erikscottberg.com » tech

CstoneChurches.com

Erik — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:52:24 +0000

I just completed a major overhaul of our church’s website last night. Over a year and a half ago, Cornerstone began to expand through the planting and revitalization of new church campuses. Since that time, the Cornerstone Network has expanded to 6 campuses.

When this began, we changed our original domain, BethaltoChurch.com to CstoneChurches.com. Our desire was to communicate that we were expanding to include more than one location. The website tried to reflect this and had a “Locations” menu.

It worked to an extent, but it didn’t work well. There were at least three glaring problems with the site.

It was basically a Bethalto-specific site with a locations menu tacked on.
Because of the locations menu…Bethalto-specific ministry information was buried in a series of menus.
It was near useless for our other campuses. Each location had a “page” but there just wasn’t room for information about what made that location unique.

So we decided to overhaul it and come up with something more useful.

We decided to make CstoneChurches.com a landing page. It’s basically a “which campus do you want” page with a little information about the Cornerstone Network. I anticipate that we’ll have more information added in the future, but for now, it works.

Then, each of our six campus will have their own websites.

Two of our campuses have their own websites already (Life Community and Simplicity). The landing page points to those external pages.
Two are still in the process of being developed, so I linked to their Facebook pages for now (Deaf Church and Godfrey).
Calhoun has received a brand new site and Bethalto’s site went through a complete redesign.

The last two websites (Calhoun and Bethalto) are located relative to the landing page. For instance, Bethalto’s site is CstoneChurches.com/Bethalto and Calhoun’s site is at CstoneChurches.com/Calhoun. Godfrey’s and Deaf Church’s will use the same convention as well.

Anyway, I’m pumped about the updates. I’m using a beautiful, responsive template from JoomlaBamboo.

Take a minute to check the sites out. I’d love your feedback about what works and what doesn’t.

where’s your footnote?

Google 2010 Year in Review

Erik — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:21:56 +0000

Well, it’s the time of year for “year in review” videos. I came across one from Google today that was excellent and I thought I’d go ahead and post it here. It starts a bit slow, but it’s worth the whole 3 minutes.

Image Optimizer

Erik — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:26:49 +0000

In the last month, I’ve found myself doing an increased amount of work that involves uploading images online. Part of my workflow has been ImageOptim.

Drop an image and it automatically crunches it down and optimizes it for you. Usually you can hit the “Again” button another time or two to further results.

If you add any images online. Run it through this first.

ImageOptim is free for Mac OS X. Download it here.

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Christmas Ringtones

Erik — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:22:47 +0000

In order to spread some Christmas cheer, I decided to make some ringtones for the faithful few who still follow my blog. Unlike last time, I’ve included mp3 versions, so my friends without iPhones aren’t left out.

My hope is to make some more throughout the season, so if you have any requests, just let me know in the comments.

1) The First Noel (Phil Wickham) – iPhone | mp3

You can buy Phil Wickham’s Christmas album on his website at philwickham.com. The album has quickly become one of my favorites. It’s traditional, yet he adds just enough to keep these songs fresh. Buy it for someone. Add it to your Christmas list. Just get this album.

2) It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Andy Williams) – iPhone | mp3

This is one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. You can buy the song itself or the whole albumon Amazon

3) Wizards in Winter (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) – iPhone | mp3

I added this one…well I’m not sure why. It became famous a few years ago in a video where the song was synced to some Christmas lights on a house. You can buy the song or the whole album on Amazon.

______

iPhone users, download the .m4r file and drag it into “Ringtones” in iTunes. Then attach your iPhone, check your sync settings and then sync.

Grab these while you can. I probably won’t be leaving them up for very long.

Merry Christmas!

Parker Fighter 2

Erik — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:30:55 +0000

Yesterday I convinced Parker that we needed to make a movie. He was not thrilled about it. Probably because he really didn’t know what he was getting into. After some arm twisting, I got him to agree.

In my garage, I have a coin-op arcade version of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. I spent hours on this machine, working on combos and special moves. I love this game.

Fortunately, Parker and Kent have picked up an appreciation for it (though they haven’t quite figured out how to do the special moves yet). Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make a SF2 movie. Since Kent expressed ZERO interested in dad’s crazy idea, I decided to just use Parker.

The following video is the result of a few quick takes and a couple of hours of editing. It’s VERY rough (bad green screen, line down the middle, etc.), but I want my boys to catch a glimpse of the potential of what we can do. I want them to explore their creative sides and expose them to the creative process in general (from concept to completion). The idea is that I’ll add more elements in the future (character select screen, life bars, timer, etc.) if they want to continue with it.

Anyway, here’s our first take: Parker Fighter 2 (Round 1)

(By the way, the image attached to this post is a super-rad abstract display of the characters in the game.)

automator

Erik — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:17:21 +0000

I love Automator.

