rick's blog

Have you visited the All Saints Petersham Twitter feed? You can find us at twitter.com/allstspetersham (note the spelling).

If you have a Twitter account (and it's free to get one), please add @allstspetersham to the list of people that you follow. We usually post a couple of announcements to Twitter each week, generally for new podcasts and previews of the next Sunday's service.

You can also send feedback on Twitter to @allstspetersham. And why not spread the word about All Saints through your own tweets? (Here's an example I cooked earlier.)

Thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding while the All Saints and Salt websites were off the air for the last eight days.

The outage was the result of an over-exuberant search engine indexing agent from one of Russia's leading websites, Yandex, which chewed up a staggering 37 per cent of our webspace's allocated bandwidth for the month of June 2008. By comparison, Google's share was about 4 per cent.

There is no evidence either of hacking or of a denial-of-service attack.

Bearing in mind that Russia falls outside the Petersham parish boundaries, I am taking steps to deny access, human and otherwise, to the All Saints website for all visitors from Yandex.ru

Note also: Our website will also be offline from 9pm tonight (Wednesday July 1) for some routine maintenance. I expect to have it available again by morning Thursday. In case of further problems we'll have status updates on Twitter @allstspetersham.

Citysearch Sydney has posted an item on their website about the All Saints/PEC Carols in Maundrell Park next Saturday night. Click here to visit the page and add to the number of recommendations!

This is the video clip shown during Antony's November 30 sermon on 1 Corinthians, featuring Christopher Hitchens (right), author of "God Is Not Great", in debate with Anglican theologian Alister McGrath (left). If you cannot see the video below please click here to view the clip on Youtube. The complete debate can be viewed online at Fora.TV.