Monthly archive: August, 2009

Template creation

August 4, 2009, by No comments yet

It’s the part of putting up a website that I have the most trouble with – designing the template. While can code a website (almost entirely) from scratch, the graphics and their layout are not my forte. So, I rely upon other to do their magic and voila, templates galore. Not exactly. We all know that the hardest part of setting up a ministry website is the dirth of good templates to look over in the first place. Whether you choose Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or some other tool, each has their positives and negatives. The most important thing is that a template created for one can not be used on another. So, I usually point my friends and clients to template sites that sell them a la carte or as part of a subscription. However, it is up to the designers for that service to create new and exciting templates to keep folks coming back for more. If they don’t create new ones, your brand new subscription can start to look like a poor investment.

Recently, however, one of my clients sent me a link to Artisteer and asked me to take a look at it. On its surface it offers something that I have not seen others will – create one template and export it to Joomla, Drupal or WordPress.

Volunteer/Ministry Scheduling

August 4, 2009, by 1 comment

It’s the inevitable question for any ministry coordinator – “Sorry to call you so late this (Saturday) evening, but I won’t be at church tomorrow, maybe you can find someone else to replace me”. No matter how many times you offer a ministry roster and remind all involved that locating their replacement is their responsibility, it will eventually fall to you at some point. So, what do you do? Well, if you have a “connected” church like mine, you consider the possibility of online ministry scheduling. Thankfully, I am not in charge of scheduling anything other than the youth (and men’s group this year). But, if you are in charge of scheduling the Sunday morning worship, this can be daunting if more than one person can not attend. To that end, I organized a list of possible options for our ministry coordinator. They are:

At this point, our coordinator has decided she wants to try Churchdirector. I will be creating an account and testing it out over the next few days.

Writer’s Tools

August 4, 2009, by No comments yet

As you can tell by the missives below, writing is not how I make money. I can write. Let’s leave it at that. However, there are many that have been blessed by God with that talent – my wife among them. To those folks, I say, “Thanks for the hard work. It keeps my entertained, busy and thoroughly happy to read”. So, how I can help them. Well, I can make recommendations about what works as a writing platform. This morning TUAW posted an article about WriteRoom. While it might be too spartan for me, I can see its allure. Just write baby!

Here a link to the article.

Getting to know someone else’s machine

August 3, 2009, by No comments yet

I am currently looking over documents on a former colleague’s machine. He left for another position last week and I have been tasked with locating and editing any number of file he left behind. The struggle is using the new version of Word (2008). I am frustrated with Microsoft’s methodology and movement of items. Specifically, I am trying to recreate a form. Within the form is any number of items that were translated from the Adobe Acrobat to Word. Some were left out. It’s up to me to try and replace them. However, try as I might, I can not locate all the symbols/word art/objects that I used to have no problem finding.

Frustrating.

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