Internet | Innovating Tomorrow

The ESV isn't just a friendly translation for webmaster and developers. Some of the best features are tech/life integration for your average everyday consumers. This goes well beyond the RSS and iCal integration I've previously written about. Let's take a look at a handful of ways anyone can use these features. Continue Reading »

The ESV translation of the Bible is the most Internet friendly, usable, and accessible English translation of the bible. I've previously written about their API, embrace of OpenSearch to add the Bible to your browsers search bar, and their use of RSS. In an effort to share the Bible as much as possible they provide more information than just these. Let's take a look at a few things to help webmasters integrate the ESV translation of the Bible into their websites. Continue Reading »

The Bible is the most popular (and possibly hated) book ever. It's popular enough that when the iTunes App store launched for the iphone and ipod touch a bible application was one of the most popular applications. There are more translations of the original text into English than any other book I've herd of or even imagined. So, it should come as no surprise that there are a couple ways to integrate the bible into a drupal installation. Continue Reading »

Opera, the company behind innovative computer and mobile web browser, is trying their hand at teaching. The Opera browser is know for it's strict adherence to web standards. It may be the browsers that holds the closest to web standards. Opera has released their Web Standards Curriculum. Continue Reading »

Drupal provides project owners with the ability to follow issues on their projects. Simply go to your My Projects page and you can see an overview of your projects and even grab a RSS feed of the latest issues. But, if you are just a project co-maintainer or a contributor who doesn't actually have access to a project there is no nice and easy place to follow the issues on that project. I used Yahoo Pipes to solve this problem because it outputs RSS, has quick add buttons for sites like My Yahoo and Netvibes, can be added to a page as a badge, and it provides JSON and PHP access. Continue Reading »

Does this number surprise you? Statistics like this are being reported by organizations like Cross Examined, Answers in Genesis, and many more. Some of you might think they walk away from the church after high school and are eventually coming back when they have families and get a little older, just like in previous generations. But, other statistics shine a little more light on this. In America there is a 720% increase in agnosticism and a 200% increase in atheism. Studying this population segment we can see that people aren't walking away from the organized church, they are walking away from a relationship with God and a belief in the God of the bible.

We can talk about why this is happening and what we can do about it but that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, let's focus on a communication medium that a majority of these kids are using (at least in places like America and Europe). The Internet. Measurements from Pew show an increase in Internet usage as you head towards younger generations. While, the numbers aren't reported for those under the age of 18, we can see that better than 90% of those in the age bracket just older than them are using the Internet.

Pew has studied teens and has found some trends that show that teenagers, age 12 to 17, are increasingly involved in social media. Over 35% of all teen girls in America blog and over 54% of girls connected post photos online. The study goes on to point out that over 64% of online teens are involved in publishing something online.

The state of youth in the church is that we have a large percentage of them walking away, we have a large percentage of them operating on the Internet, and we (the church at large) are doing a terrible job with our websites and content on the Internet. I wonder why we aren't trying to speak the vernacular of what is becoming a generation lost to the church in America.

In the most recent episode of the Geeks and God podcast Rob and I talked about a lack of photos online of Christians doing good stuff and having fun doing it. We know these good things are happening all over. What we noticed was a lack of photographic proof on the Internet.

In response we decided to start a Geeks and God group on flickr and encourage geeks to share their photos online and in the group. So, if your church is doing good stuff and people are having fun, too, share your photos online. If you like, join our group online and share those photos with us.

The photo pictured here is Rob (right) and myself (left) during one of our Geeks and God recording sessions.

Content Management Systems are always being evaluated. Sometimes it's an organization looking for the next system to host their website. Sometimes it's someone writing a review about a system. And, still other times it's the competition taking a peak at the products they are up against. Let's take a look at some common areas we need to evaluate whether the system is open source or proprietary. Continue Reading »

New releases just came out for the drupal 6 versions of the jQuery Update and jQuery UI modules. These updates bring drupal up to speed with the current releases from the jQuery team.

Highlights of the new release of jQuery Update:

• Updated to 1.2.6 version of jQuery.
• Added ability to replace core scripts other than jQuery when they are affected by an update.
• Users can specify the compression level for jQuery between uncompressed, minified, and packed.

The 1.2.6 release of jQuery is the first to support jQuery UI 1.5 and sports a few changes along with bug fixes and performance enhancers. For example, event objects in Internet Explorer used to have the attributes offsetX and offsetY. These are no longer present in this release of jQuery. If you need to use them they can be calculated with the following code:

While this release brings core up to date it's always good to test contributed and custom modules to makes sure they work as well.

Highlights of the new release of jQuery UI:

• Works with the latest 1.5 release.
• Inherits the compression level set by jQuery Update.
• jquery_ui_add() can now accept either an array of ui scripts or a single one as a string.

This version of jQuery UI is really impressive when it comes to building complex javascript interfaces.

Over in the Geeks and God forums an interesting conversation has come up around the difference between open source content management for churches and closed proprietary systems. This conversation got interesting when Chadwick Meyer and Brad Hill, who are behind two of the proprietary systems, joined in on the conversation. With so many choices in the content management system market for churches and ministries this is a question many churches are going to ask. So, let's take a look at a few things that matter and make a difference. Continue Reading »