of the word!"

Having some free time between studies, I have added a new hymn to the catalog and updated a few powerpoint files from PPT to PPTX. And I decided to change the colors on the website again. I felt that the blue made it look to cartoonish. I thing the black them is a little more appealing. I hope you agree.

Take Care and may God bless you in all that you do.

Ted

New Look...And Busy!

Posted by admin on June 9, 2023

For a while now I have wanted to change the color of the website to something a little more brighter. I felt the brown color scheme was a little boring. I hope you find the new colors inviting!

I can you are wondering why I havn't posted mush in the last few months, its because my time has been wrapped up in preparing for and teaching a class on Paul's letter to the Romans. Without a doubt, it is his most complicated letter with a tremendous amout of indepth thought. I have felt it to be overwhelming, from understanding it to teaching it to those of our congregation. Personally, I have felt that I have not done it justice, but I think we have all learned quite a bit about the grace of God and the need for obedient faith. If you haven't done an indepth study on Romans, I would encourage you to do so. You will find it rewarding!

Currently we are at the halfway point and it may be a couple of months before we are finished. Hopefully I can sqqueeze in a hymn or two during that time.

One other thing I did do was change my personal blog from Dotclear to HTMLy. It's a flat file blogging platform that does not rely on a SQL database which I find more comforting. I always worry about a crash of some sort and not being able to repair it. I'm not SQL literate, nor do I wish to take the time in my old age to learn it. HTML and markdown, to me are prefered.

Anyway, once again I do appreciate your visits and pray that you continue to find this site useful.

God bless,

Ted Gatza

Concerning Power Point Files

Posted by admin on February 1, 2023

Just a note to let everyone know that I will no longer be posting PPT files. I will instead be posting PPTX files. I had wanted to provide the older files for those who still use the early versions of Power Point. However, with the last update I did on my Macbook to Ventura, I found that Keynote no longer exports to PPT. It just exports to PPTX.

For those who still need the PPT files, I would suggest that you download and install LibreOffice or OpenOffice, then open the PPTX with them and export to PPT. I may go back and update all to PPTX, but that will come with time. There are a lot of html links that will need to be changed. I'll just add it to the "to do" list.

Once again I do appreciate your visits and pray that you continue to find this site useful.

God bless,

Ted Gatza

Search Page Tweaks

Posted by admin on December 03, 2022

I have been using the FreeFind search engine on my website since 2008. Recently I decided to tweak the output for better results.

FreeFind is a flexible and easy to use search engine that is a pleasure to use. However I never felt that the default results were very helpful for those who were searching for some specific. Today I decided to see if I could make it more user friendly.

The first thing that I did was to set the results to display a short description. This greatly reduces the clutter and makes it easier to see the results. The second thing I did was to set numbering for each item returned from the search. If you have a search result of twenty items, they are numbered 1 through 20. Then finally, I removed all the hymn files from the results. (pdf, ppt, key, mp3, and midi). FreeFind is thorough and often searched inside these files and returned results. This change removed the files, but not the hymn page for the files themselves. This cleaned things up quite a bit!

The beauty of FreeFind is that if you want to see a longer description you can set that option by clicking on the advance button and select the long description option. The advance option can also help you to narrow your search down quite a bit. For example you can search for "faith" and then add "Crosby" and you will see hymns written by Fanny Crosby that has the word faith in it.

The last change I made was to upload a modified template of my webpage to FreeFind where the search results are to be displayed on. This gives the website a more natural look. Instead of the default white page FreeFind look, my website search results page has my website look, complete with menu bar and mobile device menu button. There is only one problem that I encountered that I do not think I can resolve. If you are on a mobile phone and look at the index of words, it falls off the right side of the screen. This is because the list defaults to four columns and does not fit my website design properly. It is still readable and usable, but it is a bit of an annoyance. If you you turn your phone sideways than everything falls into place. This applies only to the word index page. Everything else works great!

