Archive for Technology

About a year ago, someone mentioned Twitter to me. If I recall correctly, it was my friend and digital ally, Justin Thorp. I signed up, looked at the home page for a moment and went on my way—elsewhere.

In January, I decided to really give Twitter a solid go. I signed in, found a few friends and started updating. Within a few days, I was really beginning to enjoy the community aspect of Twitter. I tied in my mobile phone and “tweeted” more frequently.

A couple of months later, the light bulb moment happened. I was at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It seemed like everyone there was on Twitter. So many amazing events unfolded at the conference, many of them driven by conversation on Twitter. Who can forget the botched interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Quite literally, the emotion of the crowd was driven by 140-character rants on Twitter. The sheer power of communicating in such a simple way was astounding.

Today, I think I’ve come full circle in my opinion of Twitter. It is fantastic and it is garbage. For community, it has few real rivals right now. But as web applications go, it is really nothing special. In fact, Twitter is routinely down and struggling because of the volume of traffic on the site and poor development. Yet it remains a constant for many people throughout the workday or weekend.

Twitter has its own language, built around tweets, tweeps and at-replies. But Twitter really is a simple thing. It truly is about the simple question, “What are you doing?” (Feel free to extend that to “thinking, feeling, studying”, etc.) And it matters, I think. Sure, not everything that happens on Twitter has intrinsic value. But I think the ultimate ROI can be significant. Follow the people you care about. Find new friends or re-connect with old friends. Leave the rest alone.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you will get much more information about the things I am interested in, what is happening at work, at home and everywhere in between. Just hit http://twitter.com/davidrussell.

I’ll follow you as well. Let me know how to reach you on Twitter.

Twitter
David on Twitter

Technorati Tags: Twitter, communication, web

In October, several hundred technologists will converge in Grand Rapids, Michigan for the Internet Ministry Conference. I’m pleased to be speaking at this year’s conference on the topic of Internet discipleship. If you are in a ministry position with an angle on using emerging technologies to reach people for Christ, The Internet Ministry Conference will be the perfect complement to your portfolio. There are many great speakers and, more importantly, a great community of folks who value the gifts of digital communications and real-world ministry.

2008 Internet Ministry Conference
Prince Conference Center, Grand Rapids, MI
October 20-23, 2008

If you are going, let me know! I’d love to connect with you.

Note: Today is the last day to receive a discounted early bird rate and save $49!

Technorati Tags: internet ministry conference, grand rapids, michigan, web, ministry, discipleship, evangelism, digital

That title might be slightly misleading if you think “mods” are hardware changes. None of the changes I discuss in this article have to do with modifying the hardware of the Apple TV. But many of the changes to the software go beyond simple hacks. They change the behavior of the device. So, I went with “Hacks and Mods.” You can gripe in the comment section all you want.

Okay.

The Stage

Allow me to briefly expound on my network and devices. My Internet connection is from Comcast cable with advertised speeds of 5Mbps/1.5Mbps. Lately, I have seen much faster speeds at fairly regular intervals, something I am not complaining about. Perhaps one hidden feature of the Apple TV is a handshake with the ISP that gets a hot connection for all those savvy HD downloads. Or not.

From the cable modem, I run into a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. The firmware is stock Linksys, last updated sometime last year, so likely up-to-date (haven’t checked though.) I use DHCP to dynamically assign local IP addresses to all devices except my main PC which takes the static local IP address of 10.10.10.100. If you see instances of a local IP addresses in any of the tutorials or articles linked here, be aware that you will need to modify that to reflect your own local network setup. Using hostnames for devices on the network seems to work without any problem on the Apple TV, even when connecting to a Windows PC using the local hostname. At least, it has been no trouble for me.

