Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda Philippines

TyphoonYolandaHaiyanMare Cris and I have watched the news coverage of Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda with heavy hearts.  Her family lives in northern Luzon and was not directly affected.  But we know thousands of others were not so fortunate.

Typhoons and floods are a normal part of life in the Philippines.  But I never saw a storm this big while I was living there, and it has apparently hit some vulnerable population centers–the images from Tacloban city are revealing widespread destruction.

The main reason I’m posting this is to offer some direction to my readers who wish to help.  There is an organization I can recommend for those who would like to donate:

The Two-Thirds Network is a Christian organization dedicated to helping people living in developing countries.  Some of their people went directly to Bohol (the province most affected) within a day or two of the storm.  I have linked directly to their urgent needs page.

Kuya Kevin’s Blog 2.0

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Kuya Kevins’ blog is finally making the switch from blogger to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve had my fitness blog is on Hostgator for several months and I’ve been very happy with this arrangement.

I’ve really enjoyed using blogger all these years, but there are a few reasons I’m making this switch:

*I’ve had a much easier time copying/pasting from Microsoft Word in to the WordPress.  It can be done in blogger, but I usually have formatting issues that take time to manually correct.

*I really enjoy the widgets/plugins that are available with WordPress.  Example: the follow me widget here in the upper-right hand corner was very easy to add/install.  Same goes for these nifty share buttons over and above this post.

*Changing/customizing the themes is much easier in WordPress.   Using custom themes in blogger was always hit-or-miss and involved doing some html coding.

Those are just a few factors that come to mind.

I’ve decided to use KevinSanders.org as the new domain.  I bought it a few years ago and I think now is a good time to make use of it.

Fortunately I still own KuyaKevin.com and I can point it to this new blog/domain (just as I pointed it to the blogspot page before).  I’ll be importing all the content from the old blog into this new one soon.