One advantage that FreeFind has over the powerhouse companies that do web searches is that it will index your site on demand or, as I do, set it up to reindex weekly.

I hope you like the change. From the look to the usability! I'll be adding more tweaks as time permits.

May God bless you all.

Ted Gatza

No Association!

Posted by admin on November 3, 2022

Last year when I decided to move my website and change the domain name little did I realize who would buy the old name!

If you would were to go to the old HymnsUntoGod.org website you will see that it is now owned by someone that has set up some kind of gambling website. I just want everyone to know that I am in no way associated with it. Nor do I endorse it!

As we all know, the Bible speaks against gambling:

A similar thing happened several years ago to the owner of the Cyber Hymnal. His domain, for some reason, was not renewed by the registrar and he lost his ownership. To make matters worse his site was hijacked because of the lack of copyright notices and was turned into a add driven mess in a foreign country. He has since gotten back on his feet, but the experience made me think, as he did, about copyright notices on the webpages themselves. It seems to be a necessity these days.

The hymns on this website will always be free to use, as are the mup files written to generate the PDF. That's my free gift to the world. The website code itself bears a copyright notice of ownership in order to prevent theft by people who are seeking ill gotten gain.

So, for the users of this website, please understand that my old domain name is no longer mine and that I am in no way associated with whatever use is made of it. I value all of you and the Gospel of our Lord to allow this to go unanswered.

May God bless you all.

Ted Gatza

Rethinking Things

Posted by admin on September 7, 2022

As I look over the new website, there are a few things that I will be changing as time permits. I will be changing the format of the projection hymns, adding hymns in the letter format in addition to the 6x9. As far as the website is concerned, I will be updating the hymn page format to address the table layout problem. Also I will be changing the location of hymns that begin with "The."

Letter Format

I really don't know if a letter size format is useful to anyone, but I decided to go ahead and add it. Changes to the mup file is minimal and is easy to generate. With this addition, the portfolio of options is more complete.

Projection Music

I have never been a proponent for projection hymns. The main reason is that you do not have the complete hymn before you to see all the lyrics at once and have the time to reflect on the meaning of the hymn. When I originally started doing the hymns I focused on getting the largest music and lyrics possible on each slide so that it would be visible to the audience. I have change my way of thinking and have decided to start reworking the hymns to get each line of the lyric on its own line. This will reduce the size of the projected hymn but it provides a better understanding of the hymn as it is sung. There will be some hymns where this is not possible but I will make every effort to make it happen.

Re-Indexing Hymns Starting With "The"

When i started this website I never gave much thought to the hymns that start with the word "The." As it grew, I began to realize that I should have paid more attention to this. It really isn't a good practice to do that. I will start re-indexing these where the second word is the one used to index it. For example, "The Great Physician" will be indexed as "Great Physician, The."

Hymn Page Reformatting

This is one that has embarrassed me. If I had spent a little time thinking about what I was doing it could have saved myself a great deal of work. I originally used spacing to place the links in the table. Now I will be using column grouping to accurately place the links. This may not be noticeable to those using laptops or an iPad, but a subtle difference will be noted with those using iPhones.This change will require updating hundreds of html files and will take time. I'm just glad the current setup is usable while I make these changes.

So.....

All these changes will take a lot of time to do, and I will do them as time permits. I will focus on the Projection files and make the letter page additions and other changes as I update these. In the end, my objective is to provide the best I can do for those who use my work as they worship God in song.

As always, May God bless you in all that you do.

Ted

Sweet By And By

Posted by admin on August 19, 2022

The hymn "Sweet By And By" is one of those old venerable hymns that still be sung until the end of time. I remember my old grandmother, who was born in the late 1800's, singing it when I was a little boy. The very fact that it is found in just about every hymnal shows the endurance of this hymn and the words of comfort and encouragement it gives.

