Innovating Tomorrow

After sharing 3 ways not to advertise or promote a ministry I wanted to talk about some ways to share ministries with others. After all, who am I to just go out and say what not to do without giving any suggestions what to do. Leaving it there would do little good. Let's dig into a couple different practical things we can do to share. To start we dive into what, quite possibly, will make the biggest difference in the way we present ourselves to the world. Continue Reading »

Everyone in ministry is looking for ways to spread the word about their ministry. Most of these churches and ministries have something great about them that brings something good to the world. But, when it comes to sharing what they have with the world around them what they share often looks and feels ugly. That great thing is somehow being presented in a way that makes people turn away in disgust. Let's take a look at a few ways this happens. Continue Reading »

Rotating banner images is a simple way to spice up most sites. It adds something shiny that can hook people in. If you use jQuery, like I often do, then a simple way to do the rotating banner images is using the jQuery cycle plugin. This plugin can even be used along with drupals views module to create dynamic lists of rotating images.

But, there are some downfalls with this approach. For example, if you create a list of images for the jQuery cycle plugin to rotate through you need to set all but one of them not to display with css. Even though most of the images are not initially displaying they are still downloaded in many browsers. If you have a bunch of images loading that have any size this has a potential to waste a lot of bandwidth if those images aren't viewed.

This was a problem that I ran into working on a few sites. Here's a solution I use that solves this problem while working well with Views, jQuery, and any content Views can create. Continue Reading »

Thanks to Pauls blog post I've learned about a new widget, called skribit, that I'm trying out on Innovating Tomorrow.

Skribit provides a platform for social suggestions, as they call them. The idea is simple. People can ask you questions or suggest blog topics through the widget and then others can vote for them. This can help bloggers know what their readers are burning for them to answer.

So, what questions do you have for Innovating Tomorrow to answer? What would you like me to blog about? Click on the widget title (on the right) and up will pop the question form.

Compassion International has teamed up with Search Kindly to raise money to help kids around the world. And, all we have to do to support this effort is change our search page to Search Kindlies page for the month of May.

The way it works is when you search using Search Kindly (powered by Google) all the ad revenue generated in May goes to Compassion International. You can find out more details on the Compassion blog.

I'll admit, using the Search Kindly search can be a little annoying and it's not quite as straight forward as using Google or Yahoo. But, to support a good cause it's worth a little extra annoyance for a few weeks.

The views module for drupal provides a powerful way to create queries of content and then present it in a number of different ways. One of the ways I've seen seldom used is views generating lists and variables for javascript and jQuery. Let's take a look at how we can accomplish this fairly easily. Continue Reading »

Today, May 1st, is the National Day of prayer in the United States. It's a day set aside for everyone to pray. So, what are you praying for? What are you praying for in the technological world?

My prayer is that God guide us to find more and better ways to use technology connect, guide, teach, and help people. I'd like to see more efforts like FreeRice.com and the fshbwl. I'm praying that God does even more of this for his good.

How about you? What are you praying for?

Creating dynamic websites that take advantage of AJAX, AHAH, and media with jQuery can lead to creations that aren't just functional but are fun with some eye candy. But, if your script is loading an image or other piece of media and it's jumpy rather than nicely fading in because your browser is loading the content your site quickly goes from cool to unprofessional. Thankfully, preloading content with jQuery is something that can be done fairly easily. Let's take a look at a couple ways to preload content. Continue Reading »

Have you noticed how many people want and expect something for free. To some extent I can understand this in the church. If you can get one thing for free you can use that few extra dollars you saved to do something else great for the kingdom. But, is anything really free? If so, where should we have that expectation? Continue Reading »

Do you spring clean your computers? I'm a believer that everything is heading towards chaos and my computers are evidence of this. Over a typical year I install a number of trial programs, I download incredible amounts of stuff, and I create audio, videos, programs, and websites. Much of this gets left where it's at until some time in the future where I clean it up. My desktop was so filled with stuff that Rob Feature recently made fun of me. So, it's time for spring cleaning. Here are a few tips for cleaning up our computers that can so quickly get cluttered: Continue Reading »