Kirk Thoughts

Wow, it’s been a millennium in blogging terms since I last posted here. That’s not to say I haven’t been blogging. I’ve just found my interests have been elsewhere.

I’ve been working on a few initiatives, now that family life is a little less demanding. Now that the twins have passed the one year mark, we’ve managed to catch our breath a little more often.

Blogging on parish life after losing pastor

In April, a few days before Palm Sunday, my pastor was granted leave by the bishop. My response to this shocker was to set up a blog to try and keep people informed as to what is going on and also to spark conversation. I see blogging as a voice for the people in the pews, who sadly often don’t have much say or influence over the affairs of their own parish. So far, the responses have been mostly positive, it’s affecting what happens in the parish in a good way (I think) but most people are afraid to post comments. I’m hopeful that fear will fade over time.

Building local sustainable living network

One of my passions is the environment and sustainable living. My inner fabric pushes me to make healthy, positive choices in all that I say and do, choices that benefit me, those around me and creation. Here in the Sault, the envrionmental movement is small and not welll connected, especially for individuals. I want to help build a network that can support and encourage people, business and local government to make sustainable choices. I’ve started a local mailing list called Rocks and Trees (lots of that around here) to connect people, and we get together on a monthly basis for good eats and conversation. Each month more people are signing up, which is encouraging. On Earth Day I launched a blog at greenmeans.ca. It’s a pitiful start to a bigger project I’ve wanted to do for a while, but hey, it’s a start.

Organizing the home-based remote worker scene

Working from home is great, but I do miss the personal interactions from an office environment. In January I started yet another mailing list for people working from home, in particular people working remotely for an employer. We also do the monthly lunch thing as we’re all happy to escape from our tower or dungeon every once in a while. There has even been some talk of sharing some office space for a social working experience every now and again. I think it will happen eventually.

So there you have it. I do need to get back to this blog, and there are plenty of blog posts waiting to emerge. I’ll have to set aside some work time I guess.

Is your church looking for an effective way to draw more people? In my parish, our pastor regularly encourages people to share their personal faith story, to tell people how being a Christian makes a difference in their lives. We Christians can be a shy bunch when it comes to opening up.

The River Church in Manhattan takes that personal approach and applies it to the web through their outreach site askseekclick.com. Apparently their approach is getting a lot of people to come out to a dinner and find out more about God.

Check out the full report at BlogMinistry.

Technorati Tags: church, outreach, personal, testimony, web

Having trouble getting new people coming to your church? Maybe your church isn’t so easy to find or as welcoming as it ought to be. Catholic churches don’t tend to think a lot about marketing and how to make themselves newcomer-friendly. Here are 10 Ways To Keep Me From Discovering Your Church. How many is your church guilty of?

Technorati Tags: evangelism, outreach

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

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

On Friday of last week, I got Fr. Tony’s podcast up on iTunes. The process is fairly straightforward. There is a large icon on the main podcast page in iTunes for adding your own podcast. You then have to type in the url of the podcast feed. The url is then grabbed and all the associated info (title, image, description, url) is displayed for you to verify. If there is anything wrong, it has to be fixed in the originating feed.
We’re using SermonCloud to host the homilies and it has some built-in iTunes support which is now much better after I reported a few glitches. Justin, the one guy who seems to be doing all the support is pretty quick to patch anything up.
You do need your own iTunes account and a credit card, even though you’ll never be billed for your podcast. I wish Apple didn’t treat podcasters the same as consumers who purchase music / games / videos / TV Shows through their site.
That aside, it’s pretty cool to see the podcast up there. There aren’t many other Catholic podcasts on iTunes yet, and I honestly think that Tony has the best homilies out of the handful of offerings, not to mention the best mug shot of them all. Go have a look at Tony’s podcast under the iTunes bright lights. Oh, and I should mention Fr. Tony is calling his podcast “This Foreign Land.” I’ll have him explain the meaning in a guest post.

Technorati Tags: podcast, homily, sermon

Just came across a Catholic Register article on how Catholics are using the internet in creative ways. Of note is how the Internet breaks down barriers and enables dioceses and parishes to utilize programs offered in other diocese, including marriage prep and RCIA.
I remember how valuable going to an Engaged Encounter weekend was for Rowena and I, and would still recommend that approach over something through the Internet, but not everyone has access to a quality program like EE. Combining some online activities and resource links with EE would be even better.
Read on: Cyber Faith: Catholics Use the Internet to Meet, Mingle and Meditate

Technorati Tags: Catholic, faith

The next step is to create an iTunes subscription, and to start getting the word out. This is an exciting development, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more priests climb on board. There are some gifted homilists in our diocese, including Fr. George LaPierre at my parish, St. Gerard-Majella. It seems every week someone is asking him for a copy of his homily (which he doesn’t have because they aren’t written) or wishing so-and-so had been at mass to hear him preach. Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: homily, podcast, deoweb, sermon

Google is now packaging together 4 of their services in a connected bundle for organizations:

• Gmail for email
• Gtalk for instant messaging
• Google Calendar for managing schedules and events
• Google Page creator for web pages

My first thoughts after reading this is that churches and dioceses can benefit well just by switching to Gmail, and ignoring the rest for now. Consider that:

• You get an email account that has solid spam protection
• Access email from anywhere
• Power of Google’s search for your email
• For those that want to still use a desktop email client, that is possible also. You still benefit from the spam protection as well.
• Ditch your own mail server if you have one and save on time and $$$
• Very easy to adminster email accounts
• It’s free!

More info at https://www.google.com/a/

Technorati Tags: Google Apps, email