When I decided to add it to my hymn site, I was amazed at the numerous arrangements that were made even in the early days. After scanning through many hymnals, I decided to add two arrangements of this hymn. Both are from the early years and both seem to dominate the hymnals. I have added both arrangements to the hymn page and separated them as arrangement 1 and arrangement 2. The second arrangement is probably the most common found in todays hymnals. However I do love the first arrangement as it seems to be more solemn when sung.

I did make one change in the lyrics. IN the second verse, I changed the wording from "Father" to "Savior." I think that this better represents the thought of what John 14:2 tells us. The savior is the one preparing a place for us in the Fathers mansions above whereas the lyrics say the Father is preparing the place. This may seem insignificant to some, but I would rather sing a hymn that was a little more accurate in its teaching. Hopefully you will approve.

I think I am finally caught up. Time for a little break as I search for more hymns that I hope that you will enjoy.

God Bless

Ted

You Live and Learn!

Posted by admin on July 31, 2022

Well after a little more research it seems that my host provider includes a shared security certificate. I got it installed, updated the .htaccess file to force a secure connection, and everything seems to be working as it should. I also managed to get the xml sitemate accepted by google search. That's a story for another day.

I did remove the redirect to the website and moved the hymn site out of a subdirectory and into the main public_html directory. That also eliminated a lot of problems I was encountering with google search, generating sitemaps and so forth. Hopefully your bookmarks are not to messed up.

Anyway, as this was very time consuming, I'm taking a little break from computers before going back to work on the hymns. I learned a lot but this was to much like real work!

God bless!

Ted

"If It's Not Broke....."

Posted by admin on July 29, 2022

"If it's not broke, don't fix it." If you experienced access problems yesterday it was because I was trying to fix something that wasn't broken. I had noticed that the free one year security certificate that was provided by my hosting service had come to an end. The cost to purchase one was as much as the website. So I decided to install a user defined certificate. Well I quickly learned I did not know what was doing!

When I managed to get one built and installed, I soon learned that it was causing my Safari browser to issue all kinds of unsafe warning messages and that I was going to steal everything you own and that the website should be avoided like the plague. It even made me type in my computer password to access it. I guess Apple likes everyone to have a safe browsing experience but this was way overboard. Much like the old Windows Vista machine my sister had. So I decided to remove the certificate. Between not knowing what I was doing and the Safari cache constantly returning me to a cached page I was literally going around in circles. Anyway, the user generated certificate is gone and hopefully everything is are back to normal. In the process of all that, I messed up my domain redirect. Took awhile to get that straight also.

Moral of the story...."Don't fix it if it's not broke!"

So why did I go to all this trouble? It seems that Google and Bing search engines prioritize secure websites over non secure websites. I can understand their need to provide their users with secure browsing and reduce possible liability issues. It seems though, that unless you purchase a certificate that cost as much as your website you are considered a liability.

So why do you need a security certificate. Well, If there is personal information being transferred across the site then yes, it needs to be protected and locked down. Websites that do business needs the security. But for websites that do not, such as this one, it is not necessary. Several websites that provide free access to hymns do not have security certificates. Since you are not uploading any personal information to this site, I am not going to pursue getting one. I hope that you are OK with that. I do want you to know that everything that I upload to the website is scanned with Bitdefender for viruses. I can at least protect you from that.

I'm not sure if Google will ever get me on their search list, but if you like what you find here, pass the word along to your friends and family. My reason for this website has always been to provide the best quality hymns I could for those who want new hymns to use as they worship "God in Spirit and Truth!"

God bless!

Ted

New Website Design!

Posted by admin on July 21, 2022

Finally, after 8 months of work the new website design is finished! All I can say is that it has been a labor of love. I had to build and transfer 953 pages and over 3,00 links, validate them and then check for dead links. Quite a bit of work!

I do think the end result is much better than the old website. It is now responsive to tablets and mobile devices which should make it much easier to use. The overall design is much like the old site so frequent users will not have to relearn how to navigate the site. Hopefully, you will find it a much more pleasant experience.

One more thing that I have added is a link to my personal blog site. There is nothing on it right now, but over time I will add things that are of interest to me. Personally, I am not into social media. I just do not like the atmosphere that I have often seen and I just do not have the time for such things. Blogging seems a better fit.

