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August, 2008

Choosing a Church

Submitted by Wyatt on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 16:49
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Sarah and I have been in the process of trying to find a new church. We currently attend Bethany Community Church, a wonderful church that is unfortunately located about an hour away in evening traffic. Over the past year or so we have felt more and more strongly that God has been calling us to move to a church closer to home, somewhere it is easier to invite friends and easier to engage on days besides Sunday. We have as of this week attended three different local churches. Each of these churches are assuredly home to numerous people that love God. As we have progressed through this process we have discovered a number of things about ourselves and perhaps about church in general.

First, Sarah and I thought we had a pretty clear vision of what we liked in a church service. I think we both wanted something a lot like Bethany. Now having attended a local Baptist, Lutheran and Community church we are very confused. The Baptist church and the community church from a church format were very similar to our home church, contemporary and non-liturgical. The Lutheran church, for obvious reasons was very different. While you might expect we would find the very liturgical service a turn off, quite the opposite was true. I found that I really enjoyed the liturgy and the next week when we attended the community church I found I missed that element. I think that if we stay at a non-liturgical church I will probably continue to miss it.

Second, Where have the churches from the middle ground gone? It seems like modern churches are divided into two groups, Huge and tiny. What happened to the church of 200 to 500 people? In our hunting we have found that, on the Eastside, the churchs are either in the 1000+ or the 150- size range. As parents of a burgeoning family, building relationships with other young families is very important to us. We want to be able to spend time with other folks who are walking through the same challenges as we are. Unfortunately, it would seem that all of the young parents are, perhaps like us, dismissing the small churches in favor of the gigantic churches in an effort to find other people in the same walk of life, as well as the Christian education associated with the other families children. So again I ask, What has happened to the church of a few hundred people, a church with enough bodies to provide peers for most walks of life, as well as the talented folks who educate and train up the next generation, but not so many that you get lost in the muddle?

Lastly, for now, I have discovered how very important it is to feel welcomed by a church. As a long standing member of my current church it was very easy to lose sight of the first time visitor or newcomer. Now, as a visitor, I have experienced several different churches of various sizes and all different levels of welcome. I have found the welcome the regulars offer is probably the single largest influence on my impression of a church. As a visitor I have also found that churches, in general, need to do a better job making themselves accessible. Here is just a little advise I think churches could take to help with this process. First, make an intentional effort at every service to have members of your church tasked with hunting down newcomers. This is easy and natural in small churches but is no less important, even though it is more difficult, at larger churches. Once the newcomer is found intentionally connect them with an individual of similar age or life stage, have that person show us around the church and introduce us to their friends. Have a great website. If it is not better than mine it probably needs work. Please give us a realistic idea about what to expect when attending your church. I can enjoy a variety of worship environments but there are certainly some I am more comfortable with, please try to help me avoid feeling awkward during your worship time, an order of worship would be completely reasonable and helpful. Lastly, clearly enunciate how your childrens ministry works, both on your website and at your church, with signs and personal help where feasibly.

So this is a brief look at our church hunting Journey. I still have not determined what is the correct way to actually choose a church outside of praying and asking God to reveal where he wants us.

Drupal: Modules

Submitted by Wyatt on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 09:59

Modules add functionality to Drupal. When speaking strictly Drupal is strictly the system the manages content and builds a visible webpage. All of the features of Drupal are modules. However, if you have installed Drupal and looked around the sitebuilding part of the administration menu you have surely come across the modules area. The basic install of Drupal includes a whole pile of modules but there are many many more available through, what are called, user contrib modules. The Drupal download includes the Core, which is Drupal, and a handful of other common modules including Blogs, Books, Forums, Polls, Search and a bunch of other things. I am not going to attempt to explain what all of the included modules do or how to use them but rather focus on a few really great contrib modules.  (Now as a Pre-emptive strike, I am not covering Views or CCK. I understand these are enormously powerful but I have not needed them on my site and as a result have not been motivated to learn the details of how they work. If someone can think of a good way for me to utilize them I will be happy to take recommendations.)

