Greg Davis - Technically Speaking

I love that tag line for the Innovate 2008 Conference.  If you haven’t seen the new conference web site, you really need to - very cool.  They just added the trailer video clip for the conference (Sept 18-19) which you can watch from the registration page.

I’m looking forward to seeing the team from LifeChurch.tv as well as Steven Furtick and the top notch team from Granger itself. I made my first trip last year and found it to be incredible.  Very much looking forward to this year’s trip and all of the things God will do with what we learn there and what we can bring back and apply to Fellowship Church here in the Delaware Valley as we seek to elevate what we do and how we reach out to a community in need of Jesus!

A product I have been using for the past 9 or 10 months for personal computer backups is from Mozy.  I do have an external hard drive for making backups of pictures and other files like many people do, but what if the house burns down (God forbid) or a pipe breaks and floods or some other disaster?  I also have to think to make those backups.  Enter Mozy Home. 

MozyHome currently supports Windows 2000, XP, and Vista and it is now also available for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher.  For a very reasonable price of $4.95 per month, you can download and install Mozy Home which will automatically run in the background (you can customize the options) and backup your files to an offsite server. Some of the features include:

This coming Sunday, June 8, Fellowship Church (Glen Mills, PA) is going to be joining with 1300 churches and over 760,000 people in a unique and historic event. Churches from all over the globe will be doing a new series together, called “One Prayer”.

The theme of this series is:

“If God would answer ‘one prayer’ for the church at large, what would you pray?” 

Pastor John is going to start us off with his message “God, make us different” as Live Different has been the theme for our church this year. The following 4 weeks we get to hear some outstanding pastors from different churches across the country via video. Fellowship will be hearing:

• Craig Groeshel (LifeChurch.tv in Edmund, OK)
• Wayne Cordeiro (New Hope Christian Fellowship, in Honolulu HI)
• Ed Young (Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX)
• Perry Nobe (New Spring Church in Anderson, SC)

It is so amazing to realize that so many churches are all joining together ‘to be one’ in the month of June!  Imagine, 1300 churches all doing the same series at the same time for the same purpose!  Beyond just the message series, these churches will have opportunity to all contribute to a missions project to help plant 500 new churches in Cambodia, China, India and the Sudan. If you are not familiar already with the concept behind the series, watch below or here.

In addition to partcipating on Sundays, the One Prayer web site has a blog where you can join the conversation (here is the RSS feed if you want to subscribe in a reader).

The significance of this event really struck me when looking at it in reference to Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-24:

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (NIV) 

WOW!  This year has been a big one for me in hearing God’s calling about my life and the passion He has put inside me. I know that helping the church realize and achive things like this with the aide of technology is what I was made for.  I was created to serve Jesus with the gifts He gave me for this purpose. I am very excited to be taking part in this historic event and to be serving the church at this point in history and standing on the threshhold of something incredible.

I am looking forward to see God elevate how we reach our communities with the name of Jesus!  I am desperate to be a part of it!

I’ve been really busy lately with a project at work (with a July go-live), but here are some interesting things and personal stuff I’m excited about.

• Perry Noble’s message “Celebrate or Sulk” in which he talks about Luke 15 and the parable of the lost son. Everyone in church in America today should watch or listen to this message!
  
• Collide Magazine - I am more impressed with every issue that comes out. I love the tag line “where church and media converge”
• OnePrayer - It is going to be awesome to make history in the month of June and be a part of something BIG that God is doing!
• Pop Goes The Church - Can’t wait to read this!
  
• The new Innovate Conference web site - very cool and can’t wait for the conference in September!
• Church’s that Think Big when it comes to visual worship.
• While Twitter is having some growing pains, it is still being used and more people are jumping on all the time. I love the creative ideas of Perry Noble in thinking about, what if Peter twittered? or what if David twittered? Very cool ideas!
• If you haven’t caught up with what Twitter is all about, check out this good primer to get you up to speed!  Thanks to Matt Singley for that one.
• We have our summer vacations plans nailed down!  We are headed to a dude ranch in August!  Should be really fun time for us and especially the kids. You can watch a video clip promo here (or watch below).
  