Anyway, I will be working on the overhead projection page, converting the existing PDF to powerpoint and keynote files. I also have several hymns started that needs to be added. So there is lots of new things coming. So if there there is anything you would like to see just let me know and I will do my best with adding it to the site.

As always, may God bless you as you worship God in songs of praise.

Ted

BTW, You might need to reload a page if it still appears as the old website.

Things Are Moving A Little Slow

Posted by admin on March 3, 2022

The new website is not coming along as fast as I would like. I have been really busy taking care of other things that are equally important. It may be closer to the end of the year before it is finished.

Back in January I had started teaching a class on the Holy Spirit and His personality, Nature and Works. Considering the confusion that exist in the world today I felt it was time for our congregation review what the Bible had teaches us about him. It is indeed a challenging subject!

A New (Used) Chromebook

A couple of months ago I bought a used Acer 740 Chromebook off eBay. I got it pretty cheap. It was my intention to turn it into a Linux laptop. It was a decision that I had to make because of the turn that Apple took with their laptops. Their new computers moved away from the intel chips and to a 64 bit platform. This was not good for a MUP user! The MAC version of MUP is still 32 bit and runs on the intel processor, so I had to do something so that I could move forward with both Apple and MUP. The solution was to go back to Linux and the Chromebook filled that need.

The Acer 740 supported linux in developer mode. It also allowed linux to be installed with Crouton. After a lot of research and praying I decided to wipe the machine and turn it into a full blown Linux laptop. It really wasn't all that hard. I just had to put the machine in developer mode, pop the bottom off and remove the write protect screw and I was in business. I first loaded Gallium OS which is designed for Chromebooks, but I was not all that happy with the touchpad response. After installing several Linux Distros, I finally settled on the Fedora distribution. It really works great!

Considering that the machine has 4 mb of memory and a 16gig ssd drive, you really do not have a lot of room. However, Fedora's file manager is able to mount online storage drives like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. It's simple to store files from the Chromebook and pick them up with the Mac book. With that said, Fedora only took about 6 gigs of drive space and left me with about 10 gigs for use.

I've spent the last few weeks getting use to the Chromebook and have really fell in love with it! I've "Mup'ed" several hymns and have them ready to put on the website, but that will come in time. It was a very small investment and now it allows me to do what I need and not worry about what Apple decides to do. I'm officially back in the Linux world once again. For those who don't know I used linux for about 15 years until I bought my first Mac book. They are both great operating systems, but Linux is still behind with what you can get done with Apple.

In Closing

Things are moving along. Just busy in my old retirement age. This website brings a lot of joy to my life especially when I see that is is being used by so many around the world. You all mean a lot to me and are an encouragement. It shows that my efforts are worthwhile as people worship God. We need more of that in our life. So much more!

May God bless you all. And please pray for the afflicted people in Ukraine. Especially those of the household of faith.

Ted

Major Site Update In The Works!

Posted by admin on November 24, 2021

Soon after I transitioned to the new webhost, I developed a bad head cold that lasted for a couple of weeks. Not feeling like doing much else I ventured out on a new look for the webiste. The first week was spent learning how to use the w3.css bootstrap and found it to be interesting and easy. Before long I put together a new site that is more phone and tablet friendly, at least I hope! I didn't have much to try the new look out on, but I think it will work just fine.

The new site still contains much of the old design but with brighter colors and lots of corrections! I think it will be more pleasent as you move around in it. One draw back to all of this is it is going to take a long time rebuilding the site. I counted over 950 html pages and 3,000 links that will have to be transfered manually. I think that if I can commit to doing three pages a day, the site will be ready in about a year. I wished it wouldn't take that long, but I do have other obligations in my retired life! Who would have thought that!

