Open Source CatholicBecause sharing is good for everyone.
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Easy Embedding of HTML5 Video on a Drupal Site
For the past year, I've watched the HTML5 <video> element debate (mostly over video formats/containers) with a great interest—I abhor having to use Adobe Flash on my sites to embed video, especially since that means many videos don't work on my Linux workstation (which doesn't have Flash), or on my iPhone/iPad.
The HTML5 <video> element (and similarly, the less-supported <audio> element) promises to take away the stress of having to have flash players, FLV-encoded video, etc. just to show a viewer a non-static piece of content.
In its simplest form, you...
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Study shows 2/3 of Churches not using any Social Media
Buzzplant (a social media firm) recently surveyed thousands of Churches (it was a general survey, so not just Catholics), asking what forms of social communications they were using to communicate with their parishioners. Here's a summary of the results:
- 62% of Churches post homilies to website as text or podcast
- 28% of Churches have a Pastor's Blog
- 32% of Churches use social media in one way or another
- 25% of Churches use social media to promote parish events [really? this should probably be the highest statistic, imo]
You can view...
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Catholic Programmer's T-Shirt and Mousepad
A few weeks back, after finishing a full day of swimming in PHP, HTML and CSS, I was pondering the great mystery of human existence, but probably had a little too much to drink. The result?
You can buy the design on the following products (via Zazzle):
Would you like the design on anything else? I could do a mug, or socks, or anything else in Zazzle's catalog...
Alternatively, can you think of a way to code this better? ;-)
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Drupal Gardens enters Open Public Beta
...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...
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Vatican website may have been 'Google bombing' victim
Continue reading.- An apparent glitch in Google's ranking system for web searches led the company to make a change over the weekend so that the Vatican's website was not placed below a site with information on pedophilia. According to an Italian technology website, the anomaly leaves many questions unanswered.
The first news reports in Italy began to come out last Friday about the fact that inserting the word "Vatican" in a Google search retrieved the website www.pedofilo.com as the first...
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Using Drupal with Amazon S3 to backup your site
I would like to share with you an extremely inexpensive and highly effective way to backup your Drupal sites (both MySQL and your /sites/default/files directory)
You will need two things;
One is this module: http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
Second, you will need an Amazon S3 Account >hereHow does it work? very simple, you create a Bucket (folder) in Amazon S3
and then go into the Backup and Migrate module and enter your settings.You can backup just the db or just the files directory or both. One of the best features is...
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Live-Blogging to Drive Traffic, Interest to Organizational Events
The Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America conference is attended by over 6,000 teens every year, and there are many parents, friends, and other teens who wish they could participate as well. We have always posted information after the conference, but in St. Louis, for the past two years, we've started live-blogging and posting to social networks frequently throughout the conference, driving up traffic to our OYM websites.
Here are some of the things we've been doing to drive traffic and share information live from the conference.
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My setup for the first...