Light of Togo

It’s been a very busy few weeks for us, so we’re really looking forward to leaving tomorrow morning (at 4 am!) for Accra, which is the capital of Ghana and the most developed city in West Africa. The primary reason for the trip is to bring our friend and fellow missionary, Jim, to the airport. He has been in Togo for 3 years now, and is taking a furlough back to the States.

Since we’ll be driving 11 hours each way, we decided to make it worthwhile by spending a few days there. We’ll spend most of the time shopping for things we can’t find in Kara, and running other errands like getting our truck worked on. We do plan on doing something fun for Joshua too though, maybe the beach!

Please pray for our safety, smooth border crossings, Jim’s flight, and a good time in Ghana.

You might have guessed it, we now have internet once again.  It’s been 4 months of “deconnectivity,” which honestly hasn’t been all that bad.  What has really bothered me, though, is knowing that our website has been inaccessible to many people do to some unknown problem, and I’ve been able to do nothing about it.  So, now that we have a consistent connection, I am trying to figure out this issue.  I have disabled all but the most essential plugins for our website, and I’d like to ask your help.  If you are one of the people who has had problems accessing the site, could you please go to the site and let me know what happens.  Before you do, you may want to check to make sure you have the most current version of your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) Meanwhile, I’ll be crossing my fingers and hoping that this works.

The fact that we now have internet also means that we’ll be posting to our blog more frequently once again.  We look forward to posting some pictures and other things to show you a little more of what life is like here and what we’re doing.

Thanks so much to all of you who have responded to my asking if the website was loading correctly. From the responses, it seems that about 75% had problems and the rest had no problems at all. Strange, huh?

It’s very difficult to troubleshoot a problem like that, since I my difficulties in accessing it were inconsistent as well. However, I think that I narrowed down the problem to a particular plugin that I was using. I have disabled it and the site seems to load much faster for me now, with no problems at all 100% of the time.

I’m curious to know if you will have the same success. If you could please visit the site one more time and let me know what happens. Sorry to keep bothering you with it, but the only way I’m going to know that it’s fixed is to hear from you.

Thanks so much!

For several weeks I have been receiving various emails from people who are having difficulty with this website. I have also had some of those same problems but unfortunately have not had a sufficient internet connection here in Togo to even take a look at the problem. Today, however, I think that I might have figured out the problem. Could you do me a big favor and if you are reading this by email or RSS, can you go to the website and let me know if it loads correctly and looks alright. You can either email me directly, or leave a comment at the bottom of this post. Hopefully the problem is fixed, and sorry to all of you who have had difficulties with it. Thanks for your help!

The other night as I was moving all our boxes from upstairs to downstairs where they’d be loaded on the truck the following day, I thought to myself, “Hey, why not have some fun while I’m giving myself a ruptured tendon?” So, I did. I set up my camera and took a shot or two after moving each box, then I later put them together to make a time-lapse video. Enjoy!

NOTE: If the video seems to play too fast (in just a few seconds) you might have to play it again in order for it to play correctly. This happened to me a couple times so hopefully you don’t have any problem with it.

Never Ending Boxes from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

Hi!  We are Jesse, Tiffany, and Joshua Shanks, missionaries in Togo, West Africa.  Thanks for visiting our website, and we hope that you’ll come back often to read our blog and stay updated on our great adventure.  You can make sure not to miss miss any updates by either signing up to receive them by email, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

Scroll down to read our latest blog entries, or use the navigation on the top & right to find other content on the site.

Sorry to those of you who tried to visit our site over the past couple of days.  I tried to make a change that required the site to be down temporarily, but it turned out not to work the way I expected and the site never came back up!  So, I undid the change and all is well again.  I hope this didn’t cause you any inconvenience.  I’ll make it up to you by buying you a coffee the next time you’re passing through Quebec!

Last night we had the worst storm of the winter, with 60 mph (100 kph) winds and LOTS of snow. This was the second big storm in five days. What is really cool (to me at least) is that we are only 20-30 centimeters (8-11 inches) away from breaking Quebec’s all-time record for snowfall in a single winter. As of Thursday we had 405 cm (13.25 feet), but after last night, it’s probably somewhere around 425-435 cm. The record was in 1966 with 457 cm. Let it snow!

Somebody sent this to me quite a while ago, and I just found it again on my computer. I thought it was so funny that I had to show all of you.

IF YOU ARE STILL CONFUSED AFTER READING THIS, TRY WATCHING THIS VIDEO EXPLAINING RSS

If you are reading this, you’re probably asking, “What in the world is a news feed, and what does it eat?” OK, sorry for the silly pun, but I couldn’t resist. So, here goes an explanation that is hopefully as simple as possible. Basically a news feed allows you to be notified of any changes made to a particular website without actually having to visit that site every day, week, etc. In the case of our site, and most other blogs, you will be given a simple header or title to each new post. For example, for this post you would have received the title, “What is an RSS news feed?” If you’re interested in reading it, just click on it and you will be brought directly to the post on the website. If not, just ignore it! Now you haven’t wasted any time searching for something that you had no interest in reading in the first place. Brilliant huh? Now comes the slightly technical part. This is the part that answers, “OK, so how do I do this RSS thing?” First of all, you will want to look on our website for this icon: It should be near the very top of your screen.

Go ahead and click on it, and choose “Subscribe to RSS 2.0″ It’s very possible that your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) already has built in RSS capabilities. If so, then from here it should be fairly easy to follow the instructions and finish the process. If your browser does not recognize this request and gives you a bunch of gibberish “computer language” stuff, then you probably need to update to the latest version of Internet Explorer or Firefox (just a little tip: Firefox is way better!).

Most websites have news feeds, so if you like this idea, then there is also free dedicated software just for reading news feeds. For Windows, there is Thunderbird, which also does email, or Omea. For the Mac, try NetNewsWire. There’s also the web-based Google Reader. The benefit to these is that you can view all the postings from your favorite websites without having to visit each one. Believe me, this saves a lot of time and a lot of clicking around.

Now, if you’ve followed these instructions and are still having difficulties but still like to do this, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I can hopefully step you through it.

If you have successfully completed all of this, then you should now be able to view the post titles and give it a try. Bravo! You now have your very own RSS. Just make sure to feed him lots of news each day and…alright, I’ll stop now.

IF YOU ARE STILL CONFUSED AFTER READING THIS, TRY WATCHING THIS VIDEO EXPLAINING THE CONCEPT OF BLOGS.

If this is the first time you’ve visited a blog, then let me officially be the first to welcome you to blogopia. “Blog” is short for “web log.” It’s basically a website where one can write things, called “posts.” What things you ask? Anything! Most blogs have a very specific subject or topic, such as news, sports, technology, etc. Our blog will contain posts about anything that is going on in our lives, in Togo, and in our ministry. Because the information is ongoing, the most recent posts are listed first, at the top of the page, followed by the next most recent and so on.

On the right side of the page, you will see the organization of the blog. This will connect you to other posts. Each post has a category and tags. All tags are listed there, the largest being the most frequently occurring tags. For an example, a post about Joshua’s recent birthday party would be under the general category of “family,” but also might have the tags: family, friends, Joshua, photos, and quebec. These are all things related to, in some way, the content of the post. If you’re interested in one certain recurring topic in our blog, let’s say “ministry,” then just click that tag in the right column and you will be presented with every post that has the ministry tag. How nice!

The other organization is pretty simple. Recent posts show…well…the most recent posts (go figure!), and the archives contain all of the older posts listed by date.

Well, there you go…you are now a blog expert!