Power Point Files

While I am rebuilding the site, I am also working on overhead projection files. You will see more of these as time permits. Many congregations today are using this and I really thought I needed to address this by getting more of these on line. I had originally just posted a quick PDF and let it go. However, I saw where these needed to be updated and better defined. I had not paid attention to verse structure before, but now I have gone back and broke measures so that the verses make more sense on screen.

Converting the PDF's into powerpoint files proved a little difficult. Powerpoint does not play friendly with PDFs and it was necessary to convert these into png files to get them into Powerpoint easily. After a lot of trial and error I found the best approach was to import the PDFs into Keynote and then export as a powerpoint. This gave me the best looking quality I could come up with and keep the file size to a minimum. I will say, the Keypoint files project with less degredation of the music. Don't get me wrong, the powerpoints are very clear, but you can still denote a small amount of difference. Hopefully those who use them will find them satisfactory. It has always been my intention to produce the best quality product possible. That's one reason I use MUP by arkkra.com. In case you are a Linux user, the powerpoints work just fine with Libre Office.

So my long term plans for the site is to continue building the new site, updating the projection hymns and lastly adding new hymns. Please understand that I am maintaing two seperate copies of the website and it can get confusing!

Lastly, I hope you are able to spend quality time with your family during the upcoming holidays and that you find joy in the worship of God in truth and in spirit!.

May God bless you all.

Ted

New Beginnings

Posted by admin on August 18, 2021

I spent a lot of time and thought over the last couple of years about updating and moving this website. Not that I was displeased with my provider, but I found myself quickly outgrowing the website space they provided and with plans for expansion, I saw no other course of action.

I originally thought of rebuilding the site with a content management system to give it a more modern look and make it easier to manage. With over 250 html pages with almost 2,000 links that would have to be rebuilt, I chose not to do it. I would literally take me years to accomplish that task. I may still decide to do it, but it is not going to be a priority. Besides, building the html pages is not difficult and it keeps my mind sharp. Something I need to do in my old age!

With the change in providers also came a change in the url name. I probably shouldn't have done that, but it's done. It will take me quite a while to regain my position with search engines but hopefully my visitors will update their bookmarks to the new site. I do plan on keeping the old site on line for the foreseeable future with a re-direct notice to this one. It will however be dormant and eventually I will delete the files entirely.

Why This Change

Making this change was necessary. I have plans to expand my hymn file type offerings to include powerpoint and keynote overhead projection files as well as mp3 files of the hymns made from the midi files. These take up a lot of disk space and the new provider offers the space needed as the site grows. The second reason is that I am planning for the longevity of the site. I have spent close to 15 years building it and thousands of people from all over the world have benefited from it. This is something I just do not want to vanish overnight. People at my age tend to start planning for the inevitable. By moving this site to the provider that one of my daughters uses, it will be easy for her to make sure it continues. I want this to be my legacy!

Hymn Request

As always, if there are any request for hymns or to have a hymn transposed to Powerpoint of Keynote, please let me know, I will be happy to accommodate you. The only hymns that I can do are those in the public domain or licensed under the creative commons, or have conditional copyrights by the authors. Generally, we will have to contact the authors concerning conditional copyrights.

Please understand, I will review the content of the hymn for scriptural accuracy. Sad as it is, there are some hymns that do not convey truth even though there were good intentions by the Lyrics. Sometimes a little arranging of words helps with that problem.

In Conclusion

As always, I hope that the new changes will be found useful. It has always been my desire that Christians around the world have access to hymns to worship God with. Old ones that are familiar to us and old ones that need to become new once again.

Take care and may God bless you in all that you do.

Ted

"Time Enough Yet"

Posted by admin on October 15, 2014

Like the old hymn, I keep telling myself that there is "Time Enough Yet." Over the last several weeks, the time that I have been using to work on this website has slowly been taken away from me by other important obligations. Each week I tell myself that there is still time enough yet to get another hymn done and posted. Sadly that has not been the case.