My main machine on the network is fairly modern, home-built PC running Windows XP Professional SP2. We have another PC and an old iBook G3 on the network as well, but all the hacks and mods done to the Apple TV were successfully achieved with the main PC. There are a couple of hacks that require frameworks and plugins from a machine running OS X 10.4. For those, I consulted friends who delivered the necessary files. I also had an install disc for OS X 10.4 that came with my wife’s iBook. I used that disc on one occasion. The hacks that require files directly from an OS X install disc or machine have to do with installing Flash, Quicktime and other rich media plugins in CouchSurfer, a WebKit-based web browser for Apple TV. We’ll get into specifics on that in a moment, but if you are not really interested in having Flash in a browser (you can still have the browser!) then you really don’t have to worry about having access to OS X as mentioned above.

Source

None of the hacks or mods that I used on my Apple TV were discovered or created by me. There is a fantastic community of folks who work really hard to make this magic happen. Up front, I’d like to give full credit to the folks in the Apple TV community who have made these things possible. Hat tip.

The majority of my information came from ATV4Windows and the ATV4Windows wiki, a site based on hacking the Apple TV using a Windows machine as the main rig. Much of the information compiled there has come from other popular Apple TV resources, like iClarified, AwkwardTV and others. As of yesterday, ATV4Windows has moved to a subscriber model. I wish the developer there lots of luck making money off of Apple TV hacks, but I prefer free information so I’ll try to disclose as much as I possibly can right here. However, I do plan on linking you up with many of the same tutorials I followed. I won’t reinvent the wheel. Unless that wheel now costs $15. If you do have a Mac that you’ll be manipulating your Apple TV with, no worries. There is a ton of information and iClarified currently seems to be one of the better resources. AwkwardTV is similarly geared toward Mac enthusiasts.

Enough yammering. Let’s do this.

The “Patchstick”

The patchstick is simple really, it’s a disk image that fits on any 1-4GB USB flash drive. When connected to the USB port on the Apple TV, the patchstick will install a few basic applications to help get you rolling with hacks and mods. The main thing you’ll need is SSH support. That’s the primary goal you should have at the onset. Get SSH up and connect to your Apple TV from another machine on the network. If you get there, the sky is the limit.

I used the Patchstick that is freely available from ATV4Windows. Since the author has chosen to hold the new version ransom, the older version of the Patchstick will have to do. Honestly, you only need SSH anyway. As of a few weeks ago, the tutorial he gives on the Patchstick page was accurate. I followed his steps verbatim. The new Patchstick he has made does install a lot of nice software, but at this point, it seems to be stuff you can do on your own (and for free). More than anything, I like the idea of having a more controlled install. Get what you want and only that. For another option, you can use this tutorial.

So I hope you have been able to get SSH installed on your Apple TV. Once you have that, connect to it using PuTTY (Win) or Terminal (OSX). Use the IP address of the Apple TV or the hostname, AppleTV.local. The username and password are both frontrow. You’ll have that memorized in no time. Trust me.

Once you’ve connected, you are ready to start hacking it up. What I did is not necessarily what you might do. Please browse the documentation at AwkwardTV and the other fine resources for Apple TV hacks. It’s only by knowing what is available to you that you can really make a decision about what you would like to achieve with your Apple TV. My goals once seemed radical, but as I studied I realized they could be rather easily accomplished:

• Have root control over Apple TV.
• Copy files to the Apple TV outside of iTunes “syncing”.
• Play media files encoded with alternative codecs, like DivX and Xvid.
• Play media files that use different file formats, like Quicktime, MPEG-4, AVI and WMV.
• Stream files directly from my PC to the Apple TV.
• Browse the web with a Flash-enabled browser (on the “bonus” list).

SSH

With SSH access to Apple TV, you have all the the root you can handle. All your base are belong to us. Again, this is a rather fundamental step in the process. For me, I was really quite excited just to get here. It was even more fun to connect to the Apple TV using WinSCP and browse the root files and folders. The main access point for the Apple TV seems to be in the frontrow directory:

/mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow

You’ll become comfortable with the structure of the files and folders in the Apple TV fairly quickly. You’ll find it is mostly simple, although there are a couple of tricky folders with the same names under different paths. Just check the paths carefully when performing any modifications. Don’t just haphazardly hunt for folders to dump stuff in. You might dump something in the wrong place, which could lead to some frustration and troubleshooting.

