Kirk Thoughts

Another article about how churches are adopting online communications: blogs, podcasts, chat rooms.
You never know what forms of online communication might work, but the key is to get out there, try and experiment. Given the cost of these tools are so low now, and so many people are on the web, churches can’t afford to miss out.
Just ask the Rev. Rick Chandler of New Light Methodist Church whose web site gets 10,000 downloads a month of their audio sermons. Guess who took the plunge and made it happen? His wife.
Perhaps we need a new twist on the WWJD - What Would Jesus Do? movement. WWJB - What Would Jesus Blog?
Churches spread Word on Web

Technorati Tags: outreach

It’s been a little while since my last post. I’ve got a good excuse, though. On Nov. 13, my wife gave birth to twin boys, David and Graham. Our two year-old daughter Malia and big sister is thrilled as well.

So, I do plan to continue writing to this blog, but at a slower pace. There is lots I’d like to write about, and not just about cute babies.

Technorati Tags: twins

I just installed the latest Firefox browser, having heard that it is a lot faster than the older 1.5. I had pretty much abandoned 1.5 on my Mac because it ate up all my memory and chugged so much I saw the busy spinning wheel more often than not.
With 2.0, I have to say: wow. It’s faster than Safari and Flock (a browser based on Firefox), and the new inline spell checking is a fantastic feature. We get requests from some people using DeoWeb for a spell checker so I’ve recommended the Google toolbar up to now, but inline checking takes the cake. Now there’s no excuse for those embarrassing typos when posting online.
There is also phishing protection and a bunch of other goodies.

Haven’t tried Firefox? Get it now - it’s more secure than Internet Explorer and has tons of great extensions to plug in.

Last week my wife, who is 8 months pregnant with twins, had to go to the hospital. Seems the little ones (we don’t know if they are girls, boys or one of each, although we have an idea) were getting ready to come early. That is often the case with twins, but 4.5 weeks early is not a good thing, especially when twin babies are smaller to begin with.
Fortunately, bed rest is doing mom and the babes some good. Perhaps mom has been a little too active trying to get our house (recently moved into) ready. This means she can’t do much from now until the babies come, which hopefully won’t be for a few more weeks.
The challenge is I still have to work, and we have a two year-old daughter. Grandparents and friends are helpful, but they can’t fill in all the gaps.
Then an idea came to me - why not invite some retired folks from our church to help out? Many of them have grandkids who live far away. Spending time with Malia could help fill that gap. Seems like a natural solution, one that benefits everyone and builds relationships in our parish family.
Trying to make that connection is hard! I’ve called a few people in our parish, and so far no luck. People are either busy or in poor health. Seems like there should be an easier way to match up people with needs with those who can help.
That’s where our web site could play a bigger role. I’d like to develop a system where people could list the kinds of tasks they enjoy doing, the resources they can share, so it would be easier to find those people. A modified classifieds system. This could become another one of those social apps, even, where people post comments, have photos of themselves, rank people for their service (for credibility purposes, a tad controversial tho).
Just some of the thoughts going through my head. The web is all about connecting people. Maybe I’ll try posting something in the parish forum, and put a link to it in the bulletin and see what happens. This could go nowhere, or be the start of something cool.

Technorati Tags: community, twins

Churches and other non-profits have important, critical data that should be backed up on a scheduled basis, stored at a reliable source off-site. I suspect, tho that most churches backup process is like this:

1. Backups happen sporadically
2. Not all important files are backed up
3. Backup files are stored on the same computer as the original, or on a disk or something semi-reliable.
4. Backup files are kept in the office.

Apple’s statistics show that only 4% of Mac users have an automatic backup strategy. I doubt churches are any better.
To be fair, my own backup strategy is full of holes. I’ve tried setting up an automated backup using rsync to copy changed files to an external hard drive, but that means turning on the external drive in time for the backup, and for some reason rsync seems to copy everything, not just the changed stuff so it takes forever.
If doing backups were as simple as typing out a Word document, more organizations would be doing it, including myself!
Amazon’s new Simple Storage Service (S3) offers a partial way there. S3 is an Internet “web service” that permits you to store unlimited data on their very robust, highly secure system. This is the system they use, as well as corporations like Microsoft. Rates, currently, are 15 cents per GB stored a month and 20 cents per GB transferred.
A church with 10GB of data that adds 0.5GB of new data per month would pay approximately less than $10 for the whole year of secure, off-site storage. That’s cheap. No other online storage service compares right now.
Still, that doesn’t solve the problem entirely of getting files backed up regularly. S3 provides the storage, not the tool to backup the data.
In another post I’ll list some tools that make it easy to backup with S3. I haven’t looked yet, so Google don’t let me down.

Technorati Tags: backup, amazon s3