Archive for 2006-02

We have been spending a few days with my aunt and uncle in Woodbridge, VA, waiting on some things to finalize at the apartment—painting and cleaning. Got our first chance to really dig into D.C. today. Living here is going to rock! We’re moving in (officially) Monday at 1 p.m. Hopefully, I’ll update with some pics of the trip and move-in late Monday or Tuesday a.m.

Plus: our cat, Sebastian, and my cousin’s dalmatian, Sierra, seem to be getting along ok. That’s Sierra’s water bowl…

Back to regular tech/geek chat next week. Thanks for enduring.

The hype is here. Perhaps it’s already gone. At any rate, Ma.gnolia suprised me.

I’ve been bookmarking socially for several months. I started because of the multitude of machines I use to access the web. It was getting tough keeping things organized and centered. del.icio.us changed the way I view bookmarking by increasing my awareness of the power behind community. del.icio.us/popular is a daily retreat for me. Watching my own sites gather additional interest via del.icio.us and other social sites is a nice bonus.

Just when things level off, something else is bound to come along that proves you need a feature, or product, that you didn’t even know you needed. Don’t get me wrong. I love simplicity. And in the same vein, I hate complication, especially by the excess in our lives, items we once deemed useful or necessary that lost that designation long ago. But it is evident when something arrives that you know will change the way you think, behave, or live.

For me, Ma.gnolia arrived. Alright, I’ll stop hyping it. Who knows? You might not dig it. I do. I like the fact that Ma.gnolia pushes community through groups, allowing a form of collaboration that can’t be acheived in del.icio.us (yet.) For each bookmark you make, Ma.gnolia snaps a cache of the page. So, if your prized find ever finds itself in 404-land, you’ll have some preservation in place. Cool. There’s also a simple rating system, though not community-based, and an option to bookmark privately on-the-fly.

I greatly appreciate the time and energy invested by the designers and developers in getting things just right. Flawless CSS by Eric Meyer. Solid creative direction by Zeldman. And I really dig Jason Santa Maria’s logo, whether he likes it or not. The site is a lightfoot and my personal experience has been overwhelmingly positive. Props to all involved.

Does Ma.gnolia replace del.icio.us? For me, not yet. I want to watch the social bookmarking A-list shape out over the next few months. There are some key contenders in the ring already. (BlinkList, Furl, Simpy, et al.) But at this point, I think Ma.gnolia has the best shot at coming out on top. I’d also like to see Ma.gnolia expand on a few points, like adding suggested tags while marking (found it :)), launching a community rating system, allowing assignment to a group in the initial bookmarking process, and putting me on the payroll as chief evangelist.

Ma.gnolia

Read About Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia.com/people/davidrussell

Church Leadership Group

Church Design and Technology Group

Solution Watch Review

Technorati Tags: magnolia, ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, social bookmarking, eric meyer, jeffrey zeldman, jason santa maria, review, design, UI

Addendum: ETA for D.C. Thursday night. Move in Friday and/or Saturday.

This is the big week. Packing up. Closing on the sale of our house here in Montgomery. Moving a few hundred miles north, to Washington DC. Moving in.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite as stressed out as I am right now. Even though things are falling into place, it’s been a wild ride these past few weeks. God has really strengthened Missy and I during this time in our lives. We’re totally excited about the whole thing and God might as well have written it on the walls for us. We’re at His direction.

I’ll touch base again when we settle. For now, we’re u-hauling it.

Two years ago, my wife and I were married. I can’t believe it’s been two years since that day, but what an incredible two years it has been!

God knew exactly how to put her together for me. Last night we were out with some friends and we were reminded of some simple things that we share—things we often don’t even think about. For one, we’re both preacher’s kids. For anyone in the ministry, you know, it’s just a different way of doing life. Not better or worse than other occupations (though secretly I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to be doing what I do :)), but it is different.

For Missy and I, it is awesome to have the experience of growing up PKs. We share things without even talking about it. We know things without even thinking about it. And it’s icing on the cake for our wonderful marriage.

When all is said and done, I’m not the perfect husband. Yes, I know. You thought I was. Sorry to rain on your parade. But Missy is so patient with me and loves me nonetheless. Nonetheless. I am so blessed to have her as my love.

I love you, Missy. Happy Anniversary!

Just got through digging around at the new web presence of Fellowship Church.

Wow. Very nice design. The initial front page (campus selection) is a very cool black UI that’s a temporary placeholder until you’ve selected a campus. As a non-attender, this was a tad confusing. If I were a visitor, even with knowledge of the Dallas area, I might still be confused by this. But I chose Grapevine and never saw that page again. I do love the tidy URLs and the use of subdomains for campus-specific traffic.

Once inside, the site reverts to a white, very clean UI. The menu system took just a bit of getting used to. From the initial front page to the sort of “central” page to the actual content pages you are presented with three types of navigation. Really, the central and page navs are the only real ones to worry about and though they are consistent in placement and navigation, there is a little difference in feel with the change in background. But I love the transparency on the central page navigation. I do not love the way the menu collapses on the content pages. If it were my choice, I would have left that expanded. I think it would be one less thing for people to figure out (the rollover expansion.) But the interaction is smooth and nice, so it works. And since several other aspects of the site are rollover-dependent, it seems a logical choice.

They also have a very slick, albeit slow, chat feature. Truth be told, I’m sure the slowness has to do with the live moderation (of which I wouldn’t want to even venture on guessing how they’ll handle going forward). Goes back to my recent post on web technology leaning toward live chat applications. This is really a nice way of offering live support for the site. Could also be really instrumental in any sort of web-based ministry that may occur, especially with all the recent talk of web campuses.