ATV Files

This application allows you to add folders and files to the /frontrow directory and have direct access to these files from the Apple TV main menu. ATV Files will also play media files using the native Apple TV player, provided the proper codecs are installed. For that, we look at Perian.

Perian

Perian is really quite wonderful. I’ve used it on OS X since day one. It really is a Swiss Army knife for playing media in Quicktime on OS X. It works just as well on Apple TV. With Perian installed on Apple TV, you can really open up the device to become a more true “media center”.

CouchSurfer

If it’s sounds like a web browser, it probably is. And that’s exactly what CouchSurfer sounds like. Formerly known as SafariHD, CouchSurfer is a WebKit-based browser that will allow you to load and view web pages right on your television through Apple TV. The experience is nifty, but not really amazing. You’ll find yourself wanting a keyboard and mouse. Interacting with websites with the Apple remote and scrolling around the silly alphanumeric table quickly becomes rather mundane. There is a workaround that will apparently bring support for simple peripherals to the Apple TV, but I’ve yet to give it a shot.

I did manage to get the Flash plugin working with CouchSurfer. It was a pain to get there, because of the need for some proprietary Apple frameworks from the very specific OS X version 10.4. But I did finally accomplish it. It’s not exactly the experience I expected. I loaded up the fun hulu.com to try it out. Two problems emerged: 10 frames-per-second (at my visual estimation) and no full screen. I’m not sure if either of those problems will be repaired in later releases of CouchSurfer, or if there is just some weird bug with Flash in this environment, but it seems hardly worth my time to try and enjoy the tiny frame that most streams appear in or the sluggish frame rate.

It’s still cool! It just might not be quite the experience you thought you’d have.

Shared Network Drives

This one is amazing. Using the tutorial at ATV4Windows, I managed to get some of my media in shared folders accessible by the Apple TV! This means I can stream files right across the network from the original folders in which they reside without having to copy them to the Apple TV! I bet you can sense my excitement over this, and truly it is a notable accomplishment for several reasons.

1. You do not have to worry about the remaining space on the Apple TV’s native hard drive. Let’s face it, even 160GB can be used fairly quickly when it comes to media. I probably have half of that in photographs alone! And my music database isn’t far behind that. That’s not even counting the heaviest of all files, video.
2. You can maintain your current file and folder organization structure without concern for re-adapting it the Apple TV or having iTunes import and “manage” it all. Essentially, it all works right where it already resides.

The one problem with streaming from shared files across a network, particularly mine, is the latency that can often occur with slower networks. I’m on wireless-G here which both the Apple TV and my main PC use (my PC being wireless is a long story for another day.) So without having a hard cable in the house, other than from the modem to router, my network speeds are fairly slow compared to a nice 10/100/1000 wired network.

Streaming media to the Apple TV doesn’t always deliver smooth playback. I will experiment with some options (including getting everything hardwired—which for me means a visit from a cable technician to fix a few coax outlets) but until then, I have opted to copy over media with higher total bitrates directly to the Apple TV. They stream from that disk flawlessly!

That said, the option of playing back media on the Apple TV directly from a shared file or folder over a network connection is absolutely terrific.

In Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning of this now-lengthy article, I chose the hacks and mods that would give me the most value and that achieved the goals I set out to accomplish with my Apple TV. I just wanted to get a “media center” experience out of the device and I believe I have. I realize there are quite a few details missing from this article. I do have step-by-step instructions on each hack. If you have the slightest difficulty in tracking down a solid tutorial on any of the hacks I’ve outlined, please let me know. I can publish details about each. Obviously, this article’s length is well beyond the typical blog entry here and so I wanted to abbreviate it somewhat. It’s most important that you realize how potent the Apple TV really is under the hood. Yes, it takes a little time and energy to pull the greatness out of it, but once you do you will really be amazed at what you can accomplish with this tiny box!

