New Health Ministries Website

The Health Ministries team at Forest Lake is making good headway on a new website highlighting the various events and people in their area. The site is being developed by Shelley Veal as a standalone website rather than one that is a subsection of the current Forest Lake Church website. The platform is Wordpress 2.6 and I believe she is currently using the Organic2 theme. It’s coming along rather nicely and is going to stay as a standalone site for at least the foreseeable future. At some point it might get Drupalized into the main church website, though it isn’t obvious what the advantages of that might be at this time.

I like the idea of setting up separate websites for those ministries that have the interest and ability to run on their own. I also like using Wordpress because it is more content driven and less design driven than the standard website platform. Not that you don’t get good design out of a blog OS, but rather that the emphasis is on putting up content instead of twiddling with code and design and various backend functionalities. I find that Wordpress makes a very capable CMS by itself, so the ease of use lets someone get their feet wet on website development without too much floundering around. And since each ministry website has it’s own URL then they can be branding their own ministry at the same time.

Several new church websites will be following this same development path. I want to empower people to promote and develop their own ministry area rather than having to run everything through me or depend on me (ie, wait for me) to get something posted. If they own it, then they can take pride in it and in the process more and more people are developing their skills to share what God is doing with others.

Embrace the Culture

Only a long-time Adventist would get this website. And only one with a sense of humor (not an automatic given within the culture) would find these remotely humorous. I personally want the “I <heart> Haystacks” shirt for myself.

Spectrum Interview Now Live

Woohoo! The interview I recently did for Spectrum Magazine is now live on their blog. The focus of the interview was on how the Forest Lake Church is using technology to further it’s mission. Doing the interview reminded me yet again how much I am a part of a team of dedicated paid and volunteer people who want to expand the mission and reach of a local congregation using the available technology.

What I like about the Spectrum blog is that after the article or interview is posted you get to continue having a dialog with whoever posts a comment rather than it being a one-sided conversation (I talk-you listen). What a great use of blogging technology (built on Drupal no less–see the unchanged favicon) and a way to build a community of discussion online. They are even so brave as to allow unmoderated posting–got to give them credit for that experiment in civilized discourse. I wouldn’t mind seeing that kind of attitude in other sectors of Adventism as well.

Deeper Podcast is Done

Another Deeper podcast is in the can. Well, actually several cans since I create both an audio and a video version. For those who might like to know, the podcast is currently being filmed on a Canon GL-2 and simultaniously being audio captured into Garageband via a PreSonus Firewire mixer. I then do all my video edits in Final Cut Pro using various visual elements from the Editors Toolkit Pro from Digital Juice to make it look pretty. On the audio side of the house I just stay in Garageband and do all my work there since audio is mostly just chopping up the file into pieces and laying down the musical track. On those days when the audio on the camera isn’t that good (because, you know, the camera is sitting 20 feet away and I only have one mic–the one going into the PreSonus–anyway) then I cut and paste the audio out of Garageband and try to synch it up with the video in FCP (which is often a bit squirrelly).

After I get through mangling things up, Mr. Todd Gable comes along and makes it all iTunes-worthy and gets it ready for the podcast world. And after that is all web magic and light.

Future plans are to upgrade to a better camera (Canon, Sony?) and maybe even another mic or two (woo!).

So there you go–nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, but I’m sure having a lot of fun doing it.

Update: the podcasts are now live on iTunes.

Flash Drive Has No Flash

I ordered a Dell laptop for my wife a couple of months ago. It was backordered for like 4 weeks. While ordering the laptop I also had the option to order a “color-coordinated” 4GB USB flash drive. I figured, “why not”, she needs a new one and besides, the price was good ($20) and it was the same color as her laptop. What could go wrong? So a month or so later the laptop arrives, I set it up, and put all the parts/pieces including the USB drive into her laptop bag and away she goes.

Well, last night she needs to transfer some data from her laptop to my desktop so I go looking for her new flash drive. I pop the drive in and…..nothing. It shows up in Windows Explorer, but it won’t launch. I try formatting it…no good. I change the drive letter, put it in different USB ports (front of computer, back of computer), put it in my Mac. Nothing. This is the first time the drive has been used and for the first time in my experience, it looks like I’ve got a defective USB drive.

No problem, I’ll just return it to Dell. Wrong! Turns out that Dell won’t let you return it if it’s more than 21 days old and it doesn’t say “Dell” on it. Doesn’t matter if it’s broken. If it’s more than 21 days after you bought it (mind you, it took more than that just to get here) then you are out of luck. End of discussion.

So here’s what I learned from this (fortunately) inexpensive event. 1) Test everything you get from a vendor, especially the third party stuff right after you get it. Even if it is something you might normally not use right away–test it right away. If you don’t use it for a couple of weeks, they aren’t going to let you return it even if it is defective. 2) Beware of Kingston DataTraveler 110 4GB USB drives. Even if the ad says they are “reliable”, they aren’t. Or at least this one certainly wasn’t.