Another time consumer has been my laptop. A few weeks ago it decided to "go the way of the world" and I had to invest in another. Having been a Linux user for about 15 years, I decided to invest in an Apple MacBook. The main reason for this is the ability to do work on my iPhone or iPad when I'm not at home and have things conveniently migrate to the laptop. This has been a great benefit to me as well as a learning curve. Getting things ready for and working on the website is quite different. I do have the new process down and it seems to work quite well.

For those who are frequent visitors, I do not want you to think that I have abandoned this project. It's that updates may be longer in coming than I would like. As time does permit, I will be making corrections and work on adding the lyrics to the pages that currently do not have them and making corrections as I find them. This really does not take too much time to accomplish. Also, I will still monitor the Projection Hymns and email daily.

Thank you so much for your interest, and may God bless you in all that you do.

Ted

I'm Humbled!

Posted by admin on March 21, 2014

I'm humbled. What else can I say! Looking back over 2013 I am amazed at the amount of activity that this little hymn site has generated. Like all website owners, there is always the curiosity about the traffic that makes it's way to their web-site. As I have said before, I never attempt to locate or track personal information from this sites visitors. I don't even know if it can be done. I do however, use Google analytics and Awstats to look at general information and I thought that I would share this with you.

This past year, this site has logged 4,615 unique visits with 1,158 return visits with a total of 54,000 page views! With about 193 countries in the world I have had visits from 95 of them! When I started this site a few years ago, I never would have dreamed that I would have this much interest in my efforts.

Two of the most searched for hymns were "Dare To Stand Like Joshua" and "There's No Disappointment In Heaven". The most downloaded hymn was "Lord, Remember Me."

I know that I can never reach the magnitude of those large public domin hymn sites that have been around for many years or the volume that they produce on a weekly basis. I just enjoy finding those old hymns that aren't used very much in today's hymnals and hopefully giving them a new life. By the many visits to this website, this dream of mine seems to be coming true.

Thank you so very much for your interest, your nice comments, and your support by visiting and telling others about what can be found here.

May God bless you in all that you do!

Ted

Visitor Searches

Posted by admin on November 15, 2013

One of the benefits of using the Free Find search engine is that they provide reports of what this site's many visitors are looking for.

When I first started this site I had decided to just concentrate on hymns that were new to me. My thought was that with so many hymn books available today, I didn't see the point of doing the more popular hymns that are found in them. However, the reports that I have been looking at are indicating that many visitors are looking for these popular hymns.

After thinking about it for a while, I have decided to spend the next few weeks locating and re-scoring a few hymns that people have searched for. There have been many visitors from other countries that may not have access to good hymnals. By providing the popular hymns, I believe that their worship to God will be greatly enhanced.

For those who visit looking for new hymns I want to assure you that will still be this sites primary goal. But above all, I want all people to be edified in song as we worship God!

Ted

Projection Hymns

Posted by admin on August 9, 2013

Projection Hymns that are projected onto overhead screens for congregational singing seems to be the new thing these days. As with all new things, some love this new form of displaying the hymns while others do not prefer it. At times I am amused at the discussions of the pros and cons of hymns being projected onto a screen. From a personal perspective, I do not like to use them. The main reason being is that the words of the hymn appear in short sections and then disappear. The congregation never sees the whole song at one time. Just bits and pieces.

With an hymnal, I often sit and read the hymn before we sing the song or I have sat there afterwards looking the the hymn and reflecting on the words. You just can't do this with projection hymns. No matter which way you may lean in the discussion, there is a desire and need for these presentation type hymns.

This past week I have once again started looking at how I could adapt the hymns on this site to the overhead format quickly and without much effort. I think that I have come across a good solution. For the last 4 or 5 hymns that I have posted on this site, I have added another PDF file in a projection type format.

Take a look at the hymns and see what you think:

• The Master's Call
• Cleanse Thou Me
• In Praise Of His Glory
• Rejoice In The Lord
• O Prodigal Child, Come Home

I would appreciate any feedback you may have.You can leave me note on the guest board or you can email me at this address.