Good luck with yours.

• Awkward TV

Technorati Tags: apple, tv, hacks, mods, modifications, software, SSH, WinSCP, Windows, OS X, Mac, media, Perian, codecs, CouchSurfer, WebKit, ATV Files

Last month, I received some disposable income for getting older. I had really become interested in doing something to make my digital media more accessible on the traditional medium of our living room television. While I really enjoy working on the computer all day long, sitting at a desk to watch podcasts and movies is really not a great experience.

So I started researching a few of my options. I really like the idea of a Sony PlayStation 3 and started to just save up for one. Then I thought about Apple TV. It’s moderately priced, would likely handle the “iTunes” side of things in a cinch, would certainly have good hardware and likely good software. I’m no Apple fanboy. I like the diversity of operating systems and believe each serves well in unique ways. But I do love iTunes and the way it handles media (generally speaking). And once I looked at what the Take2 upgrade to Apple TV enabled the device to do, I was sold.

Using craigslist, I managed to locate a 160GB model at a decent price ($250, new-in-the-box condition). Once I arrived home, I noticed the factory restore the seller had initiated put the firmware back to the original version, Take 1 so to speak, so I started the upgrade option immediately. Once it was all patched up and rebooted, I toured the menu, set up access to my wireless network and shared iTunes resources from my main PC. Then I perused the features, watched a couple of YouTube videos and linked up my Flickr account.

Take 2: YouTube and Flickr

I am really impressed with both the YouTube and Flickr features. While it is not very efficient to have to “type” in searches using the tiny remote to scroll around a few rows of alphanumeric characters, once you are in, each experience is really great. For what they are, YouTube videos generally look great and even the sound seems improved. But the real winner here is Flickr. Wow! This experience is stunning. The speed at which they are able to grab really great looking images for viewing on the TV is impressive. Though it has a few imperfections, like a bad habit of cropping the top and bottom from photos, overall it really makes the Flickr experience even better. It’s so handy when family is over to start up a slideshow to view Andrew’s latest antics or talk about an event I shot. When Apple TV goes idle, it goes into a screen saver mode with a cascade of my photostream! So even when we aren’t using the Apple TV, it becomes a part of our lives just like the pictures in frames strewn around our rooms. That is such a nice touch and though seemingly insignificant, it really adds value to the experience for us.

iTunes Integration

Smooth as silk. Yes. It was just so easy. All my tunes, videos, and podcasts synced to the Apple TV in just a few minutes. The iTunes Store is there too, albeit in quite a unique form. The UI is really slick and geared toward simple manipulation with the remote. I can rent movies, even in HD, right from the store and begin watching within just a few moments. The picture quality of an HD movie is quite stunning on my Samsung 32″ 1080i HDTV. In fact, I’m probably more impressed by how Apple gets the image to look so good and still stream to me so quickly and with zero buffer! It’s hot. A couple of small gripes are the way movies are displayed in the store. Essentially they show the cover art as a thumbnail for each flick. It can be a little hard to read the titles of each movie. Once you hover the cursor over one, a plain text title appears as a caption, but you must hover over it. So I generally find myself hovering over each cover to see what the title is, as opposed to scanning the screen for what I want. Perhaps on a larger screen, this problem is less noticeable.

Podcasts are really well done on the Apple TV. I love browsing the store and grabbing at some of the top podcasts and just sitting back and seeing what happens or throwing on my personal favorites to listen or view. There really is some fantastic content in the podcast space. Apple TV makes accessing that content fairly simple.

Conclusion

Apple TV is okay. Apple TV Take 2 is quite good. I have extended my Apple TV to make it great and I’ll cover some of those modifications in another article. Stay tuned.

