Open Source CatholicBecause sharing is good for everyone.
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The Catholic Developer and Blogger Christmas Wish List - 2011
In Luke 12, Jesus teaches us to guard against greed: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” However, it is a longstanding tradition for Catholics and non-Catholics alike to give and be given simple gifts.
While not espousing the vice of greed, I’d like to offer some gift ideas for Catholic techies, bloggers, and podcasters. All the items are things that I have found help me in my ability to spread the Gospel through the technologies I...
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Preventing Form Spam on Your Website
As more Catholic websites are adding comment forms and feedback forms, the problem of form spam (where you get submissions that are either obviously not written by humans, or submissions that are simply opportunities for people to link back to their own websites) increases.
I wrote a post on user-friendly spam prevention techniques that I employ on my websites over on Life is a Prayer.com, and in that post, I talk about the importance of making your spam prevention user-friendly. I specifically write about how detrimental CAPTCHAs are to usability...
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OneBillionStories.com seeks Intern for Web Development
A Global Search Begins
November 2nd 2011
Few moments in OneBillionStories.com’s (OBS) short history measure up to this one right here – let the global search begin for assembling a team for the mission.
For twenty months, the mission of OBS was led by a lone ranger (me, Seth DeMoor), traveling the ‘digital continent’ frontier, with no more than a video camera and laptop as his companions, and look where the mission has traveled: to every continent (digitally), to multiple TV appearances, to a new language, and all in 20...
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Open Parish Initiative
Open Parish is an initiative to improve parish websites and online presences.
Making Things Better
Open Parish encompasses some technologies, some ideas, and some tools you can use to make your websites, your social media presences, and your communication better.
Projects and Initiatives
- OpenChurch – a Drupal distribution that can be used to help a parish (Catholic or otherwise) quickly set up a fully-featured website.
- Parish Bulletin – module for Drupal websites to help with bulletin management and display on your website.
- Parish Calendar – module for Drupal websites to...
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Catholic Diocese App
The Catholic Diocese App is an open source project for iOS and/or Android that can be customized and modified to allow Catholic Dioceses and Archdioceses to build an app suited to their needs.The App is currently being developed on GitHub (iOS Android), and we are currently building a list of developers and development companies that can be contacted for help making the App work for your diocese or organization. Help develop the App by forking our projects on GitHub:
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Private Social Networks for Parishes
I read a good post on the idea of parish online communities yesterday, over on Catholic Tech Talk (great site!), titled: Parish Online Communities: Private vs. Public. In it, Ryan Foley speaks about the value of parishes having private communities incorporated with their websites and parish member management systems.
I wrote, in response:
Coming from the perspective of having worked on a similar kind of project diocesan-wide (for priests), I have to say that creating an insular (parish-level, or even diocese-level) social networks is a serious undertaking.
We've tried...
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Mobile App Development Resources
Is your parish or organization interested in building its own iPhone, Android, or Blackberry App? There are tons of resources available to help you in building the App.
There are different ways you can get your own app:
Build Your Own (DIY)
This is often difficult due to lack of resources (time, money, programming personnel), but is highly advantageous in that a custom-made App can do pretty much anything you want.
This approach requires knowledge of different development frameworks and programming languages (Objective-C and Xcode for iOS, Java for Android,...
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