Church Tech Blogs

John Chandler has started a new Church Tech Blog aggregator. If you read a lot of church tech blogs, you might find that many of them (including mine) are being aggregated there all in one convenient place.

Emergencies

I just got out of a Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED re-certification course. My employer makes sure that there is a person in each department who is certified in all these areas. I think it’s a pretty good idea.

I don’t know what churches do in this area, but it is something that should not be overlooked. Does your church have an AED, a first aid kit, and someone who knows how to use it?

What to do with the Map?

Now that we have this map information, what do we do with it? Thankfully I'm just the grunt in this whole effort and much more strategically minded people will be using this information. A couple ideas are:

• knowing key locations for small groups
• choosing a location for a branch service

Do other people have ideas? Please share.

Mapping Again

Props to the people at ESRI. ArcWeb is very cool. Their people are very helpful and responsive as well. About 2-3 hours after my last post, I got a TrackBack from James Fee about my use of ArcWeb. I posted a comment on his blog asking for some help using Perl with SOAP::Lite (which is a pretty weak SOAP implementation, IMHO). Minutes later I received comments back with pointers to some examples.

I was able to get the whole thing plotted tonight. I still need to fiddle with the map coverage. I simply asked for a best-fit map without realizing that we've had people come to Crossroads from all over the place. We've got a pretty good spread!

Once I get the ArcWeb code cleaned up I'll make it available.

Fellowship One Mapping Update

I came across a really handy site called ESRI. ESRI provides mapping services to non-profits for free (they also have a commercial service).

They provide several different APIs for creating maps. I started out with the REST API. The map you see was created using this API. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to move to the SOAP API because REST only works with small data-sets. But it sure was a lot easier to work with.

The map you see is the first 150 addresses to come out of my Fellowship One Data Exchange query. The map is centered on the Crossroads church office.

If this could be considered a random sampling (probably pretty close to random), it gives a good initial picture of the distribution of our people.

Web Re-design Team

I got a recent comment on my blog essentially saying that the Crossroads website looked cheesy. This really ticked me off. Then I realized that the only reason it ticked me off was because I agree. If I "knew" the Crossroads site rocked, then a silly comment like that wouldn’t have bothered me. It was because the comment was true that it really hit home.

(Lesson learned: don’t let rudeness block you from seeing the truth behind the comment)

I had planned to pull together a team to work toward redesigning the site sometime mid-year. This has accelerated the plan. I’ve hand selected a group of 8 people to form this team. We’ll be having our first meeting on March 8. Here’s our team (in no particular order):

• Pete Bishop – communications, design, video, big picture (pastor of technology)
• Linda Gentry – leader of our marketing team
• Faythe Emens – project manager, copy-editor
• Doug Winters – pastor of assimilation (my wife calls him "the Borg pastor")
• Ben Mitchell – culture, design, idea man
• Deb Johnston – photographer, art consultant, design
• Josh Borton – graphic design, general creativity
• Brian Glass – team leader, geek

I’m also on the lookout for a creative writer (suggestions are appreciated). This team is going to ROCK! This will probably be a continuing series of posts. We expect it to take about one year.

Joomla!

Last night Crossroads took the plunge and converted from Mambo to Joomla. Since Joomla is a fork of Mambo (though the developers won’t admit that), the upgrade path was fairly smooth. I was waiting to see where the two projects were headed and hoping to go a little longer without having to decide, but reports of a worm that attacks older versions of Mambo convinced me it was time to decide.

The deciding factor for me was the fact that a vast majority of the 3rd party developers went over to Joomla in addition to the core development team. We use several 3rd part components such as our forum and wysiwyg editor. I did not want to have to dig up replacements.

The upgrade had only a few glitches that were mostly due to the 3rd party components. Upgrading these components to the latest versions fixed most of the problems.

Increasing Fellowship One Penetration

Many companies nowadays offer two types of service. Take 37signals. For each of their products they have a free version and a pay version. The free version is usually a subset of the pay version. For 37signals’ Basecamp, the free version allows one project. I use a mail service called fastmail. They provide a free service that supplies 10MB of storage space. I pay for the version that supplies 600MB.