If you are in the market for a $300 media center, I’d definitely encourage trying out the Apple TV if you have a store nearby. You probably will not be disappointed. Are there better media players out there? Well, given the recent developments on the PS3 front and given some really interesting things I’ve seen done with a Mac Mini and given the impressive abilities of a Linux box running MythTV, I’d say there probably are better setups. But each has it’s own price, either in cold cash or in an investment of labor. I feel like the Apple TV is a shortcut on both fronts, time and money, but has a significant ROI. I’m happy. When I explain the mods, you’ll learn why I am ecstatic.

• Apple TV

Technorati Tags: Apple TV, Apple, take 2, media, itunes, PC, Mac, upgrade, center, TV, television, technology, podcast, movie

Breaking Update: Looks like Blockbuster might be trying to weave into the Apple TV space. (Article)

Not bad while paying for a 5MB/768k connection. Looks nearly three times that. I hope it stays this way for a very long time. (Well, at least as long as 14MB/s is good download speed.)

I’m headed to Austin, Texas for a few days to enjoy SXSW Interactive.

So far, I have the first two days of the conference all planned out. I’ll play the other two by ear and schedule as I go. I want to leave a little flexibility. I already feel like I’m quite maxed out! It’s going to be a blast. I will likely need a day just to recover from the insanity of it all.

I’ll log updates here as much as possible. I’ll also post @Twitter, assuming they don’t have any downtime, on Pownce and possibly on Flickr.

A few events I’m looking forward to are:

• The Flickrite Meetup at the Cathedral of Junk
• Google Party
• The 2008 SXSW ABX
• The SXSW Godbit Dinner

Of course, those are all evening (non-official) SXSW events. I will be attending a plethora of sessions. One session I’m especially excited about is the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview. Hopefully, I’ll get a few free moments to meet up with the EllisLab folks and thank them personally for crafting such fine products, ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter.

If you are at SXSW and would like to meet up, send an email: sxsw@davidrussell.org

Technorati Tags: sxsw, flickr, google, godbit, events, schedule, expressionengine, codeigniter, ellislab, conference, austin, texas

Microformats are the way of the present, and most certainly the way of the future. This is simply an approach to HTML that allows you to markup information on your site in a way that allows humans and devices to use the text/data on the page in new ways.

We use microformats at theaterchurch.com to markup our contact information and events schedule. Visitors to our site can take that information from a page and into their address books or calendars in one simple click. It is also easy to work microformats into dynamic content by inserting them into the markup of your content management system. I have crafted our content management system to microformat our data at strategic places, like the small group directory, where visitors can add the small group leader’s contact information right to their address book. It’s completely hands-off, once a system is in place to produce the proper markup.

While it’s hard to gauge how well microformats are utilized, I think it’s clear that it has been valuable for us to offer this feature. It’s so simple to implement that the ROI is strong on the return side. And yet, as the popularity of microformats increases, we’ll be strategically prepared to deliver in the coming years.

I have several projects in which I’ve implemented microformats and I will continue to endorse microformats among my web developer peers. If you are not in a position to personally add microformats to a site you control, talk to your web administrator about getting it rolling!

If you are interested in discovering and using microformats on the Web, I recommend the Operator extension for Firefox. There are other options available. Some sites may make hCard or hCal content available through tools like Technorati Contacts or Events and tie the service into microformatted content on the host site. This is an approach I regularly take in making microformats accessible without the need for a third-party tool. Firefox 3 should support microformats natively, and I would not be surprised if other browsers followed suit.

Obviously, I think that creating content online is important. But adding value and meaning to that content through semantic markup, including microformats, is a great step in creating content that is accessible, modular and re-usable!

If you are interested in microformats, be sure to check out microformats.org. There is also an excellent book/blog on the subject called Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 from web expert John Allsop. I highly recommend it both as a great read on microformats as well as a technical resource.

