Church IT – Supporting ministry with IT

I’m not normally given to extolling the virtues of a plain technology, what you can do with it is much more important. But I think an exception might be in order.

If you’ve not heard of XML it stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and if that sounds similar to HTML, the language of the web, you’d be right. XML is designed to be more flexible as you can define what XML is used for, so it is equally at home handling a home CD collection, or organising songs in OpenSong.

There’s my link to what you can do with it. The creators of OpenSong decided to use XML for the songs, which was a very good decision in my opinion. Someone  on the OpenSong forums asked if it is possible to convert songs to Word or PDF. Actually conversion isn’t strictly speaking necessary because Word can open the files without any extra help. Well, baring renaming the files to songname.xml because the OpenSong files don’t have a file extension. One small detail I would change.

It’s not just Word either, OpenOffice Writer opened the song too. In fact in some respects slightly better because the XML tags are represented as plain text so a simple find and replace macro will remove them.

So why the praise for XML? Well, because of the way it was created it is possible for two programs (OK three OpenSong, Word and Writer – I’m lumping the latter two together) to share information without any kind of modification. Even if they couldn’t, because XML is text based it’s human readable. In theory at least, though OpenSong files are very clear and easy to read.

So it’s a great format in my opinion, and one that I hope thrives.

As it was an All Age Worship (family) service this morning, I was operating OpenSong as well as the mixer.  Generally quite straightforward as there isn’t too much to have to react to, apart from some swapping around of radio mics.

The only snag was at the end of the service when the words I had entered for ‘The Spirit Lives to set us free’ turned out to be different from those in the hands of the singers. Luckily we have a second monitor that points towards the music group so they were able to switch to that without any problems.

Being a techie I find myself casting around for a solution that involves some form of electronic wizardry. Perhaps it is time to push harder for internet access in the church.  Then we could have a central place to store information about the service.

Another solution is to run through the service in more detail (or indeed at all) before Sunday, as per the excellent advice to be found in the podcasts of Creative Synergy. As much as I agree however, it is harder for a small parish church with a limited headcount.

Perhaps this also inspires a feature request for OpenSong. A portable version would allow me to carry it around on a USB key so I would always know exactly what is on the notebook. Part of the problem was the service organiser had looked on the notebook for the words but I had copied them straight from Junior Praise that included an extra verse.

Of course, as OpenSong is opensource, there’s no reason for me not to have a go myself, perhaps it’s time to stop just lurking in the forum.

Then again, maybe I’m dwelling too much on the negative. It was only one song, and the rest of the service went without any problems.