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.

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.

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.

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.

GiEN 08-Sabbath Morning

First Session (Sabbath School)

Adventist Web Presence Around the World (various presenters)

Germany-DVD on the construction and ministry of the German Media Center. Develop content such as Bible Studies and evangelistic crusade materials and provide technical support for countries throughout Europe. The name of the studio: Stimme dur Hoffnum

USA-Discover Bible School (part of Voice of Prophecy). Went online in 1996 and worked with WWC to develop an interactive website. www.biblestudy.com. 850 churches that are branch Bible Schools for VoP. 50 languages. Separate section for kids (Kid’s Zone)-which is self-graded (no adult interaction). HopeTalk.org is a portal with content (unclear what sort of content it is) from each Division. New technology: mobile based content without graphics, answers are all T/F and then submit answers via cell phone. Next version will be more graphically based.

Poland-eBible-Bible software, in Polish, endorsed by Catholic Church, includes EGW as well. Nadzieja.pl-Polish for “hope”. Self-supporting ministry, affiliated with the church but not financially linked. Stream two internet radio channels.

South Pacific Division-David Price. A DVD on materials available to those in the South Pacific such as Discovery Bible studies and their Bible Study Centre.

USA-Someone from SoCal. Stories of people who join the church via online adventures.

USA-PatmosChapel.org. Robert Helmsley-Technology guy from Southeastern Conference (regional conference in Florida). Told a story about the Whitney Phipps video on YouTube. Also told a story about someone who attended Patmos online and left her life of prostitution and came back to church.

Philippines-Advent SIM Presentation. A partnership with the largest Telecom in the Philippines to provide SIM cards with value-added services. Can text each person who has one or people within a certain regions. Additional information can be pulled down included church and pastor locations. Can make donations via the SIM code.

South America-Hope Impact. Major marketing effort focusing on the Second Coming series of meetings in Porteguese and Spanish. Various other websites in a region that has over 21% Internet usage and huge Internet useage growth. Those studying online has grown exponentially.

China-John Ash. Very large Internet audience in country and around the world. Hopenet.tv in conjunction with Adventist World Radio. Creating Bible stories in Mandarin with Flash animation.

InterAmerica-Project with Montemorelos University. Using UStream.tv and YouTube to stream content. Using netAdventist 3.0 and training everyone to use it. Example: recording presentations and campaigns and posting them to YouTube.

The rest of the meeting was a Sabbath School discussion with Gary Gibbs, HopeTV, Gary Krause (who wrote this quarter’s SS lesson) and Homer somebody.

GiEN Afternoon Sessions-Thursday

Session #1: Alexander Carpenter–Interfaith Power and Light (part time with Spectrum as well)

The Spectrum blog is based on Drupal now.

The Adventist Church is a social network made up of nodes and ties like any other network. Bringing new media into this network needs to understand how that network works. Long Tail Theory–Adventism has also marketed using the Short Tail approach and not understood that there is a long tail of content that can exist and be consumed.

After two years of Spectrum blogging, what has he learned?

1. Blogging saves money but costs time.

2. Talk, don’t sell.

3. Write on issues you know and care about.

4. Bloggers get smarter by listening to what commenters say.

5. Post often and be interesting.

6. Talk about our relationship with God…and his world (ie., not just about God)

7. Create media not to connect people, but rather that reveals already existing connections.

Discussion topics:

Aren’t blogs scary? How do I control it? What if someone uses a cuss word?

GiEN 08–Thursday Second Session

Presentation Two–Young People and Technology

Convergence of devices–multiple avenues to the same content, thus online 24 hours/day. Influences include anime’, gaming, file sharing. Demonstration of various online content and the quality of that content along with online, MMORPG gaming. Then there was a panel discussion that tried to discuss the preceeding presentation.

Projects on the Front Burner

1. The topic is Drupal 6.2 versus Joomla 1.5. Is Mac OSX to Ubuntu a fair analogy? Discuss.

2. Price and specs for a good quality (preferably HD) video camera. Talking prosumer grade here. Need all the goodies to go with it and probably a DTE (direct-to-edit) device as well.

3. Site design for an updated Forest Lake Church website. (see #1 above for the development/CMS platform)

4. The launch of the new Forest Lake SmugMug account. 90% of the work is done…time to kick it out the door and let it live on it’s own.

5. Hosting for the aforementioned website.