Technorati Tags: microformats, html, semantic, markup, accessibility, content, open, operator

For quite some time now, I’ve enjoyed the benefits of using OpenDNS on the networks at NCC and at my home. If you are not familiar with OpenDNS, allow me to briefly explain what their service does. Using the web has become quite dependent on the domain name system (DNS). In the very early days, we used IP addresses to navigate the web. Domain names solve the problem of the human factor by allowing text, numerals and hyphens to be used to translate IP addresses into something more friendly.

OpenDNS is a service that allows you to change the route of your DNS requests away from your ISP. This provides a number of benefits, as outlined in the OpenDNS features. You might also be interested in a very simple explanation of how OpenDNS works.

The features I particularly enjoy are:

• Adult-site Blocking - It’s important to have these types of filters in place even when no one on the network intentionally uses adult sites. It avoids embarrassment and potential accountability issues, especially in the work environment. It also is a general measure of security for a network frequently used by kids.
• Statistics - I am a statistics fiend, so I really enjoy measuring network traffic and gleaning useful tidbits of data compiled from my DNS traffic.
• Speed - In both of my personal cases, there has been a noticeable increase in speed of DNS requests when I switched from public ISP DNS to OpenDNS.
• Customization - For the office network, it is nice to have a solution we can paste our brand into.

Since I first signed on, OpenDNS has provided excellent service for me. I’d encourage anyone with a computer and especially anyone who is an administrator for a home or office network to get started with OpenDNS. If you have access to your wireless router, it is simple to apply one change to the DNS settings and have all computers on your network begin using OpenDNS.

For statistics to work on a home network, you’ll probably need to use an application to update OpenDNS with your dynamic IP address. It is rare for a consumer-level ISP to provide a static IP address to a customer. You may be one of the lucky few! If not, there is some additional assistance on setting up a service or application which frequently updates OpenDNS with IP address changes. This option is only necessary if you are interested in recording statistics. OpenDNS has created a web-based service called DNS-o-matic which makes simple the process of updating several services and networks at one. At work, we have a static IP so we do not need to update OpenDNS. At home, I use the INADYN service. The DynDNS updater might be a simpler solution for novice users and also has an option for Mac users.

Enjoy speed and security! This round is on me!

Technorati Tags: opendns, dns, isp, network, administration, security, speed, tweak

I’ve been a long time fan of Mozilla’s award-winning browser Firefox. I’ve heralded the glory of safe browsing and championed the cause of FOSS.

I do still love Firefox. But lately, I’ve been troubled by a single problem: Firefox eats alive my available RAM, occasionally to the point that my machine slows to an unbearable crawl. I’ve researched the problem extensively only to come up with many dead ends on options to repair this. Apparently, many people (and seemingly Mozilla) touts this problem as a “feature” in that it is caused by caching history of the open tabs. If I have 10 tabs open at one, Firefox stands at the ready for any one of those tabs to be selected and will allow faster access if I navigate forward or backward to recently browsed pages.

Of course, the idea is fantastic. But the price to pay for such a feature is costly, especially on my home machine where available RAM is 1 GB.

After trying several modifications to Firefox, none which were successful, I decided to start casually browsing using Opera. The reason I looked to Opera was because of one particularly bad experience with Firefox. Quite by chance one day, I was using Firefox with about eight tabs open. Suddenly, my computer started acting up and I checked the system. Firefox was hogging a tremendous 610MB of my available 1,024. Yikes! I really needed to get to what I was working on faster than it would take to clear the issue by rebooting Firefox, so I pulled up my Program List, opened Opera and within seconds was browsing through the information I needed. Firefox whirred away in the background, trying to figure where to get more RAM to do its deed.

While browsing with Opera, I noticed how responsive the application seemed. In fact, web pages loaded faster. At first, I thought it just seemed that way as I was miffed at Firefox for going 20 mph in the fast lane of I-95. But indeed, even over time, Opera responded well. I opened the same tabs in Opera, navigated around for an hour or two and checked the system status. Opera was using a mere 59MB of RAM while Firefox still hogged over 300MB. I was impressed with Opera.