To install a new module to Drupal you will need FTP access to your site. It is easiest to find modules by searching for them by name on Google. You download the file, it will be a tar gz compressed file. Extract it (with a tool like 7zip). Then copy it to the sites/all/modules folder on your site. Once you have copied the files they will appear on the Administer -> Site Building -> Modules list. You can enable them by checking the box next to the associated module and saving the changes. Most modules have a setup element that will be added to your Administer -> Site Configuration menu.

I am going to start my modules list with a few modules to make Drupal easier to administer and then a few that add cool functionality.

Administration Menu - This is a cool basically plug and play module that adds a menu above the top content on your site that shows all of the adminstration functionality in pull down type menues. You control the visibility so that only administrator roles are able to see it. This is so cool and easy to use it is a must for anyone solo running a site. It is much easier to navigate then hunting through pages of menu screens everything is just available.

Devel - This is a slick little package of features that help with managing how your site looks. It adds little block editing links as well as a slew of other developer features. Devel also allows the owner of a site to populate it with a bunch of dummy users and generate a ton of artificial content to see how the site will look and feel once it is up and running. I do not use this near as much as I should but it works as a great companion to Firebug, the Mozilla web developers best friend. (Firebug is not part of Drupal it is an add on to the Mozilla Firefox browser. Everyone who does anything with CSS should have this feature in Mozilla.)

Poormanscron - For those users who do not have access to SSH from there web host Poormanscron is a great alternative to manually running cron every couple hours or days. Cron is a maintence tool used by CMS systems to run a number of tests on the system. Many of the test's results can be found under Administer -> Reports -> Status Report. Generally there is a SSH command that can be used to setup automated Cron operations. But, for those of us without SSH access Poormanscron does the job for us. You simply install the module and setup the minimum frequency for operation. Really huge sites (which should have SSH access) may take a performance hit from Poormanscron because it causes Cron to be triggered at the completion of page loads. This should not be a problem for smaller sites but should be considered for sites with lots of simultaneous users.

IMCE - IMCE is is file management tool that uses a scripted interface to let you find select and insert file content into your website. It has a great file browser and upload tool (you need to have the Core Upload module installed and enabled). IMCE integrates very tightly into FCKEditor to allow easy access to files while you are creating content on your site. This in my mind is a must have mate to FCKEditor.

FCKEditor - Many users of Drupal really like to use HTML to style their postings but there are a whole bunch of people who have no clue how to use HTML for anything more than Bold. FCKEditor is about as close as the current Drupal can come to having a WYSIWYG text editor. FCK is pretty easy to use out of the box and will add a slick little toolbar to the top of your text editing fields that has buttons to change fonts, bold, italics and add tables without having to add a bunch of HTML or CSS inline. In addition it also has a slick little linking tool as well as a great tool for adding images to your posts. In addition to functional changes FCK also changes your text editor field so that it shows what the finished stylized text will look like published. As noted above this tool integrates very well with the IMCE module to allow easy uploads and slick little file browser accessible through FCKeditor. There are several other WYSIWYG but my experience points me to FCK.

I am going to wrap this section of my article up and pick it up soon to explain how I did my photo gallery. I will say that before I had a Drupal site I was using Gallery2 to house a rather large image gallery. I have since integrated it into my drupal site using the gallery module as well as lightbox2. However, this was a rather tedious and complex task and I will devote a whole page to explaining what I did and what I learned.

Facebook

Submitted by Wyatt on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 07:18
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A while back I set up a Facebook account to see another page. (You have to have an account in order to see any real pages in Facebook). I thought nothing of it for another 6 months. Then, about a month ago, I got a friend request from a guy I knew in college. I went back on figured out who he was and added him to my friend list. Still I didn't do much with it. Then I got another two or three requests and when I went to check out my page it had recommended that I may know a bunch of other people. Lo and behold I did. Enter the magic of Facebook. Within 2 weeks I have 50 friends and probably 10 or 20 outstanding friend requests. Perhaps I need to take a step back.

Facebook is a (maybe the) social networking site. It is basically a really simple webpage you can use to keep track of a broad spread of people you know. You start by creating a page. Then you search for people. Once you have put in a few people Facebook begins to suggest that you may know. These suggestions are based on the relationships between your friends. The remarkable element of this whole thing is that it works.

