Open Source CatholicBecause sharing is good for everyone.
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My Confessor app/service - know when your priest is hearing confessions
God may be omnipresent — but His priests aren’t. So a holy man in Madison, Wisc., has turned to app development, along with divine guidance, to find a better way to tend to the needs of his 800-family flock. Father Richard Heilman is launching a My Confessor App that will let his parishioners know when and where he is available to listen to their sins. After 25 years in the ministry, Heilman believes Catholics could do with a bit more priest-and-me time. His preferred dosage is at least once a...
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How to setup LAMP in Ubuntu
Hello all,
I recently finished a tutorial on how to setup Ubuntu 13.04 as a web server for local sites hosted within the users account.
I have switched to Ubuntu 13.04 running on my Dell XPS13 and it is amazing. Clean fast “open” :-)
Setting up Apache to serve my local sites was not very straight forward, so I decided to make a tutorial that should get anyone up and running in about 10 to 15 minutes.
http://joao.machado-family.com/2013/06/04/ubuntu-13-04-apache2-setup-public_html/
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A New Kind of Church Directory, Built on Open Source
I recently launched a little site for finding Catholic parishes and mass times called parish.io. It takes a very different approach to gathering parish info and mass times than other sites in this category. Not only is this approach beneficial to users (more accurate and complete mass schedules), I think it’s of particular interest to other software developers.
Rather than relying on manual data entry, parish.io gathers all of its info by scraping diocese and parish sites. It took months of hacking to validate the concept and develop the...
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A Saint Taxonomy Explorer and API
I’d like to announce the rollout of Saintstir, which is currently in beta.
What is Saintstir?
Saintstir is the world’s first online Catholic saint taxonomy. We’re creating what can be best described as a genome that categorizes and classifies the saints by various attributes and dimensions, such as their graces/virtues, life experiences, and special powers, to name a few.
The taxonomy itself is extremely flexible and can change with user feedback. We currently have 200 saints and blesseds, but the goal is eventually all saints of the Church.
Additionally,...
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Created a new App for my kids
On May 3, 2013, myself and three others, launched a new app into the world of iOS. We have been working on this app for what seems like forever. This app crosses over into my personal life, as well as business.
Two years ago, my wife and I were trying to teach our kids a little more about the rich history the church has with Saints. Some of the more famous ones come to mind: St. Mary, St. Joseph, St. Christopher, things from my childhood, typical Catholic Saints. Together we...
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Code for automatically figuring out the Liturgical Season and changing the colour on a website
Back in 2006, I started to work on my first Catholic blog (www.beingfrank.co.nz). As I started to explore Wordpress as a CMS and how the themes work within that platform, I wanted to get the colours of the site to change with the liturgical seasons of the Church - i.e. violet for Lent and Advent, gold for Easter etc.
So, I searched the web trying to find the algorithm that is used to calculate when Easter is, as all the other dates in the calendar basically stem from that. It...
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#ThanksPontifex - a Twitter Storm to Thank the Pope
I wanted to thank the Pope as he retired but I didn’t know how. I happen to work with youth ministry, so I also wanted a way for teens to get involved. Then this idea came to me, why don’t we create a Twitter storm of thank-you messages. If we got enough, our tag would appear on “Trending” for all users on twitter even non-Catholics.
I mentioned it to a few who have more followers than I on twitter and got a positive response. So now I would like to...
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