News

You can now receive *cino updates via Twitter, which is most likely exciting news to some and a harbinger of doom to others.

If you're a regular reader of catapult magazine, you probably noticed that the catapult site changed drastically with our last issue. We're proud to introduce a complete redesign of the site that we hope will help foster more regular discussion on the site. We're still in the process of adding a few more features and we'll let you know when those are available. Also, you'll soon be able to support catapult and *cino by subscribing to the magazine for additional features. Stay tuned!

*cino is very pleased to welcome Hearts and Minds Books into the *cino blog network.  Hearts and Minds is a bookstore in Dallastown, Pennsylvania started and run by Byron and Beth Borger with a wonderful and comprehensive understanding of reformatinoal Christian worldview.  They've long been involved with the CCO in Pittsburgh and one of the highlights of CCO's Jubilee Conference in February is the huge Hearts and Minds book table.  Byron regularly updates his blog with passionate reviews of new resources; we encourage you to check out his posts and support his store!

Several months ago, we were forced to have all new *cino discussion board registrations approved by a board administrator in order to keep malicious users from posting spam and wreaking havoc on the site. Then we were overwhelmed by bogus registrations--at least 25 a day--until we were no longer approving any registrations, which obviously runs contrary to the kind of invitational community we're trying to foster here.

Well, we have made a significant breakthrough today by adding Akismet authorization to everything posted on the board, from new registrations to discussion posts. Akismet is a service that checks information submitted against a vast database of confirmed spam criteria, returning either a positive or negative value back to our site that it can use to confirm or reject a user or a post automatically.

Users can once again register without a moderator's approval simply by confirming an e-mail address after registration.

We apologize to many of you who tried to register over the last several months and were unable to have your account activated for use. We tried to find and activate legitimate registrations in the 900 or so unactivated accounts we recently deleted from our database. If we missed your account, we hope you'll see this message and register again to participate in the *cino community!

Well ... it's happened again, a little earlier than expected. After a number of utilities on which we rely--our web sites, e-mail lists and others--started failing a little too regularly on our old server, we decided to move to a new, more reliable server. Wouldn't you know it? The day we initiated the move, all of our sites went down on the old server--making our move a little less graceful than we had hoped.

Anyway, we almost have everything back to normal here at *cino central, barring a few tests. In fact, this blog post is serving two purposes: letting you all know what's going on and testing our blogging capabilities on the new server.

Thank you for your continued patience and for your participation in the *cino community.

catapult published its 100th issue last Friday with "Busy is Good," which, while only a number in the middle of two others, is still pretty neat.

Well, we've decided to finish our test of Google AdSense a little prematurely because it's proving ineffective, both as a tool for generating revenue and networking online resources.