Resources

Jeff's post here on OSCatholic titled "What Makes a Good Parish Website?" brought me to brainstorm and design a PowerPoint presentation for clergy and parish staff/volunteers in the Diocese of Sacramento, to get folks moving in the right direction.

On Tuesday, June 1, 2010, I delivered this presentation to ~100 attendees at our first annual diocesan Stewardship Conference.

I recorded the audio on my Olympus WS-300M and edited it with Propaganda.  Then, I broke the audio into 21 separate files to match the 21 slides of the PowerPoint presentation using Roxio Creator 2010 (this step was a necessary evil, as I discovered).  Finally, I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Adobe Presenter 7 to sync each audio file to each slide's animation and to produce an online copy of the presentation in Flash.

To view the 28-minute presentation, click here or on the screenshot:

I'm hoping that this digital copy of the presentation will make its way into the offices of many diocesan and parish clergy and staff, to assist our Catholic parishes in publishing great parish websites.

Permalink to the presentation: http://www.diocese-sacramento.org/website

Download the handout that accompanies the presentation, which is essentially the presentation's text bullet points.

It looks like the Vatican is going optical! Here are the details, from CathNews Asia:

The Vatican City State has announced a major upgrade to its communications infrastructure including fibre optics links to other Vatican sites including the pontifical villa at Castelgandolfo.

The Governorate of the Vatican City State and Telecom Italia announced the signing of a contract for the installation of the first nucleus of the “Integrated Communication Infrastructure for Vatican City State”, VIS reports.

This consists in a broadband IP network capable of voice, data and video transmission within the territory of the Holy See and Vatican City State, a communique says.

The plan includes, among other things, fibre optic cable links between the ten main extraterritorial sites including the Pontifical Villas at Castelgandolfo and the radio stations in Santa Maria de Galeria.

Apparently, the Google Bot is quite happy when your a website offers a constantly updating home page - to the tune of 1,000+ page hits per day! Catholic News Live has received an average of 13,000 page views per week from the Google Bot since it's launch two weeks ago... meaning it has had a field day updating content from the site, and finding stories from Catholic blogs and news sites. It seems the bot checks in at least once an hour.

What does this mean for you, lowly webmaster? Well, if you can get your feed on Catholic News Live, you can get the Google Bot to index an inbound link (which does NOT have any kind of rel="nofollow" attribute, so you get some link juice from Google) pretty much every time you post a story. That can be pretty valuable if you want your posts to show up on Google quickly!

(An aside – Link Juice, in case you were wondering, is what we refer to when talking about the whole idea of Google pagerank and inbound link 'votes' - Google uses inbound links from legitimate and established websites to determine whether your site (the site linked to) appears higher in its rankings for certain search terms. More on SEO to come - for now, do some Google searches on the topic...).

Two questions come to mind from this discovery: Continue Reading »

For the past week (and the next), I've been in the Eternal City, helping the Redemptorist community stream their 24th General Chapter. They wanted to share the proceedings in a more immediate fashion with the broader Redemptorist community around the world, and this is probably the best way to do it.

A few months ago, I was approached by the Redemptorists' communications director and asked what kind of equipment he would need to take a live video feed from a multi-camera setup, and broadcast it on Ustream (free streaming = a good solution - you can also use Watershed or a similar paid service if you need it).

I found a great little Analog-to-Digital converter from Canopus, the ADVC-55, and also purchased the ADVC-PSU5V AC Adaptor Kit with it (since the PC laptop the Redemptorists have has only a 4-pin/no-power FireWire port. I've used a variety of DV bridges in the past, and always had trouble with keeping a reliable DV stream into the computer. Luckily, the Canopus does a great job, and has not once caused a blip in the DV stream - it takes composite video in (along with audio, if need be), and converts it to a DV stream over firewire.

I didn't even have to install a driver on the Vista PC, as the DV stream acts as a generic DV-over-FireWire stream. Therefore, Ustream immediately recognized it and put it online.

For audio, we are using an output from the sound mixer, converted from XLR to 1/4" stereo minijack, and it sounds pretty good. You can easily control the volume of the signal either (a) at the board itself, or (b) using Ustream's volume slider. Note, however, that you should listen to the stream so you can see whether or not the sound is clipping. If it's clipping, you may need to use a different signal, or change the input on your computer from mic to line level.

This kind of setup works great for those who have in-house video systems, as it is probably the easiest way to convert analog video (composite, RCA-jack video, or S-video) into a usable source for Ustream, Watershed, and the like.

More on streaming via Ustream

• How to stream from TriCaster Broadcast/Pro to Ustream.tv or Watershed
• How @archstl Streamed the Installation Mass Video Online and via Satellite
• Live Streaming from an Event using Ustream or Watershed

Any other suggestions?

What if the USCCB offered the Bible via an API so programmers/iPhone App developers/web developers could query a verse or chapter for display/search?

What if the Vatican offered better searching, indexing, and referencing for their vast library of Papal encyclicals, Church Council documents, and other other messages?

What if the USCCB offered, perhaps, some sort of 'widget' for displaying a random bible quote, the day's readings (or a blurb from said readings), and other Bible-related topics on people's blogs, websites, etc.?

I really hope these kinds of things become reality, and sooner rather than later. Does anyone know if these kinds of issues are even on the radar?

I'd also like to find out more about how our Church is working towards the lofty goals set forth in Inter Mirifica, the letters for the World Day of Communication each year, etc., besides implementing a YouTube channel and Facebook app. I'll volunteer time to help accomplish some of these goals—can't we bring some of these projects into the 'open source' sphere? The dogmas of the Church are not 'open source,' but couldn't the technologies be more so?