Technology

I was a little bummed out today when I found out that my favorite Podcast was coming to an end.  The guys over at Geeks and God had put out a weekly podcast all about Technology in Churches and Ministries and I looked forward to listening to it every week.  I learned a lot about Drupal listening to those guys and following up by looking for answers in the forums on their website.  I will miss listening to them but from the sound of their last podcast, they are on to a great opportunity that will allow them to use the gifts that God has given them in a new way.  God Bless Guys.

One of the concerns that I had when I was planning the conversion of my blog to drupal was the ability to post to my blog from my phone. I had found a utility that allowed me to to that under Wordpress and I wanted that with Drupal also. I found iBlogger and so far it is working out better than I had expected. Maybe I will post more often now.

In my search to learn more about Drupal I have run across some pretty good podcasts that help users learn how to take advantage of this great content management system.  One of the ones that I have been going through recently is a Video podcast from Mustard Seed Media.  This is done by one of the guys from Geeks and God and I really like it.  He does short Video podcasts that show you how to work with drupal from a designer perspective and I am finding them very useful.

I have been working on my Church website for a number of years now and while it has gotten better with each itteration, I have come to realize that there really is so much that could be done yet.  When I took over our Church website from someone who moved out of state, it was developed entirely in Frontpage and I continued to use that for some time.  After I got tired of dealing with the bad code that Frontpage produced I moved the website to Dreamweaver and that made it a little better but I did not have the time to devote to the site that I had in the past.  The other issue with using Dreamweaver is that I was testing/developing at home and unless we purchased multiple copies of dreamweaver, I was the only person that could update the site and that did not lend itself to having a lot of fresh content. I spent the last year or so learning the basics of Drupal.  Drupal is a content managenment system which I have used to setup our church website so that once I put some basics in place, others can help update the website using only a browser if they have a login to the site.  We have started using this new site but as I teach others to use it I find there are many things I am not satisfied with on the site and I want to learn more about CSS, PHP, and MYSQL so I can really do the things that I want on the site.  I have found a great resource in a website called www.geeksandgod.com that is a great site that helps people interested in developing church and ministry related websites.  I am listening to the podcasts and really coming up with some good ideas. One of the first things I want to do to get to know this platform better is convert this wordpress blog of mine to Drupal 6 to get me more proficcient in the tools that I need.  Design is probably one of my biggest hurdles as I am more of a technical guy and not really the artsy creative type.  I may need to rely on the advice of others for help there.

I am writing this post from my iPhone using some software just for managing wordpress blogs from iPhone's. So far it is pretty cool. I also updated the blog with a new mac inspired theme that I really like. With this new software maybe I will post more.