Church Relevance has a regular chart of well designed church web sites and this provides a useful counter balance to my desire to get as much content on the front page, often at the expense of visual eye candy. Hopefully the new homepage will do this much better than the current one.

Even so it’s hard to know what sort of information should take pride of place on the web site and this goes to the root of what the web site is for. It is an advertisement for the church to the world, but it can also provide huge benefits for existing members.

I read a great article tonight on the subject at digital.leadnet.org, ‘Does your church website serve two masters?‘. For a long time the majority of our traffic has been from new visitors. Some new traffic is good but this suggests that it’s not really a community site. I’d also love to see the site used by more people but that doesn’t seem to happen. But that’s a good reminder for me that many people do not use the web and computers like I do. So I think for the moment we should concentrate on bringing people in on the main website, and maybe set up a subdomain for all the internal stuff. 

I think I shall add have added the author’s blog, healyourchurchwebsite.com to my blogroll.

Now I need is approval and sign off….

I was very interested by this article that popped up the other day (via Lifehacker if memory serves) about how to concentrate.

It got me thinking that many successful people really know how to concentrate on one thing. There’s certainly enough tips online about booking meetings with yourself to avoid interuptions.

Perhaps I shall cut down on the distractions, people know my telephone number if it’s really urgent. Curiously enough I sometimes miss the old days of essays at Uni, when I could just focus on one thing for several hours and not get distracted.

Then again, I’ve got a lot of words to write on one subject tomorrow, so I may well get the chance after all!

Composition was never my strong point at school when I did music, so I’ve been trying to brush up on these skills. There’s plenty of stuff to keep me occupied for a while.

It’s nothing spectacular but hopefully gives you an idea of what can quickly be achieved using software like Magix Music Maker 14. The music was generated from the samples included with Music Maker, I didn’t have to play any instruments. That’s for a later project…

My MP3 player - an MSI Megastick 528 - fantastic little device with a line in socket - takes up a fraction of the space, records for longer than a briefcase of tapes (ok just a guess) and runs for hours off a single AAA battery. So it’s better surely?

Well no, not really. There’s no way to check levels without playing a track back, and there’s rarely time for that before a service. It’s also a little slow to respond to button presses; once it’s going it’s fine but sometimes getting there can be a pain.

Now, this is one thing for me, I’m reasonably comfortable at messing around with technology and can normally get it to work without raising my blood pressure too much, but there’s no way I can recommend it in a situation with people who are less happy with playing around this way. What we need is something with that familiar red button, preferably large and easy to see when active.

The trouble is, most electronic devices are just a variation on my MP3 player. We used to use an M-Audio portable recorder for podcasts and even I managed to fluff up recordings by not pressing the right combination of buttons. It’s not that the device didn’t work, just it wasn’t as simple as a tape deck.

I asked this question at the Worship conference held at Crawley Baptist last month as we had a seminar dedicated to sound and pa. They recommended the iKey Plus as offering the right balance of functionality and ease of use, and it certainly looks that way from a quick read of the manual.

Interestingly as I was mulling this post, an entry appeared from Musicians Tools for this rack mounted recording device for iPods. We’ve already got an iPod Nano for day to day background music in the church, I’m sure one more iPod won’t hurt.

I have to admit that the Summer Chill samples weren’t really to my taste, though I can’t fault the sound quality. The Ultimate Samples Collection Vol 3 was another matter however. Plenty of really good drum samples, both individual drums and patterns.

I’m looking forward to trying them out with some songs. If you’re interested I’m mostly using Magix Music Maker 14 these days. Very underrated software in my opinion and with some great features for playing live at church. I reviewed the previous version last year and thought it was pretty good. It was XXL version that comes with a MIDI/USB keyboard, which I’m still using.

Stallman receiving Torvalds award at LinuxWorld conf 1999

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.

Those wanting some suggestions will find the Bible Version Selection Tool most helpful. The basic version offers serveral different aims from private study to public reading. The detailed options offer a lot more control, such as whether cultural references are translated.

You can view the records for each Bible too, which is a useful way of getting some background on unfamiliar translations, as I was with the Message.

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