This evening I created a couple screencast tips on how to change your blog email logo (photo) which is published by Feedburner.  You can watch Part 1 below or click here.

Part 2 is is about how to easily edit or resize a photo (to use above) with Flickr.  You can watch that part below or click here.

It looks like the viral generosity of many is indeed spreading across the country for the benefit of Herman (for background on Herman, go here). If you havn’t done so yet, get in on the action and Give Herman $1.

In the past several weeks and months I have had more opportunity to help set up / rework some blogs for more pastors and ministry leaders than I ever imaged I would be involved with doing. I must say it was helpful for me as I have had the opportunity to learn much more about Wordpress and Blogger than I knew before.

Here are some of the blogs I’ve helped with recently and some things that were unique or what I learned in the process.  These comments are not about using the blogging software, but rather about installing / customizing it.  Each has different merits in the actually processing of creating and posting blog entries.  I’m only going to share my thoughts on the technical side here.

• A Student Ministry Search Committee - an interesting use of a blog to keep interested parties updated on the general progress of the effort by the search team. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  This was the first one I created on Wordpress.com. The process is fairly straight forward and mapping to a personal domain was easy (after purchasing the $10 in WP credits from paypal).  We were able to pick out a simple theme, customize it a bit, add in a few sidebar widgets and were up and running fairly quickly.  I like the ability of creating new users for the site with out much hassle.
  
  
• Life From the Porch - A view of the worship life from Sam Stein - Pastor of Worship and Music at BVBC. (hosted on Blogger)
  Blogger (Blogspot) is one of the most common blogging platforms and one that many use to get start with. I did myself.  It has improved much over the years and provides much more flexibility and customization then it did in the past. One pet-peeve of mine is that Wordpress-hosted blogs do not let you override the default RSS feed. I’m glad to see that Blogger now does.  However, I did find it much harder to get the custom domain working from GoDaddy.com with Blogger.  Maybe I just wasn’t doing something right, but it took forever to get it to work.  One good reason to start with Blogger, almost all other platforms have the ability to import your blog from Blogger.  Very handy when you want to bring your history with you to a new platform.
  
  
• Cremeans’ Blog - John Cremeans is the Lead Pastor of Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA - . (self-hosted Wordpress)
  This was my first actual complete install and setup of Wordpress. I had heard and read about others doing it, but had never done one myself. So while it was more work, I did learn a lot about working with a generic host provider, downloading the Wordpress files and doing the SQL DB setup, FTP of the WP files and installation on the host. Being able to compare it to the other Wordpress hosted sites, I can see how you get more flexibly by going with the self-hosted option (more widgets you can add, ability to hack the theme more, ability to remove the default WP feed so that you only publish your Feedburnerfeed, and a few other things, but it is a bunch more work on the front-end to get everything set up.  I guess once it is up and running it is about the same (fingers-crossed).  We did a good bit of custom design work on this one but in the end looks and works pretty well I think.  I just wish there was an easier way to import new themes instead of having to manually download and upload to your site.
  
  
• Jeff Ream - Jeff is the Worship Pastor at Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  His I have had to do the least with so far - just a basic set up to get his custom domain “jeffreyream.com” to be used instead of the Wordpress default and “burning the feed” via Feedburner and add the links to the sidebar. Jeff already added the cool custom banner!
  
  
• Ryan Geiger - Ryan is the Pastor to Students at Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  This to was fairly straight forward. Ryan already had a sweet theme picked out and custom banner put in. I did the work of getting his custom domain “ryangeigerblog.com” to be used on the site as well as the Feedburner RSS and e-mail subscription options. On Ryan’s we also put in his Facebook profile badge and link to Twitter.
  

The next one on my schedule?  Buddy Cremeans (John’s brother).  Looking forward to this one because I’m hoping to move it off of Wordpress and maybe use Squarespace (the platform I’m using). The biggest hurdle I see so far will be importing the history. I may have to use a TypePad account to make the bridge as Squarespace cannot import a Wordpress blog directly.  Should be interesting experience.

I’ll be sure to post an update when I’m done about key learnings and final results. Let me know if you have any suggestions!