parish website

From Matthew Warner's blog on the National Catholic Register website: How are parishes using new media?

Last week I asked my Twitter followers for some examples of parishes using new media. I got some good ones, which I was pleased with. So thank you fellow tweeters!

But I must admit that, overall, I was a bit disappointed in my search. I also “googled” the topic fairly extensively and the pickin’s were few. I hope that one day when we google “Catholic Parish,” we are blown away with how impressed we are with the many, many great results we find. In the meantime, we have some learning, sharing and working to do! Keep in mind I am looking for new media being applied specifically to the life of the parish, not simply its use in various other ministries by those in the Church.

I tried to capture a good variety of new media applications that parishes might find useful. But I hope it doesn’t stop there. I hope leaders of parishes will be contacting these parishes, asking them what works and what doesn’t and all taking some steps forward together. I also pray that the laity who have been blessed with the ability to produce and apply new media will come forward and fulfill an important roll in their Church.

What do you think? Be sure to drop Matthew a line either over on the original post (which has more findings from Matthew), or on Twitter (@MatthewWarner). (Matthew also blogs at Fallible Blogma, and is the founder of TweetCatholic).

...and now anyone can set up a fresh, hosted Drupal 7 website in seconds—for free.

From Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and president of Acquia, the company behind Drupal Gardens (basically, a site like wordpress.com, except with more awesome):

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

I expect this service, and others like it, to grow in popularity in the coming years. For many parishes, a site on Drupal Gardens would do 90% of what they'd need (or 100%, if they weren't shooting for the stars...).

And it's free (for basic plans), community-based, and super-easy to use (the theme developer is especially nice). On top of that, you can, at any time, download your entire site and put it on your own web host!

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.