WPtouch Theme {view site}
Great plugin that formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.

Custom Login Page {view site}
Allows for the admin login page to be customized to reflect the overall branding of the site. This speaks loudly when logging into the admin panel.

Google Analyticator {view site}
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics, a powerful tool that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way.

WP-Cumulus {view site}
Allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting for you visitor’s.

Sociable {view site}
Great way to automatically add links at the footer of your posts, pages and RSS feed that allows visitors to share on your favorite social networking sites.

When I saw these statistics it made me reflect on a church community web site that is going to launch this week. It left me wondering with the connectivity in social networking how are, and can church web sites reflect their true flavor. A flavor that is dynamic, true, raw, and real. A web site that has a balance of information for regular activities and the raw life it’s community is wrestling with that engages. Ultimately “raw life” plays out in the physical relationships with others.

• Do you agree or disagree that the church should engage more in social media?
• What would balance if information and “raw life” look like in a church web site?

In the last three months I have watched about 5 online church services, got glimpses of 3 live church leadership/communication conferences. One was all prerecorded by various leaders around the globe that had nine minutes to share what was on their hearts. It was powerful to see the variety of church leaders and the impact they are making in their respective communities.

I have appreciated the church leaders who have stepped outside their tech comfort zones to communicate in new ways. In addition to these conferences I would follow comments posted about the conference on Twitter. Even though I was unable to be present and missed some of the speakers, I was able to gather various quotes that stuck out to people as they tweeted during the conference. Gone is the day where you only have the option to be present o learn. You can learn and discern through comments and blogs by others. I am not saying that it is not worth while to attend conferences as that is the only way to truely connect with fellow believers, church communication or church leadership folks.

It is my hope and desire that church’s continue to make steps to reach out to people by utilizing technology.

Some tips from my experience to help in organizing digital photos and scanned photos so that you don’t have multiple DSC0120, IMG5612, etc…

{STEPS}

1. Create a NEW folder called YEAR. (i.e. “2009″)
2. Create a NEW folder called TEMP within YEAR (i.e. “2009″ > “TEMP”
3. Whenever you bring pictures off your camera, load them into your TEMP folder!
4. Go through and delete bad, close to duplicates, etc…
5. Using a program like Adobe Bridge, Google’s Picassa. Do a batch rename of all you files to the date created as YEARMONTHDATE (i.e. 20090609_001.jpg, 20090609_002.jpg or 20090609_robert heather in backyard.jpg, 20090609_grace abraham in the pool.jpg
6. Tag each of your photos with keywords (i.e. name, place, etc…) Keywords can be whatever you want. The key is to use words that will help you in being able to do a search for photos later using the keywords assigned to each of the photos.
7. Edit the photos as needed (i.e. crop, lighten, darken, etc…)
8. Now you can move these photos to the “YEAR” folder or subfolder (i.e. “2009 > “01-03_Jan_Mar”, “2009 > “04-06_Apr_Jun”, or however you want to name you subfolders.)

The overall key is to first place the photos in a general TEMP folder so that you know these photos have not been looked through. They need to be renamed, tagged with keywords, edited, etc… Once they are in the overarching YEAR folder, you know that these are the photos you wanted to keep and importantly to find quickly and view the photos you were looking for.

Please comment if you have questions or other digital photo organization tips to share.

This video was for my Digital Video Production exercise three. We had to storyboard and film an instructional video teaching something. Martha was gracious to help me in this project and she did wonderful!

Ingredients

• 1 pound of creme filled cookies
• 16 ounces of Bakers chocolate
• 8 ounces of softened cream cheese

One huge marketing and tool found on the web now is video. For the average non-profit or small business, it would be wise to partner with branded video players like, Vimeo than to spend time and resources on developing or purchasing a video player to play video content. A major reason to partner with them is because they have already worked out many of the plug and play bugs and functions. Even with purchased video media players the setup of, storage of, and rendering of the movie files would have to be managed and that often gets missed. Even when it comes to my anablepomedia flash site. Looking back on the amount of time that went into creating a flash video player, it took a lot of time. Personally I plowed through trying to learn how to create custom video players through flash so that I could evaluate it and for a school project.

A major buzzword of the web is social networks! There are companies that provide a closed “social network” to ensure privacy and create a “close network”. Why go through the trouble of creating a individual social network when there are tools like facebook that already have a large network of people. The great thing about facebook is that you can promote networking of people inside & outside of your own organization/company. You can create a group (private or public) to represent your organization and network within that group. Events for that group can be created, the group page can be used as bulletin board postings, etc…

Just about every organization large or small has a calendar. There are many services that provide online calendars for a monthly or yearly fee. Google has a calendar that is free and can be applied to many various web applications. It also allows multiple users to administrate the calendar’s events. Calendar’s can be public to everyone or be private for a select group/organization.

The key with any white-label technology is to find out what it offer’s, any limitation’s, etc… As with anything there are pluses and minuses. Then it’s a matter of creating and utilizing the tools for the best interests and marketability of your organization/company. For the majority of non-profits and small businesses to create their own brand of video players or social networks will not result in the best bang for the buck. There are however circumstances when it would be best to branch from facebook into a low cost alternative social networking like Ning. One must consider the trade off of losing the existing community found through YouTube, Vimeo, facebook to creating one’s own brand.