gdp's Comments

The Blazing Center : Does Using Apple Products Make You A Better Christian?

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:02:36 +0000

I, for the most part, stick to the more expensive PC's and use only well tested software and proven software. The more expensive PC's are about the same price as the Apples and sometimes cheaper. I have few to no reboots and a very fast PC with Logos 4, Bibleworks 8 , Nota Bene for research writing and information management. If I was to try this on a Mac, I would have to run a PC emulator, which introduces it's own set of problems.What's the point of that?

Becoming A Writer Seriously : MacCompanion's Special Issues For Writers

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:24:10 +0000

Have you had a chance to compare Nota Bene and Mellel yet? I've been using Nota Bene now for approximately a year. I've re-looked at Mellel and I'm also not impressed. I think Nota Bene is incredible and I wish it had more people supporting it. They are working on a version 10 of Nota Bene that will be the next major leap for the tool's technology. If you are interested in comparing, wait until Nota Bene 10 comes out sometime this year or next year.

ChurchCrunch : The Value of Facebook and Twitter Links for Page Rank and SEO

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:55:27 +0000

I use bit.ly to create links that I place on Facebook and Twitter. Then bit.ly tracks the popularity of the link. So whether someone clicks on it from Facebook or Twitter, I can see exactly how many people clicked on it. If Google ties into bit.ly links, then there's the missing link (no pun intended).

ChurchCrunch : Linear Comments Are Dead

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:19:40 +0000

The trade-offs are important. Loosing comments, being unable to get them back. Sometimes the most valuable thing about the post is the comments. I would prefer if an add-on was created for my CMS (Expression Engine), that could handle threaded comments. At the moment, I don't get much comments on my site, so it doesn't matter. Software wise, threaded comments aren't really "threaded" in a software sense. They are just hierarchical with a parent comment containing children comments. I would suspect this could be fairly easy to implement. My understanding was that Disqus and ID had the added "social" dimension of being able to view a persons comments on various blogs. Has anyone found THAT to be useful. If that's not useful, then forget ID and Disqus, someone just needs to develop a threaded comment add-on for Wordpress, Expression Engine, etc.

The Gimcrack Miscellany : Why I Don't Have AT&T UVerse (Yet)

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:55:03 +0000

I'm in San Jose and one evening experienced a download of 500 Mbytes in what seemed like 5-10 seconds. I thought is was an error so I checked the file size again and confirmed it. I looked at my neighbors new U-Verse. I think the video quality is not as good. Jaggies, over sharpened, and compression so that motion looked a little riddled with artifacts. They say you have to use their wireless router too. I have a very good wireless N dual band. Theirs is single band G. I think I'll stick with Comcast for now.

ChurchCrunch : Post.ly (The New Face of Posterous?)

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:41:46 +0000

I've been using bit.ly and like the addition of the statistics reporting. Their bookmarklet is very straightforward and can post to Facebook and Twitter. If I combined the two, I would get a bit.ly link from the bookmarklet, copy it into an email and send to posterous@posterous.com. I'll have to try that out.

The Gimcrack Miscellany : Why I Don't Have AT&T UVerse (Yet)

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:11:24 +0000

We would have two T.V.'s at the moment. Really, we just have one, but have been contemplating another for the children to watch while we watch something else. Currently, in order to get a better price, I have to call up Comcast, telling them that I'm contemplating cutting services because the cost is too high. So the AT&T U-Verse looked like a better deal to get the same channels. Perhaps I need to do the math again.

The Gimcrack Miscellany : Why I Don't Have AT&T UVerse (Yet)

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:58:16 +0000

All this talk about AT&T U-Verse and Fiber, in comparison to Comcast and Coax had me wondering. They opened up U-Verse to our neighborhood recently and I'm trying to figure out if it will be better than my existing Comcast. My biggest concern is image and sound quality of HD content, and internet speed. It seems that Comcast has the edge when there's coax coming up to the house. They say cable shared bandwidth with other houses, but if my bandwidth is being shared, on a much more higher bandwidth connection; let's say there's a 1 GBit coax coming from the curb to my house, but the shared connection with the other houses is a 100 GBit conneciton, then it's perhaps not such an issue. But I realize its not possible to split a 100Gbit connection into 1 - 1 Gbit connection without a router. Hmm, just trying to think through this.

The Gimcrack Miscellany : Why I Don't Have AT&T UVerse (Yet)

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:39:21 +0000

So Comcast doesn't have fiber in their networks?

