From the category archives:

tech

State of the Mosaic Blog

by Lon on November 25, 2009

I just wanted post a few thoughts on why we use this blog

Church is not exclusive to Sundays – While this is not a replacement for real physical daily encounters, this online portal allows for at least some level of interaction outside of our sunday gatherings.

In-depth – Especially for those of you longing to get more into the Scriptures, as we’ve been doing with the Book of Acts this past year, I’ll be posting verse-by-verse reflections through the Gospel of John this next year. This frees us from any time limitations we have in our regular teaching time and allows for deeper reflection.

More contributions – We are a community of many unique voices and anyone in our community is allowed to post to this blog. We believe that every voice matters no matter how divergent the opinions and we want to humbly listen and learn from one another. Comments are even allowed to be anonymous as I personally believe anonymous feedback (if necessary) is better than no feedback at all.

Unique content – Lots of thought provoking images, links, media and news can be channeled here for our community. Churches everywhere are building and releasing great content that a community like ours can now leverage due to technology. Our blog provides a place for this and all sorts of other fun, powerful, inspiring content.

Interactions - I understand not everyone will speak out loud during our sunday gatherings, no matter how open we create it. Those of you who find the written word or sharing of images more conducive to how you’d like to share can also have a space of expression here. Comments from people you might not typically engage with may also be a doorway to deeper real community.

Your own pace – Although we send out weekly emails, having a blog also allows for less spam. You can always check here for up to date real-time information on our community. If it’s too much for you, or don’t care to read a certain post, just skip it! This allows for you to take in as much or little as you’d like from our community without being intrusive. You’re also able share at your own pace as well – Have something you wanted to say during a sunday gathering, but wanted some time to pull your thoughts together? Take your time, reflect, and then post it here as you’d like.

There’s so much more, but these are a few important ones. Let me know what you think.

Btw, thanks goes out to Ian for refreshing our header images.

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We’re Twittering!

by Lon on September 30, 2009

Ok, I just set up a twitter account for our community, http://twitter.com/mosaicbaptist

I’m sure you’ve all heard of it if you’re not already on it. Is it just a fad? possibly, but it’s a current medium for communication, and I’m open to ‘all means possible’ as the apostle paul declared.

Very basically for our purposes – it’s a short communication channel – you can think of it as a micro-blog that gets distributed to your twitter client (desktop appilcation, mobile phone / device, etc). There are many other uses for it, but we’ll keep it at that for now.

99% of people just don’t ‘get it’ and it’s something that needs to be used for a period of time with a decent network of people to actually see the value of it. We’ll give it a try here, if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine too, and it can just be a one-way broadcast medium. If you’d rather not try one more techy thing out there, you can always also view the latest 3 ‘tweets’ in the sidebar on the blog here.

Here’s an interesting post on why churches should not twitter – if you’re wondering or have apprehensions.

Otherwise, you can sign yourself up at http://twitter.com
You can ‘follow’ our church community at http://twitter.com/mosaicbaptist
You can follow me personally at http://twitter.com/lon

See you on the flip-side.

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Bloggers…

by Lon on September 17, 2009

In case you’ve never noticed there’s a list of some people who are also blogging in our community on the sidebar to the right. I just added a new active blogger, Alfred Lam. Check’em out.

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blog subscriptions

by Lon on June 22, 2009

Technology is suppose to enrich our faith, not take us away from it.

Here’s a short primer on what rss/subscriptions are – something i personally use to save time and stay on top of things.  rss-icon

When you see an icon like this show up in a web page or at the top of your browser address bar – it means you can ‘subscribe’ to the site.  It’s also sometimes linked or referred to as an RSS feed.  With this, I rarely visit individual websites.  By clicking on it,  you can ‘subscribe’ to everything new that shows up on that web site, and it gets aggregated into a ‘reader’.  I recommend google reader

Google reader collects all the sites that i’m subscribed to and brings it together into the one site that I visit.  This way I don’t need to continually check or visit multiple sites for new content, I simply go to my reader application.

ie. If you want to subscribe to this mosaic blog, you can click on the orange icon up at the top, or you can click this ‘link‘.  Make sure you’ve already signed up for a reader or register yourself for one afterwards at http://google.com/reader

You can subscribe to my blog here, and thousands of other blog and news sites around the world this way.

That’s your faith/tech update for the week.  Hope it helps.

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How to embed videos on the blog

by Lon on May 20, 2009

You can add YouTube videos to either WordPress posts or WordPress pages. Go to the editing section of WordPress by either writing a new entry or managing an existing one (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A WordPress entry

Figure 1: A WordPress entry

Without closing out the WordPress page, open up a new tab or window of your web browser and go to the YouTube.com website. Navigate to the YouTube page that has the video you want. Find the long string of HTML tags in the field labeled “Embed” and copy the entire string to your clipboard (Figure 2). You can do this quickly by clicking into the field and pressing ctrl-a to select all and then ctrl-c to copy (on a Mac, hold down the command key instead of control).

Figure 2: A YouTube page. Notice the Embed text field on the lower right of this screenshot

Figure 2: A YouTube page. Notice the Embed text field on the lower right of this screenshot

Now, go back to the WordPress text editor.

In most circumstances, when you first begin to edit a post, you use the “Visual” editor. This allows you to see your formatting changes as you type (for example, bolded text in the editor window is bold in the published entry). When adding a YouTube video, however, you need to temporarily switch over to the “HTML” editor to paste in the YouTube instructions. The button for the HTML editor is on top of the textbox (Figure 3). Click it, and if you had any formatted content in your text box to begin with, you now see it with HTML tags surround by angle brackets (“<” and “>”) (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Locating the Visual & HTML butoons atop the editor

Figure 3: Locating the Visual & HTML butoons atop the editor
Figure 4: While in HTML editing mode

Figure 4: While in HTML editing mode

Find an empty line in your text where you want your video to appear and click there to place your text cursor. Now, paste the text string from YouTube that was on the clipboard. Usually control-v (or command-v on a Mac) is the quickest way to do this. You’ll see a long string of HTML text inserted at that point, starting and ending with an <object> tag (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The <object> tags pasted into the HTML editor

Figure 5: The <object> tags pasted into the HTML editor

Click on the Visual tab to return to your normal way of editing. Though you will not see your YouTube video immediately, a colored box appears where your video will be inserted. If the position of your video isn’t right, you can return to the HTML editor, cut out the entire <object> string you inserted, and paste it somewhere else.

Once you are ready, you can save your WordPress entry in the normal way and then navigate to the page to see how it turned out (Figure 6). You’re done!

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