It’s a powerful program that comes bundled with OS X that allows you to automate tasks and actions on your mac. I’ve just started playing around with it, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool that can enhance your workflow.

For instance, every Friday I need to send out an email to our staff to remind them to get me their agenda items for our next staff meeting. I used to just try to remind myself each week…and that didn’t really work out. So then I went to the next step. I created an iCal alarm for 10am each day. This was effective, but I still had to respond to the alarm. I had to open Mail.app, create a message, choose the recipients, type my message and then send it.

Not hard, but a bit tedious.

So I created an Automator action that would accomplish this whole task for me on it’s own.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Open Automator.
2. Create a new “iCal Alarm”

3. Select “Mail” in the left column to only show Mail.app specific actions. Then drag “New Mail Message” onto the window on the right.

4. Enter the information for the email recipients, subject and message. You can also select which email account you want to send the message from (if you have multiple accounts).

5. Now select “Send Outgoing Messages” and drag it beneath the “New Mail Message” action.

6. Save the Automator file.

7. iCal will open. Set the parameters of the iCal event. (I created a separate iCal Calendar named “Automator” for all of my Automator events). Notice that the alarm isn’t a noise. Instead the alarm is to open the Automator file. Make sure to set the “repeat” setting in the iCal if you want this to be a reoccurring event.

If you’ve done this properly, Automator will create your email and send it off for you at the time you specify and at the repeat value you set (i.e. every Friday at 10am).

This is just scratching the surface of what Automator can do. I’ve automated several different tasks on my mac (like backing up folders to my Dropbox account).

If you’d like to explore it a bit further and get an idea of Services (new to Snow Leopard), check out this video with Sal Saghoian from PixelCorps.tv.

Google Quick Search Box

Erik — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:52:52 +0000

I’ve been using Google’s Quick Search Box on my macbook for a couple of months now and thought I’d give it a quick review and recommendation.

You can start the search box like any other mac application, but since it runs in your menu bar you can press the Command key twice to call it up (quick and easy).

Once it’s up, you are presented with a box that allows you to search for just about anything including: web searches, documents on your computer and most importantly (for me) applications to launch.

I’ve used QSB to search to find a few items on my mac, but for me, the real power is the ability to quickly launch any application. In the screen shot below, I’ve started the search box and then typed the letter “F”. QSB auto-completes “Firefox” for me. All I need to do is press “Return” and Firefox instantly launches. There’s no need for me to even finish typing the word “Firefox” out.

I still keep many of my most used applications in the dock, but since using QSB, I’ve been using the dock less and less. It’s just faster than scrolling to the bottom of the screen and much faster than clicking through to the Applications folder.

This is just scratching the surface but I’ve had such great results with it just as an application launcher that I thought I’d give it a shout out here.

Anyway, you can download Google Quick Search Box here and try it for yourself.

8-bit invasion

Erik — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:58:31 +0000

I saw this today and instantly knew I had to post it here on the blog.

It makes me want to get my NES out and play some Contra or Ninja Gaiden.

Too bad it’s packed away in storage.

ninja

scottpress.com

Erik — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:35:14 +0000

This past summer, I set up a website for a friend’s church plant in Chicago. In the process of doing this, I realized that there were probably a lot of churches who could benefit from an updated (and affordable) web presence.

For instance, our church has been utilizing a professional CMS (Content Management System) for our website for the past several months. The company we used charged high monthly fees and a hefty setup cost. The CMS is used for Doug’s site is called Joomla!. It’s an Open Source community developed platform that is free for anyone to use. Tomorrow I’ll be transferring our new church website, built on Joomla!, over to www.thestonechurch.org. (In the meantime, you can catch a sneak peak at www.stonechurch.info.)

I began working Content Management Systems in 2004 with the Open Source project, Mambo. Shortly after this, the development of Mambo split and Joomla! was created. In January of 2006, I began developing a site for the youth ministry of Stone Church using Joomla!. Since that time, I’ve set up several Joomla! sites and branched out to using WordPress in 2008.

This is one of those things that I’ve recently discovered that I truly enjoy. And probably, my desire in this is really to help churches. There’s just no reason that churches should have to pay enormous amounts of money in order to have a decent looking website.

Anyway, do me a favor. Check out the site (scottpress.com). And tell a friend.

links

Erik — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:50:55 +0000

I made some updates to the blog today. I created a page of links to friends and family who have blogs. At some point, I’ll get around to making it look nicer, but for now it’s at least functional.

If I missed your blog or someone else’s blog that should be on the list, let me know.

Everyday I tell myself that I need to get back to blogging on a daily basis again, but I’m just going through a season where I don’t have much time or content to post here. Instead of rambling about nothing, I figure I’ll save the posts for when I’m more inspired and have something more substantive to say.

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