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Most of this is copied from my "About" page.  I thought it would also be a good first post and serve as a bit of an introduction.

So who is Gene Ilten?  As you can see I am not a big name.  I don’t  have a theology degree.  I am an everyday person who is open to what God  can do.  God has done His greatest work through the most ordinary people.

You might be asking, "So what qualifies you to write a blog about God?"

The answer is simple. Nothing.  Yep, that’s right, absolutely  nothing.  I am a Bible college dropout.  But then again most of the  writers of the New Testament weren’t qualified either.  For the most  part, except for possibly Matthew, they were all uneducated working  men.  (Mostly stinky fishermen) Of course they had direct access to the  greatest “tutor” ever.  Jesus crammed a lot into about three years.  I  also never noticed any of them signing their epistles or letters, D.D.  or ThD.

So I thought if Jesus could do it in three years with them, then  after 40 plus years of following Him, maybe a few things might have  gotten through to me.  Even though I have fallen on my face, stubbed my  toes, messed up, screwed up and thought, “Boy God, did you make a  mistake in choosing me.”  One thing has shown through it all: God’s  grace is sufficient for me.  You see, I am no different from the  grossest nastiest person   to walk the earth.  (You don’t get to see the  garbage in my head, that’s reserved for my Savior to clean out.  “Gee,  Gene didn’t I just clean out that dirty corner of your mind?”)   What  makes me (and hopefully you) different is Jesus gives me a new day each  day.  And by His death on the cross for me, He gave me a new life.  But  we will get into more of that as time goes by.

So why am I writing this?  Well, for one thing our pastors keep pestering us to journal what God is doing in our lives.  I have tried it on several occasions and just can't sit and write.  So I need to make regular posts to this blog to keep it going, so why not share with others?  It just might be an encouragement.  Another reason is God has gifted me a bit in the area of, for lack of a better term, inspirational prose.   Some friends have even suggested that I write a book.  Well, a book is a bit overwhelming foe me right now, so I can share my heart here.

So sit back and enjoy a journey of what God has done, what He can do and what He is doing in the life of a Bible college dropout.  Hopefully you will be encouraged and possibly challenged at times.

"I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,  may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."
Eph 3:16-19 NIV

May God be with you

Gene Ilten

b2evolution blogs are installed with a default selection of Widgets. For example, the sidebar of this blog includes widgets like a calendar, a search field, a list of categories, a list of XML feeds, etc.

You can add, remove and reorder widgets from the Blog Settings tab in the admin interface.

Note: in order to be displayed, widgets are placed in containers. Each container appears in a specific place in an evoskin. If you change your blog skin, the new skin may not use the same containers as the previous one. Make sure you place your widgets in containers that exist in the specific skin you are using.

By default, blogs are displayed using an evoskin. (More on skins in another post.)

This means, blogs are accessed through 'index.php', which loads default parameters from the database and then passes on the display job to a skin.

Alternatively, if you don't want to use the default DB parameters and want to, say, force a skin, a category or a specific linkblog, you can create a stub file like the provided 'a_stub.php' and call your blog through this stub instead of index.php .

Finally, if you need to do some very specific customizations to your blog, you may use plain templates instead of skins. In this case, call your blog through a full template, like the provided 'a_noskin.php'.

If you want to integrate a b2evolution blog into a complex website, you'll probably want to do it by copy/pasting code from a_noskin.php into a page of your website.

You will find more information in the stub/template files themselves. Open them in a text editor and read the comments in there.

Either way, make sure you go to the blogs admin and set the correct access method/URL for your blog. Otherwise, the permalinks will not function properly.

b2evolution comes with an .htaccess file destined to optimize the way b2evolution is handled by your webseerver (if you are using Apache). In some circumstances, that file may not be automatically activated at setup. Please se the man page about Tricky Stuff for more information.

For further optimization, please review the manual page about Performance optimization. Depending on your current configuration and on what your web hosting company allows you to do, you may increase the speed of b2evolution by up to a factor of 10!