Of course, that super sweet Flash-based video player is still in the mix. Brian talked extensively about the development of that app and I’ll give him even more pats on the back here. Even though I am not a proponent of Flash, given its proprietary nature, I love the approach they took in development and the final execution is beautiful. I’d love to take a similar approach to web-based media delivery at NCC.

The developers also took the site in the direction of open source technology, opting for a PHP/PostgreSQL platform. Very solid. Plus, they are developing with web standards in mind. The new FC site is W3C compliant. Awesome! Brian Bailey, discussing this last year:

We began this year knowing we were at a crossroads. As our sites have grown, so has the pain in maintaining them. Though built using similar tools, they are each unique in terms of content management, e-commerce, user management, and e-newsletters. The sites are also in need of new looks, with an emphasis on designs that are more user-friendly, flexible, standards-compliant, and inviting. The combination of rapid traffic growth, three additional campuses, and a small team requires us to worker smarter and faster. Or as Bono said, “We have to go away and dream it all up again.”

I think you got what you needed, Brian.

Overall, I give the new FellowshipChurch.com a major thumbs up. Fellowship sets a nationwide standard for churches in many aspects of ministry and I am glad to see them stepping it up so strongly in the area of web development. Great job to all: Brian, Brad, Jeph and the other creative and technology teams involved.

Fellowship Church

Technorati Tags: fellowship church, ui, web, development

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my father-in-law, David Copeland. Welcome to the blogosphere, Pops!

David has a truly great ministry reaching into the interior of Guyana, into Trinidad, Kenya and many other countries where the Gospel is so desperately needed. In fact, he’s on his way to Guyana as I write this post. Stop by the Revival Journal and let him know you’re praying for him.

Under his leadership, Revival Now Ministries has also expanded to include an FM radio station, WRNK 96.3, which ministers to thousands of people in East Alabama and West Georgia, 24/7.

On a personal note, when you marry, you marry a spouse, but you also marry into that spouse’s family. God has blessed me with incredible “in-laws.” In fact, they’re not in-laws, they are family. It’s awesome to have the added blessing of a second fatherly mentor in my life. Plus, he’s a blogger and a podcaster.

Revival Journal

Looks like Google is tweaking Gmail a little more. Not a bad idea to keep Gmail up to par since it’s one of Google’s flagship products. In a “few weeks”, they’ll roll out a couple of new features in Gmail.

First, Gmail will now store your chat history from Google Talk conversations. A nice feature that should have been in Talk from the start.

They are also adding a convenient feature that will allow you to use Talk right in your Gmail session. This looks like a nice addition at this stage in the game. IM can improve or destroy productivity in any environment and that all depends on the end user. I like seeing this feature roll out.

Interesting to see so many companies diving into web-based chat. It’s not new. In fact, Java has allowed this for years. But now, companies like Meebo have really stretched our thinking about chatting in a browser window. And 37signals has even entered the fray hoping to improve project management and group collaboration with their next app, Campfire.

Technorati Tags: google, talk, gmail, im, chat, meebo, 37signals, campfire

I was thinking the other day that I have several guitar buddies that frequent the blog, so I thought I’d take a moment to go over my current rig for those musicians (and non) who would like to know what generates that sweet tone.

Guitar
2000 Fender Deluxe Fat Strat
EMG Vince Gill Signature Series Pickups (Pro Series VG20) with EMG Smart Presence Control Mod (SPC)
L.R. Baggs X-bridge Piezo and Ctrl-X Blender

Rack
1986 ADA MP-1 Tube Pre-amp w/ Midi Controller
Lexicon Alex Effects Processor (for Reverb)
Alesis 3630 Compressor
Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner Pedal
Boss DD-5 Digital Delay (with Boss FS-5U for tap tempo control)

Amp
Peavey Classic 30 Tube Amp (mfr) (with “Peavey” logo ripped off to give it that Fender look.)
Celestion V12-80 Silver Series Speaker

Technorati Tags: guitar, rig, fender, strat, emg, lr baggs, piezo, ada, mp1, lexicon, alesis, boss, peavey, classic 30, celestion

It was a joy to connect with Jim Walton of Church Tech Matters earlier tonight. Jim was troubleshooting the Feedburner plugin for Wordpress and I was able to call him and confuse him even more.

CTM was one of the first tech blogs I came across many, many months (years?) ago when I was first inclined to start listening to the blogosphere. It was an immediate bookmark and I’ve kept up with him ever since. Jim’s a great guy who loves to break stuff and then fix it. I love that kind of approach to life. If someone hasn’t coined this phrase yet, they should: If it ain’t broke, break it and make it better.

Church Tech Matters

I bit the bullet, dropped 30 bones and got Mint. This terrifically constructed and designed web statistics compiler is the brainchild of Shaun Inman.

I love that Mint is extensible. Shoot, I love anything pluggable, modifiable, tweakable or loveable. Or pretty. Or sweet. Or loveable, pretty and sweet, like my wife.

So, Mint is cool. I look at my blog statistics no less that 43,210 times per day. It’s worth having a system I can enjoy looking at as well. The UI is very attractive.

The tech behind Mint is decidedly different than my current stats tracker, AWstats (an open-source app written in Perl), which collates data from the Apache server logs and re-presents the data in a web interface. Mint is written in PHP, uses a MySQL database for data storage and uses Javascript to generate the traffic data. Using Javascript has a few drawbacks, like failing to track visitors with Javascript turned off in their browsers. But the choice is merited:

In order to record hits Mint requires JavaScript be enabled. This may be an issue for some but was a necessary trade-off that prevents Mint’s results from being skewed by non-human spiders, crawlers and referrer-spam bots.

Nobody likes a referrer-spam bot.

Mint is worth its weight in peppers.

Have a Mint

Watch my stats roll in Mint (limited time offer)

Technorati Tags: mint, shaun inman, statistics, blog, tracking, awstats, javascript, php, perl