Fellowship Tech (and other church management ASPs) could follow this model and I predict in doing so would provide a dramatic increase in church adoption. I would think providing a free service that does not include check-in, check-scanning, website integration, or data conversion and allows only limited membership size in the range of 100-200 would work. Churches could start small and as they outgrow the 100-200 size limit would become paying customers.

The dilemma to consider here is that many churches are not growing. If you get thousands of these small non-growing churches using Fellowship One with no potential for becoming paying customers, you may have a problem. But it is a strategy worth at least some investigation.

Latest Kid Crossing Banner

Here's the latest iteration of the Kid Crossing banner. A couple people commented that it essentially felt dead. Here I've added some kids, a car driving through, and the Sun at the end of the road. I'll probably be adding more kids in the future.

Fellowship One Data Exchange for Perl

For those interested, I have posted my Perl package for Fellowship One Data Exchange in the Fellowship One Data Exchange forum available through the support link in Fellowship One. I’d be happy to answer any questions in regard to its use.

You are free to use this package in any way you choose. Please realize that if you release this code to the public, you (not I) will be violating the Fellowship One non-disclosure agreement.

Pete Bishop: Tagged

Link: Pete Bishop: Tagged. I’ve been tagged by Pete. I guess I’m supposed to cough up the following information…

Four other jobs I’ve had:

• C programmer for Simulation Resource, Inc.
• system Administrator at Andrews University CS department
• computer lab assistant at Andrews University
• Music department assistant at Union Springs Academy

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
• The Matrix Trilogy
• The Village
• Pleasantville

Four places I’ve lived:

• Onsted, MI
• Terre Haute, IN
• Berrien Springs, MI
• Union Springs, NY

Four Shows I like to watch:

• I don’t watch TV

Four foods that I like:

• General Tzo’s Chicken
• Barbeque ribs
• Pizza
• Cheese cake

Four sites I visit every day:

• bloglines
• linuxtoday
• newsmax
• google

Four things I’d like to do before I die:

• do ministry full-time
• take my family on a multi-day backpack trip
• Go to Norway
• Become a Tai Chi master

Four people I’m tagging:

• Nobody. This is an insidiuos form of chain spam.

America’s Secret War

Over my vacation last week I had a chance to read. I took a stack of books on 3D graphics and Perl programming, but ended up becoming immersed in America’s Secret War by George Friedman.

For my liberal friends, this is not a pro-Bush book, nor an anti-Bush book. George Friedman is the founder of Stratfor, which is a civilian intelligence agency. It will give you a completely new perspective on why things happened and are happening. More often than not, things are not what they seem. If you are at all interested in our current global situation, this is a must-read book.

This book and Norman Podhoretz’s article World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, have done a lot to shape my views of our current global situation.

Skiing

My family and I have been in Vermont skiing for our annual ski trip. My in-laws live in Vermont and my father-in-law is a volunteer ski patroller at Sugarbush, so we get free lift tickets.

This year Micah (6) took an all-day ski lesson. This lesson made a night and day difference. We believe the primary success of the lesson was building Micah's confidence. He even managed to ski some easy black diamond trails today.

Hannah (4) is still skiing with a harness, but she has no fear. Her problem will not be lack of confidence, but learning to listen to her teachers. She is doing remarkably well for a 4 year old.

P.S. The videos may not show up in your RSS readers.

Fellowship One Maps

Our pastor of connections recently mentioned that he would like to see a map of all our people so we would know how we were distributed geographically.

I had been wanting to construct a Perl package for accessing Fellowship One (F1) through Data Exchange and this offered a great excuse. I now have a working package for querying F1 (no updates or inserts yet). I will likely make this available to other F1 users in the not-too-distant future.

There is a really cool SOAP service called Geocoder.us that makes it really easy to get latitude and longitude based on an address.

I had hoped to use the Google Maps API, but alas, their terms of use require that the results of your usage be made freely accessible by the public. I'm guessing that making that type of information available would not be a good thing. What do other people think about that?