ChurchCrunch : Is Your Ministry Trying to Catch Up or Just Copy?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:29:05 +0000

The message of the gospel is already unique. The church just needs to focus on making the website usable, and filling it with content that ministers to the hearts of the people under their care. Focus on truth, and teaching the truth and tailor the website to make those goals possible for the web; which for me includes being able to communicate the truth easily from our website to feed readers, social websites, etc. I created our church website in a little over a month with very little background experience. It's not the greatest looking site, but it has the functionality our little church plant needs and it's ministering in a way that's appropriate for us. www.veritascc.org

ChurchCrunch : Church Online IRL

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:22:19 +0000

It would appear from the video that the lesson is to turn off chat; but then again, that's just a video stream if there's no chat. The next obvious solution would be to have moderated questions instead of full blown chat.

ChurchCrunch : Church Online IRL

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:19:43 +0000

ChurchCrunch : What Would a Techno-Savvy Church Startup Look Like? Perhaps It's Got Some Soul...

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 00:01:49 +0000

I was checking out their 7 is greater than one clip. Man that's such an awesome fun little video with such a good vision for 7 days of the week. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHYj8QA-jas&fe...

ChurchCrunch : Get Your Church Online: Launching Into Cyberspace - Part 2

Wed, 2 Dec 2009 23:40:21 +0000

I used the 960 grid system on our http://www.veritascc.org website. I was concerned about how it would look on mobile, but it breaks up into columns and looks really nice when viewed in column view. My friend has a Blackberry with a column view mode and it all lined up real nice (even the css navigation broke down perfectly). It took me a while to get used to the 960 gs, but now I think I'll stick with it after getting comfortable with it, and especially after seeing how it looks flawless on all the browsers, including mobile phones.

ChurchCrunch : Get Your Church Online: Launching Into Cyberspace - Part 1

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:04:36 +0000

I've been a big fan of Expression Engine. It's an awesome CMS that rocks dynamic content. Expression Engine does not fit the static definition of CMS that you explained. In general, CMS is supposed to be a "content management system". The whole reason for having content management is because you want to be able to dynamically change the content. So I don't quite understand where you got the idea that a CMS is for static content. Expression Engine can easily support Blog creation and more. I just launched a new version of a church plant website on Expression Engine (www.veritascc.org). It's still in a growing stage, so there's still some work to do in polishing it up. But here's the basics of what I created in a few weeks on Expression Engine. - Blog - Information Pages (can dynamically add more) - Sermon - Forums - Facebook Share buttons everywhere, including in the forums. - Vimeo integration for Video - Fonts served from Typekit - Extra Audio storage hosted by Amazon S3 - Disqus Commenting System - Automatic Twitter updates from the EE Control Panel Publishing. - Front page can grab content from anywhere on the site and display it up front. - Member accounts that are fully configurable to allow various levels of access to the site. I still need to implement things like search, RSS and a few other items. EE2.0 is coming out soon and will have more exiting new features. Another incredible thing is the add-on developing community. They have tons of interesting add-ons that you can see over at http://devot-ee.com/

ChurchCrunch : Perry Noble: Don't Fight the Bloggers!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:23:39 +0000

I respect that he recognizes the importance of focusing on the Gospel; yet at the same time I think it's perhaps a little foolish to not listen to critics as a rule, and I don't think that's what he means; but to be clear, leaders particularly need to be teachable and if the rebuke is a biblical rebuke, made in love, with genuine concern for matters pertaining to holiness, godliness, and truth, then it's important for leaders to hear. I found it interesting that he stops and asks God to do things and finds that God doesn't let him do it. I personally wouldn't put too much trust in my own perceived notions to hear, at any given moment, what the Spirit is saying because sometimes we can be deceived into leading ourselves rather than the Spirit leading us. Did God say it was okay to tell the entire congregation that, in his heart, he would rather have said some things that God would not approve of, and so he only conformed his outward behavior to godliness while the inside was wanting something different? The whole congregation seemed to enjoy that sinful disposition of his heart as entertaining. Overall, he's a little confusing to me, but again, this little video blip is all I've seen of him so I certainly can't claim to know him. Again, I certainly appreciate he wants to focus on the Gospel. That's good.

ChurchCrunch : Get Your Church Online: Where Do I Put My Stuff?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:35:39 +0000

No problem. They have EE2.0 coming out in Dec 1st. The whole thing has been redesigned and built on the CodeIgniter framework. This will ease add-on development for EE2.0. I've got some add-on ideas for churches that I plan to develop. :)

ChurchCrunch : Get Your Church Online: Where Do I Put My Stuff?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:58:48 +0000

I'm redesigning Veritas Community Church's website with Expression Engine (http://www.expressionengine.com) and hosting with EngineHosting (http://www.enginehosting.com). Expression engine is an awesome, extremely flexible CMS with a huge community of developers supporting it. Enginehosting is set-up to support dynamically driven sites and fine tunes their hosting for CMS's like Expression Engine and are known to be very reliable. I host my own site on them too. They don't provide tons of storage, but that's how they keep a reliable, fast service. So I plan to integrate Amazon S3 for storage and Vimeo for Video.