Blogs I Read

In response to Dave’s blog entry, I decided to detail some of the top blogs and RSS feeds that I read each day.

God Related:

Leadership:

Geek Stuff:

Several Friends & Family

with news about children, health battles, and life in general

General News:

Do you have any blogs or RSS feeds that you recommend?

ChMS, SMS, and Maillists for Urgent Communications

I’m not sure if I stole this idea, but as winter weather is only months away, this seems like a good idea to pursue. Basically, how can we make use of SMS text messaging?

Mass SMS text messaging seems useful for last minute announcements. One thing that pops up every couple of years is the need to cancel a church event due to winter weather. It’d be cool to have an easy way to SMS everyone we have a cell phone number for with this sort of announcement.

SMS alerts shouldn’t be that hard. Here’s what I think we need to do:
1) We should be able to export all cell phone numbers from our ChMS system.
2) Then we can remove all characters from the cell phone data that isn’t numeric.
3) Append ‘@teleflip.com’ to each cell phone number to get an email address for each number. (Any other email to SMS gateway service could work instead of teleflip.com.)
4) Then load the list of SMS email addresses into a mailing list.

I already have some other mailing lists that I auto populate from our ChMS, so this should be relatively straight forward. This could be scripted to update the mailing list every week.

So, if an urgent church wide announcement needed to be communicated, someone could simply email the sms mailing list and most everyone should be notified in near real-time.

Does your church make any similar use of SMS for any communciation?

What kind of plans do you have in place for urgent communications like this?

Lyric Background Videos using Music Visualization and VJ Tools

I have a hard time coming up with good visual backgrounds to go along with song lyrics. It seems like it’s easy to find backgrounds that are either boring, irrelevant, or distracting.

For a couple of years I’ve been thinking there has to be some way to have dynamically created animations to use as song backgrounds. Several months ago I came across some Quartz Composer animations that were controlled via sound. But, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to use any of these animations in real time with our presentation software.

So, finally last week I decided I was going to experiment with using some sound triggered Quartz Composer animations for song backgrounds. After a few hours I finally setup a video camera to capture my Mac’s screen animation and feed the video into our presentation software via a live firewire feed. It was clunky and awkward to control, but it worked and looked nice. Unfortunately, I only really found one useful Quartz Composer animation to use, Soundstream. So, I’m not ready to put it into regular use, but I proved it was worth exploring some more.

So, has anyone else used any music visualization or VJ software to create song backgrounds? Any advice you can share?

Addicted to Google Reader

I started using Google Reader about 1 month ago to be a central spot for everything I read online. As a firm believer in RSS feeds for a couple of years, I’d explored Google Reader back when it first was introduced, but didn’t really find it all the useful or powerful.

But now that’s different. Google Reader has matured into a powerful RSS reader, while RSS and XML feeds have become much more prolific. After a bit more exploring this weekend, I’m finding that I don’t need to leave Google Reader to catch up on any of my online reading.

A Few RSS Reader Tips
So, besides subscribing to the normal blog and news feeds that most people are aware of, here are some additional things I’m doing with RSS feeds in Google Reader.

YouTube Videos – http://www.youtube.com/rssls

CraigsList

Weather – http://www.rssweather.com/

Bible Reading

Google News

Yahoo Pipes – http://pipes.yahoo.com/
I’m not using Pipes yet, but the idea of easily programming applications and feeds via this interface intrigues me. I want to keep my eye on this tool.

Anyone else have any RSS feed tips that help them with managing your daily flow of information?