These hymns are in the PDF format and can be used on Linux, Macs, or Windows with any PDF viewer capable of full screen viewing. The PDF files can also be combined or split using Adobe Distiller, or another program such as PDFSam (which is free.) As a Linux user, I prefer PDF Shuffler. It's a thumbnail viewer with drag and drop capabilities and is fast and easy.

Combining files allows you to build a song service by combining several hymns together and removing verses that you may not want to sing. With a little practice, using PDF's can be just as easy as any other presentation type program.

Hopefully you will find this new addition to the site helpful as you worship God.

Ted

New Look!

Posted by admin on May 16, 2013

For those who are frequent visitors, I am sure you have noticed a significant change. For a while I had grown tired of the rather plain appearance of this website. So this week I sat down and started tweaking the css files to see what I could do. After several hours this is what I came up with.

I hope that you find the change more appealing . Personally, I have found that it makes using the site a little easier. I still have a little work to do on the Projection Hymns page, but for now it will have to wait. This is the only change that I have made. There has been no change in any of the site's content (except for new additions.) Should you see something that doesn't quite look right, send me an email and I will try to fix the problem.

Thanks for visiting, and have a nice day!

Ted

MUP Music Publisher Is Now Free

Posted by admin on December 29, 2012

If you have been curious about trying the MUP Music Publisher, now is the time. A few weeks ago Bill and John, who own Arkkra Enterprises, released MUP 6.01 to be used for free. After 17 years of developing and maintaining the prorgram they have now licensed the source code under the BSD licenses and allowing other programmers to improve the code. Bill and John have said on their website: It is our hope that this will enable and encourage many more people to use it, and make it possible to include Mup unencumbered in Linux distributions that otherwise would not include it.

If you are a hymn writer and had considered MUP in the past but was discouraged by the licenses cost, take another look at MUP 6.01. And as always, you are free to use any of the MUP files found on this website to help in your work.

Ted

The Guest Book Is Online!

Posted by admin on August 03, 2012

I finally got around to getting the site's guestbook back online. It took me a while to find something that would easily fit into the site. I think that this one will be easy to use and provide a nice way for those who would like to leave feedback about the site.

With this guestbook you can leave public or private messages. When leaving a message, you are required to enter an email address. This does not have to be a real email address. In fact you can enter anything that looks like one and it will accept it. For example, you can enter Hello@World.com or 1@1.com and it will accept it. So if you are hesitant about leaving you email, just enter something like these examples and do not worry about it. I do not collect email address for any reason and don't intend to do that here. I have trouble keeping track of my own, let alone someone elses!

So feel free to leave feedback. I always enjoy comments from those who visit.

Ted

Major Site Renovation!

Posted by admin on June 14, 2012

It's been close to three months since I have made any additions to this website. These have been very busy months because I have rebuilt the site. I had originally built this website using the Concrete 5 CMS sytem. While it is easy to use and had many unique features that made website building easy, I was not happy with its performance. As the site became bigger, it became slower and this disappointed me deeply. Not being a "power user" of the system, I lacked the ability to tweak it's performance. This, along with the constant fear of a database crash I decided to rework the site using just plain html.

The last few weeks have been interesting because I have learned new things, but it has also been very time consuming because of the amount of work that was involved in building hundreds of pages with a "gazillion" links! I think the performance issue has been resolved, and moving around the site will not be frustrating to the user by having to wait for database loads.

I have to admit that it is not very flashy with a lot of eye candy. I'm not very good with those sort of things. I had always intended for this site to be just a repository for hymns that people could easily access. Hopefully I have achieved that for you.

During the rebuild I corrected a lot of mistakes (some very embarrassing!) And I started adding the lyrics of the hymns to it's page. My friend who owns ehymns.org encouraged me to do this and he was right. It really does add to the value of the hymn. I have done several so far and will add more each week over the next few months until it is complete.

The site is still a little rough around the edges but things will smooth out over time. I hope you enjoy the changes, and as always, find it useful as you worship God in song.

Ted