Greg Davis - Technically Speaking

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.

 

View Larger Map

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!

If you are involved with video editing or post production work, you’ll enjoy this!  You can watch below or go here. (hit play and give it a few minutes to load).
 

Trans Siberian in Service from FC Post on Vimeo.

This was produced for the opening of a Christmas service at Fellowship Church (in Texas).  To read about how they did it, check out Pace Hartfield’s post here.  He is the Worship Pastor serving with Ed Young.  

(HT to Greg Atkinson)

I learned something new today (actually many things), but one in partcular I’d like to share. Many of you use various methods to subscribe to blogs. Some use email (if offered) but most rely on “news readers” of some type. They are many types of news readers, including Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, and others. I’ve posted before about how to subscribe to a blog and also referenced some great short videos which explain the basics of RSS and why it is your friend here and here. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS feeds, do check them out first.)

I personally like NewsGator the best. I’ve used Bloglines before and it is a very good product and I can certainly recommend it. NewGator gives you some exta features however that are quite interesting. First of all they have both the free online reader as well as a free desktop version (called FeedDemon) that sycronizes with your online account. In addition they also have a mobile version that allows you to download your feeds directly to your mobile device and it too syronizes with your online account, which simiply means is that if you read something in one place, it will be marked as read in the others - no worry about seeing same posts over again on your mobile device that you just read on your pc.

Anyway, the part I learned today and want to share with you is a feature of FeedDemon that I didn’t realize before. You can create and share clippings folders with others. That is simply an easy way to share posts and other web pages you like with others. You can read more about it here.  Simply put, you can copy posts or web pages (even drag and drop them) to your clippings folder and if you check the option which says to share the RSS feed of that folder others can subscribe to your “clippings”  To demonstrate this I have created a new shared clippings folder and used FeedBurner to generate the RSS feed I want to share. 

So, if you’d like to subsribe to Greg’s Shared Clippings, you can use this RSS feed,  or subscribe via email here:

Subscribe to Greg’s Shared Clippings on NewsGator Online by Email

I plan to share things here that I stumble upon that I find of interest to the church IT and technical arts community but may not do a seperate blog post about here on this blog.   Yes, you may have heard about other sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com which are similar in concept, but I’m liking this integration with my news reader which makes it much easier and quicker for me to share. Let me know if you try it and what you think! 

Congratulations to the team at 30 Boxes on their recent Webware 100 Award. I happen to be an avid user of 30Boxes online calendar and can highly recommend it. It is simply easy to use, accessible via mobile devices, integrated with Facebook, Jott and you can even add-in other iCal format calendars. It certainly provides everything I’m looking for in a Web 2.0 calendar app at the right price - free! If you’ve been looking for something new or better than what you currently use, give 30 Boxes a try!

Yesterday, Anthony Coppedge blogged about the importance of networking among those working or volunteering in the worship, creative, and technical arts areas.  This is something that is on my heart to do for 2008 and was first encouraged to do so by Greg Atkinson, back in December when he posted about “Who’s in Your Network”?

Going to MinistryTECH at the begging of April was a great step for me in getting to meet many folks from all over the country.  However, a goal I have for 2008 is to begin a network here in the Delaware Valley. So, today I have launched a Facebook group, “Technical & Creative Arts in the Delaware Valley”. I don’t know all that God might do with this, but I’m hoping to at least provide a place for those folks that are located in the greater Philadelphia/Wilmington area that have a passion in the “technical arts” to join together for support, fellowship, and networking. If that fits you, I hope you’ll join and invite others as well!

I do believe we all serve on the same team for the sake of the Kingdom and not in competition with each other. I hope this group will be just one small way to help foster that spirit here in this little corner of the the globe.

Okay guys, here is your chance to do something very small and help in a big way!  Terry Foester is doing a creative little experiment to help a local homeless man named Herman. He is trying to raise some funds (for which he has a matching donor), but here is the trick… for it to work this has to be virally because you can only give $1.  Yep - a buck.  You might be inclined to dismiss it or write it off, but if he can get 500 people to give a buck, the donor will match it, dollar for dollar, for a total of $1,000! 

Now, he isn’t going to give Herman the cash.  He knows Herman well and will be using the money to help Herman in a more significant way. Read Terry’s post for details but here the deal:

1. Comment here on his blog.
2. Leave your first name and your city/state, or if you’re scared just leave your “street name” – and tell us “I’m in.”
3. Follow through by sending $1 to:

Herman’s Bridge
PO Box 363
Montchanin, DE 19710-0363

Tell your friends before June to help make this idea fly and help spread the love of Christ in a viral way!

I’m in - how about you?