I don’t want this to come across as an “I’m just putting something on my blog because ohmygod I haven’t posted in ages!” kind of effort (even if at some level it may be), so here are a couple quick updates. In particular I’ll try to highlight some of the things I’ve posted about “recently.”

• My parents are doing quite well after their house fire last year. I just received word from them today that their construction loan has finally gone through. They are rebuilding on the same piece of land their old house was on, but starting literally from the ground up. They hope to start digging footers for the new construction next week (mid-May) and to be in the house by fall.

• The new Honda Insight has launched, to pretty good reviews I might add, but I’m still not convinced. It is about 4/5 of a Prius at a lower price, both size and mileage-wise. While the $20k price is attractive, I still have significant reservations about the overall environmental impact of all those hybrids’ batteries, even if they do use less fuel.
• I survived my first time through all the major seasons of the church (especially Christmas and Easter) and have emerged unscathed as I prepare to celebrate my 1 year anniversary of being a pastor on June 15th. It’s incredibly hard to believe it’s been almost 11 months, though I guess if you judge by the continually decreasing frequency of my blog posts, it’s not all that surprising.
• Part of the blame for my lack of blogging should also go straight to Facebook and Twitter. The more I seem to get sucked into these social-media oriented sites, the less I create original content for my blog. I do intend to remedy that though …

Rather than inundate you with more semi-interesting updates, I’ll leave you with news about this blog:

No, I am not abandoning it. Yes, I am actively planning new content!

• A review of my recent “road test” of a 2009 Nissan Versa. I’ve had my eye on the Versa as a possible next car for a while now, so you might be interested in my impressions after spending 350 miles with one.
• Some tech updates on “recent” purchases – Lenovo S10 netbook, Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera, and several others.
• Some insight into bicycle commuting – continuing the irony that this gearhead car-blogger often doesn’t even drive a car unless I can’t avoid it!
• A revew of Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence – a wonderful, insightful (and relatively short) book about “how Christianity is changing and why.”
• A semi-regular feature for posting recipes, particularly for the soups and breads I make every Monday night as part of the dinner and conversation group I host.

So, there you go … proof that <montypythonvoice> I’m not dead yet! I’m getting better! </montypythonvoice> Stay tuned for new content coming soon, and feel free to leave your suggestions for interesting posts in the comments section!

This past Sunday after worship, the Richmond Church of the Brethren (CoB) celebrated the launch of its new website! This site has been months in the making, as it was in progress for quite some time before I became pastor in June.  You can check out the site to see all its exciting bells and whistles, including online calendars, a “conversations” blog, and online newsletter distribution. Since I did quite a bit of work getting the site finalized and ready for launch, I’ll talk about some of the more technical details of the site in the rest of this post.

The new site was set up and is hosted by Summersault database driven websites. There are several connections between Summersault and Richmond CoB, so they were a very logical choice. Summersault set up our server space, configured Drupal, an open-source content management system, and set up our preferred theme with some graphic-design tweaks. From that point the site was delivered to us to do any final design tweaks and to create the content.

(Working on getting this new site ready to launch has been another one of the reasons new content has been so sparse on my blog lately. Of course, buying a house may have something to do with my recent busyness as well.)

Calendar Setup

While Drupal has quite a bit of built-in event scheduling and calendaring functionality, both myself and the church’s office manager are committed Google Calendar junkies. While Drupal plays relatively nice with GCal, it isn’t quite as easy to use for recurring events, rescheduling things, and interfacing with other services and devices.

In the end we decided to use a combination of Drupal’s built in calendar and Google Calendar. Special events are scheduled using the Drupal site, while recurring events and more mundane things like when the church office is open, etc. are scheduled via GCal. Since Drupal exports an actively updated .ics file that GCal can subscribe to, I was able to set up a calendar display page that uses an embedded Google Calendar to display both sets of events at the same time. It sounds somewhat cumbersome, but at this point it’s the best compromise we were able to set up. For end users I think the experience will be relatively transparent.

CSS Tweaking

In addition to figuring out the finer details of how we were going to use the calendar, we also ran across several aspects of our chosen template that we wanted to tweak or change. Since a number of people in our community use Linux, I wanted to do what I could to make sure the site looked good on both Windows and Linux browsers. Since many Linux installs don’t include the same fonts as Windows, some aspects of the layout needed to be adjusted to make sure things lined up correctly when non-standard fonts were in use.

As I tweaked the CSS I also found myself banging my head against the wall a few times as I learned some of Drupal’s eccentricities. While Drupal is an amazingly configurable, adaptable, extensible piece of software, that sometimes results in complexity and a steep learning curve once you start to try and fiddle around “under the hood.” I made a few changes to the actual PHP and HTML code that makes up the template we’re using, but most of the changes I made were just in the CSS files.

What now?

Now that the site has officially been launched there will be some additional upkeep needed right from the start. We’re going to try and have an up-to-date list of upcoming worship themes and preachers on the “Worship” page, the calendar will need to be kept a bit more updated, and the Conversations blog will need attention if we really want it to be a place where conversation is taking place.

Because of Drupal’s expandable nature we have a number of options we may look into in the future for expanding the site. One popular possibility is to do some sort of sermon podcast, possibly with sermon texts available too. Another idea would be to have an area that those who help in various kinds of church leadership can use for collaborative planning and resource sharing.

Overall I’m excited about having the new site up and active. It will mean that my online attention will be stretched a little bit thinner with regards to blogging, now that I have 2 different sites vying for my writing attention. However I think that it may also be a generative experience, where I’ll be coming up with ideas that might not work just right for the church blog, but would be appropriate for this site. Only time will tell.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the new site! Let me know what you think, and if you’ve got any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

In the end I feel that the church is going to be a wonderful place for me to be the pastor, and will provide me with great opportunities to continue to learn and grow as a ministering person. Don’t expect any revealing posts about the congregation or my work there as a pastor, as I intend this to remain a site informed by my own interests and not those of the church. Likewise it should go without saying that anything that I may post here is not in any way meant to represent an endorsement by the church.

I begin my new position June 16th, and while there may be a higher than usual number of posts between now and then don’t be surprised if during the first couple weeks after I start there is a bit of a drop-off.

From Bits to Bites & Windshields to Worship!

I’ve put a great deal of time and effort into getting this blog up and going. I hope that it can be a source of information, insight, connection, and community. One of the advantages of ramping up slowly before going live is that I’m able to launch with quite a bit of content already posted, so feel free to poke around and get a feel for what this blog is all about. Check out the categories listings, peruse the archives, and maybe even leave a comment or get a subscription (or at least figure out what getting a subscription means!)

One of the things that makes blogs so great is the opportunity they provide for conversation. Therefore, I hope you’ll feel free to contribute your own thoughts, retorts, and suggestions in the comments sections you’ll find at the end of each post. The beauty of the internet is that it doesn’t have to be a one-way communication medium, so let’s make the most of it!

Now that you’re here, why don’t you go ahead and take your coat off, kick off your shoes, and hang out for a while? I think this gonna be a lot of fun …