Postscript: I ordered a $10 no-name 4GB USB drive from this website. For $9.99, including shipping, I can get two of these for the price of one Kingston and still come out ahead even if the first one doesn’t work. I guess sometimes it pays to be cheap.

Smashing is Smashing

If you love great web design ideas, resources and lots of free stuff like icon sets, wallpapers, fonts and such, then you must add Smashing Magazine to your list of daily online reading. At least once a week they will post something that will stimulate my creative juices and send me down a happy tangent for at least an hour or more. I love the monthly wallpaper contests where people submit monthly themed wallpaper (wallpaper with this month’s dates on it) because it generates such a wide variety of high quality work that you would be happy to display on your desktop (and I do). So check out Smashing Magazine and be stimulated.

new website work

OK, so the decision has been made and Drupal it shall be. In fact, just to make it extra official, we’ll be building three sites on Drupal, not just one.  Buildingboldlyforjesus.org will be the home site for our upcoming capital expansion project. Paul Martin and company will be leading out in that effort and already they have some placeholder artwork up there. Secondly, kingdomkidFLC.org will be going up shortly as well (currently it’s just naked). Right now I can’t decide if it should be a Wordpress based site or Drupal. It may start as a Wordpress and then go Drupal later once I have a development team free to do that work. This site will be for the Forest Lake Children’s Ministries department. And finally, of course, the world famous website, forestlakechurch.org, will be up for a redo, upgrade, overhaul, what have you in the next few months. I’ve got the crack team of Wilcley and Wesley Lima working on that one. Two brothers of with their own web design business, they approached me and offered to help, so I put them to work. There are several others on board for the project as well and it looks to be a good team of young bucks that have been assembled. We’re gunning for a late October launch date of at least the basic functionality website with continuous improvement happening there after.

Many thanks to site5 for the webhosting services. Reasonable rates, “unlimited” storage and bandwidth (we’ll find out just how unlimited it is :-)  ) and a slick multisite administration panel is what sold it for me. And their Fantastico app is completely up to date with the latest (and I do mean latest–Drupal 6.3 was there right after it went up on Drupal.org) flavor of all your favorite open source toys and goodies. They don’t have 15 different hosting plans, just one–with a “turbo” add-on at $5 more for multisite–and that’s it. All the rest of the upsell stuff on those other hosting plans (pointers, subdomains, FTP, emails, parking, etc, etc) is all included in unlimited quantity with their plan.

My First Comment

Yeah! My first comment on this baby blog.

Thanks Jonathan.

Post-GiEN Observations

Spending time at a denominational confab is always an adventure. For the first time in many years I just spent the better part of week hanging out with a combination crowd of Adventist techies and administrators, with some significant international presence thrown in for flavor. I usually have an allergic reaction to such a heavy concentration of church administrators, so fortunately there were enough techie types there to put some oxygen into the air.

Not surprisingly I discovered that there’s even some church politics in the mix as well. Seems that one level of the church developed a hosting service for all churches to have a website and so did another administrative level and never the two shall meet. So now you have dueling hosting and website development services. [Just for the record at FLC we use neither of them and are strictly a home brew shop.] It was fun to be approached by both competing services and asked to join their particular platform, but no one really gave me much of a hard sell, more like a glancing blow.

I was surprised that an international conference in its 5th year still only has 60-80 in attendance and the majority were not from the US, even though the meetings were here in the US. I would imagine that most every Adventist church in the US has its own website by now, yet there are only 80 people in the world who are interested in sharing the Gospel via the web? Not even some folks from Denver, just some people with a travel budget. A marketing problem? Lack of interest? Hard to say.

Back to the swamp tomorrow and then back to work…

GiEN 08-Sunday Morning Session

Gary Krause-Morning Worship

In the spirit of the Internet, we need to get real. Sort of like vegetarian Adventists who look far and wide for food that looks and tastes like meat. There is a lot of spin going on in the news, etc. So we need to be able to cut through the spin and distortion. “The Word of God is living and sharper than any two-edged sword.” The Word of God is a guide to our feet and we are fooling ourselves if we think we can walk in a straight path if we are relying on our own intellect and strength.

Presentation #8-Panel: Nancy Lamoreaux, Robert Henley, Gordon Harty

“e-Marketing the Gospel”

Henley-how are we engaging the community via our website? Does a lot of pastor training in terms of technology.

Harty-most effective things seem to be social networks, particularly via Facebook notifications, etc. Center for Post Modern Studies and GiEN both have groups there.

Different presenter now….

Carl Gordon-BiggyTV. A delivery platform for video content. Marketing for movies in order to separate the content out from the background noise and static. In terms of the Adventism, this is called The Adventist Channel. Biggy brings a reputation and marketing experience. This is an “inward-facing” site that only hosts “high-quality” content, not the homemade, YouTube stuff (his terms). Target distribution is Adventist Media Centers and Adventist websites. URL goes live tomorrow. Programming is both inward and outward and now has a social networking component, too (MySDA). There was then a demonstration of the Adventist Channel.