So, I went to CPAN and discovered a handy dandy Perl package called Image::WorldMap. The image you see is a highly zoomed and cropped version of the image made by Image::WorldMap, using coordinates from families with last names starting with "GL." I will need to hack Image::WorldMap to use a Lenawee county map. Since I have the source, that should be pretty straightforward.

Fellowship One Data Exchange is very cool.

Lawn Ornaments, Pt. 2

On Thursday, I got a call. The fellow on the other end claimed to be the Adrian City Zoner. He was calling about some rather large inflatables that had been set-up without a proper permit. He claimed that unless we had the ornaments removed by 3:00pm that day, we would be fined $25. I asked him what his name and phone number was, but he said he didn’t give out his name. He could be reached by calling the City offices and asking for the City Zoner. I was a bit suspicious since 1. Most fines are in excess of $70, 2. The fellow wouldn’t give me his name, and 3. The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

I called Matt, and he had been contacted by the same gentleman. Apparently this gentleman had gotten our numbers from a sign that had been put up in front of the inflatables declaring that the gentlemen at these phone numbers will install these inflatables for free. I work in Ann Arbor, which is about an hour’s drive to Adrian where Crossroads and Pastor Scott live. Since Matt was 5 minutes drive from there, he agreed to run over during his lunch hour and take them down. It sounded mighty suspicious, but better safe than sorry. It turns out the sign with our phone numbers did not actually exist.

It turns out the "City Zoner" was Mike Luce and there is no fine for having inflatables in your yard without a permit. Touché!

We all had a good laugh over this one.

Back to Perl

After using PHP for a few days, I’ve decided to dump it and go back to Perl. Quite honestly I’m flabbergasted that so many fine open-source packages have been built using PHP.

Yes, you can do nearly anything you need to using PHP. But just because I could write an entire web-server in assembly language doesn’t mean I should. PHP is fine for whipping up simple and quick dynamic web pages, but it’s not something I would choose for doing a major project. On the other hand, Perl is even better for whipping up simple and quick dynamic web pages and it’s something I would choose for doing a major project.

As Randal Schwartz put it, PHP is like "training wheels without the bike."

Bozo Brain

After we managed to get 2 kiosks up and running on our wireless network in our rented facility, I tried to get my Ubuntu Linux laptop connected. Ubuntu has a real nice and simple interface for networking so I typed in my WEP key (don’t send me emails about the hazards of WEP. I know) and just couldn’t manage to connect.

I spent most of the morning Sunday between services twiddling configuration files and trying all kinds of contortions to get it to work. Someone may a snide remark about how much trouble I was having with my "obscure" version of Linux. I was beginning to think they might be right.

So Wednesday night (i.e. I’m typing this from our facility) I went in to set up 2 more kiosks and after I was done decided I’d try one more time with the laptop. Let me just say that I’ve learned my lesson for the umpteenth time. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS double triple quadruple check your WEP key. It turns out I was typing it in wrong.

Arrggghhhh!

PHP

I’ve started developing a toolkit for using Fellowship One Data Exchange.

My initial thought was that I would use Perl (since that’s almost as good as English for me). But I decided to try PHP, since that is what our content management system (Mambo) is written in. Using PHP should make it easier to integrate into our site if necessary in the future.

I must say, I’ve used PHP before, but had forgotten why I went back to Perl. I’ll probably continue on with PHP for this project, but I have a growing list of complaints.

• Included or required files don’t have their own scope or accept arguments. Can we say "globals are bad?"
• Included or required files dump straight to the output stream and can’t be captured into a string without jumping through hoops.
• There are no closures.
• The argument stack is not available for use. In Perl it’s @_ and can be passed on in subsequent function calls. I had to use the klutzy func_get_args().
• Using regular expressions is more complicated and the regular expression engine isn’t as complete as Perl’s.
• Most everything seems just a bit less convenient than the corresponding Perl feature – though still a far cry from the inconvenience of Java.