Today, I dual-wield the browsers. I still use Firefox daily. I cannot live without it for web development. In fact, I recently commented to a friend that if I was left with the option of a single browser and three plugins, I’d choose Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug and the HTML Tidy Validator. Together, they are a brilliant development platform. But for casual browsing, I’ve started turning very often to Opera. It’s fast, light and gets the job done. The UI takes some getting used to, but I’ve found everything I need.

If you battle the Firefox “memory leak”, I’d encourage a visit to opera.com. The browser is free and it’s a great alternative to Firefox. Opera also comes in tiny packages for your mobile device. And Opera Mini is a great product for accessing the web using more traditional mobile phones.

Technorati Tags: opera, mozilla, firefox, browser, slow, speed, switch

This year we moved to a more standardized form for budget proposals. Each department prepares a worksheet with their estimated expenditures in each subcategory of the budget.

For IT, I prepared something very close to last year’s budget by following the baseline for last year’s actual expenses. Other than a couple of “shifts” that were approved for me to make last year, my estimations on the IT side were fairly accurate. We knew what we needed to do and so I “shopped” and budgeted accordingly. This year, we’ll probably do fewer projects on the IT side because we handled so much last year:

• New Server
• New Server Rack
• VoIP (SIP) Phone System
• Desktop Standardization Project¹
• Improvement in Spam Protection (Postini)
• Storage Implementation
• Plus, many small but consequential tasks

You must read that list slowly to really feel the weight of those tasks. It was a big year for a team that has no real IT department. It’s me and Dave Clark picking up these tasks when we have spare minutes away from digital communications and media. That means many late nights because spare time in digital communications and media does not exist.

So we have a lot finally nailed down on the IT side. And things are rolling well. There is always room for improvement, but it helps to have so much in our favor. 2007 was a year of establishment for the IT department. 2008 will be a year of refinement.

For the digital communications side, I think the exact opposite is about to happen! I’m extremely excited about this. 2006 was very much the year of establishment for the digital communications side. There were several large projects that happened including the massive re-building of theaterchurch.com. In 2007, there were a few major things, some internal application development providing support to the staff, many “routines” based on the establishment of the preceding year and last, much research. Plus, much of my focus went into those massive IT infrastructure changes.

In 2008, I am looking at some very big projects—so large, in fact, that I’ll have to outsource a large portion of the development for the applications and services we are looking to build. That’s exciting to me for many reasons! It will free up a large portion of focus for me. I need that. I won’t spend as much time fiddling around in PHP or trying to bend a small web app into submission to serve a need. (Silos!) I’ll move back into front-end development and project management. I’ll focus on organizing our data into one or two large systems and reducing the silos of information we’ve created over the years by snapping up URLs and building microsites and temporary blogs.

We’ve already experimented with outsourcing this year. That has been very successful. Nathan Herald built a fantastic support ticket system in Ruby on Rails. The projects we are looking at this year are massive. And they’ll likely need several Nathan Heralds. These are thousand-hour development and multi-person team projects; most involve high-end technology as well, including Flash, Ajax, RoR and more. It’s going to take some effort to get where we want to go. The projects we are looking into aren’t exactly secrets, but I’m not going to get into details until I see what I get approved to manage.

Budget proposals are just one piece of the pie. But they are a very important part of the end-of-year process for our departments. Our whole year depends on what happens in these proposals, meetings and approvals. I’m praying for awesome opportunities in 2008.

¹ The Desktop Standardization Project reduced significant “weight” of old, non-standard machines in use by our office staff. We moved old gear out and brought in fresh machines—desktops and laptops, according to the needs of the staff member. There were many reasons we needed to do this, but primarily it was to get everyone on the same technological level and provide consistency of hardware to produce more efficient answers to support requests.

Technorati Tags: 2008, budget, proposal, business, process, communications, digital, web, IT, technology