So for the last week or two I have been diligently adding new friends. I have connected with old college and highschool friends and even got to chat with a friend that is currently on the other side of the planet. Sarah had been using my Facebook to poke around and look for her old friends and finally she broke down and created her own page last night. The really good news about Facebook is that you don't really have to spend much time with it. While it is kind of like a blog it is really only designed to be updated occasionally and only in very small entries, like a sentence or two.

I highly recommend checking it out. Facebook has made this massive appearance and has a really amazing breadth of users. I would be amazed if anyone could NOT find someone they knew. Give it a shot, if you are reading my blog you probably have a friend in me.

www.facebook.com

Wii!

Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/07/2008 - 14:18
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Well, I finally broke down and bought a Wii. It is great! I found it on Criagslist for $200 with some extras.

Last night it was about 90 degrees in our house and some friends brought dinner over for us. After dinner we headed downstairs where it is much cooler to play the Wii. I have discovered it is nearly as much fun watching people that have never tried a Wii play with one for the first time than it is to play with one yourself. Jeremy and Margaret, our friends, are a married couple and I could just see Margaret thinking "what a waste of my time". Ha Ha, by the end of the night she was already making plans to get one if they had extra money after Christmas.

It is really hilarious to watch people go from awkwardly waving about to understanding how the remote works then to violently stabbing at the air in an effort to knock out there spouse in Wii Boxing. By the end of the night the rec room was as hot as the upstairs and we were all sweating like pigs but we had a good time. In any case the whole evening was a hoot and we now have two more avid Wii fans. I guess I am going to have to go out and find a couple more sets of controllers.

My recommendation: Don't try a Wii if you don't want to get hooked. I did about as good as anyone. My brother bought his Thanksgiving the year they came out and I have waited a year and half. I say I was a pretty good holdout. We will see how Jeremy and Margaret do.

To Build a Bed

Submitted by Wyatt on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 11:45
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Over the next few months I am going to be building Sarah's Anniversary present. This is our 5 year, which, for all you gift givers out there, is the wood anniversary. I am going to be building a Mission style bed our of Western Maple. A few months ago I bought about 125 board feet of old growth wood from a local source. The guy uses a chainsaw to cut the logs into ~2" planks of varying width. Fortunately my father has a Mighty Mite type bandsaw sawmill. I was able to get the slabs to my dad and we milled almost all of the pieces up this last weekend. I will post a pictorial journey of building this bed hopefully it will be fun to watch and hopefully it will be good enough to show at the end.

W

Musing on Late Nights

Submitted by admin on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 11:38
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Sorry it has been a very long time since Sarah or I have posted so it is high time. A couple of notes:

The Website has been updated. There is now a Gallery tab rather than link. This tab integrates our old Gallery into the new and improved updated webpage. It is really slick and deserves to be checked out.

Luke is two and half months old. How time does fly. I will try to get some newish pictures of him up soon. Again check the gallery, there is some pretty recent stuff in there. Now on to the topic of the day.

Luke for the last few months has been up pretty late in the evenings. He has historically been going to sleep around 11 maybe 11:30. As you might expect at first this takes a toll and then you just start getting used to it. Well, Sarah and I have gotten used to it (although, I still think that she needs a nap most days, whether she gets it or not). So in an effort to pass this new found time we have been reading books together. We have started with The Chronicals of Narnia. We had both already recently seen the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe so we started with the Magicians Nephew, then read the Horse and His Boy. We are currently about 3/4 of the way through Prince Caspian (we will hopefully be able to get out and see the movie once we finish).

Now, this may sound like a wonderful relationship building thing to do together. It really is. But, it does have negative side effects. Last night, for instance, Luke went to sleep around 10:30 (he is in general going to sleep much earlier). However, do to some other stuff going on we didn't get to read until about that time. I ended up reading to Sarah until just about midnight. It is really ridiculous. You would think we would learn our lesson and take sleep whenever it is offered. Not so much.

Apparently we are just gluttons for punishment.

In any case, Prince Caspian is a great story from a master storyteller. I would encourage anyone to either pull out or borrow from the library the Narnia books. They are so much fun and perhaps you will find yourself so enthralled that you forget the time and immerse yourself in the story.

W