Heal Your Church WebSite

Here’s a resource-filled website that may help your church, charity and/or lay-ministry garner some much needed funds: non-profit guides. This site hosts free Web-based grant-writing tools for non-profit organizations, charitable, educational, public organizations, and other community-minded groups.

As the site says:

If you are an individual or start-up organization, try our links to related Web sites to find additional grant & fundraising resources …

… Successful grant-writing involves solid advance planning and preparation. It takes time to coordinate your planning and research, organize, write and package your proposal, submit your proposal to the funder, and follow-up.

… You might also visit your local library, contact a nearby college or university, and/or research federal, state and local government resources.

It is with that in mind that the site provides guides are designed to assist established US-based non-profits through the process of grant-writing, by offering:

• sample inquiry letter
• sample cover letter
• sample cover sheet
• sample budget
• sample proposals
• sample foundation rfp
• sample foundation grant application
• sample government grant application

Sounds like a worthwhile resource to me - and just in time for a rainy weekend. Well at least for me as Hurricane Hanna pays a visit.

Your mileage may vary.

Looks like some people with a great sense of humor took my August 25, 2008 post entitled ‘Don’t turn your front page into a splash page‘ to heart. As demonstrated by the following Signal-to-Noise cartoon of Rob Cottingham that appeared on ReadWriteWeb this past August 31:

And thanks to the quick commenting skills of HYCW cult member 1st Class, Bill Siddall, we are also privy to the following ReadWriteWeb commentary that accompanied the cartoon

Just when we thought the [darned] things were dead and buried, I ran across another Flash intro screen the other day. And like practically every other one I’ve seen, it was half useless puffery about the organization behind the site, and half lookit-this-kewl-effect self-indulgence by the designer

See, it’s not just me - so please, enough with the distracting and bandwidth-consuming arts-n-crafts front pages. Let’s get back to delivering the compelling content seekers and members want and need.

Looks like Google Chrome was launched a bit earlier than desired yesterday. The official Google Blog following-up “iterate often” with a link to their online comic book explaining their new browser works. And while some may only see “Yet Another Browser” - those of us looking under the hood are beginning to ask ourselves, it this really just a browser - or is this actually Google creating a web desktop and/or web OS that will finally put the nail in the Microsoft Office coffin?

From the few screenshots I could glean from TechCrunch, Chrome seems to be a browser that Gina Trapani over at LifeHacker describes as “borrow[ing] parts of Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s WebKit to build Google Chrome, which sounds like it might be similar to Prism (but with tabs)” - in other words, clean, simple and fast so it gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

However, what intrigues me more, and what has me asking whether or not we’re really not looking at a web operating system or web desktop is Google’s own description of what’s going on under-the-hood:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

What’s this all mean? More importantly, how does this answer my question? Glad you asked.

First let’s consider two definitions:

• Simply put, a Web Operating System, or  WebOS for short, is a virtual operating system that runs in your web browser (Frantic Industries)
• A Web desktop or webtop is a desktop environment embedded in a web browser or similar client application integrating web applications, web services, etc … (wikipedia)

Now let’s consider some of the ‘under-the-hood’ elements that has me thinking that Google Chrome is anything but “Yet Another Browser.” I think C|Net has the best enumeration of the elements that I’ll paraphrase for brevity:

• Stability - Each tab will run in its own process.
• Speed - The browser is being written with WebKit.
• Scalability - browser is also getting a new Javascript virtual machine, V8, making both on and offline use zippy fast.
• Search - who does it better than Google? Now it’s built in, feeding you suggestions based on your browsing history and live search results.
• User experience - the default start page will show thumbnails of the user’s most frequently visited pages and a list of their top searches.
• Security - Along with a private browsing mode (as IE 8 has) - each Web page, or tab, runs in its own process, and is blocked from accessing other processes on the computer
• Standards - the browser will be released as an open-source project.

Now note “Scalability” wasn’t on C|Net’s list - at least not explicitly. However it is V8 that has me thinking that eventually, Chrome will eventually answer the question “How do I use Google Docs when I have no internet connection?”

Sure one can currently use Google Gears to employ limited offline access, however it’s not something the average church secretary and/or field missionary is likely to understand and implement without the help of the congregational geek. Most can however use whatever gadgets and/or services are supported and/or enhanced by a browser such as Chrome out-of-the-box - mostly because it appears to them all under one roof.

This is where I believe this is where Google is truly going to eat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer lunch … and that of Microsoft Office as well.

It’s still all a long way off, but hey just remember what Google Apps was a couple of years ago. And considering the cost and fuss over the forced upgrade to Vista, then your computer’s RAM, then Office, then your computer’s disk …imagine the liberty a WebOS or WebTop will buy laypersons and/or church staff running any variety of computers on a mix of Mac, Ubuntu, or even Windows 2000 systems, no problem.

That and think of the gas everyone will save when you can hold meetings via products such as Skype and collaborate on documents remotely via Google Apps Education Edition; the later provided to registered non-profits with current 501(c)(3) status free-of-charge.

UPDATE - looks like ZDNet is on the same page: “Google Chrome: The enterprise playbook“

The WikiPedia defines ‘cruft’ is computing jargon for code, data, or software of poor quality and ‘kitsch’ as art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an existing style. The Celebrations Of The King Ministries in Loma Linda, CA provides a website that is both. The only real question being, what % is kitsch, and what % is cruft - as the design of the this church website seems to take its queue from the Hamster Dance school of design, circa 1998.

What does it profit your church or charity’s website to have the most beautiful web pages ever designed if it doesn’t convince people to visit your church, engage in your ministries, or at least inquire for more information? Today I ask that question of the Westwinds Community Church of Jackson, MI - based in part on some advice offered by Cynthia Ware in her post 4 Simple Steps to Improving Your Website.

One of the more painful big money issues facing churches and charities are upcoming energy costs that will consume more funds once allocated to other endeavors; while forcing some locations to have black-out dates to reduce the high cost of heating a facility during off-hours. Not to mention the rising costs to staff and laypersons to drive to said locations during the week. With such exorbitant expenses in mind, there are many online technologies now available to an ever growing bandwidth-enabled congregations that will allow them to save money by moving mid-week meetings and classes out of bricks-n-mortar places and into the web space.

You bet I’m stoked! This coming October 13–14, 2008, I’ll get to rub usability elbows with Eric Meyer, Jason Fried, Jeffrey Zeldman, along with several other web standards rock stars at the An Event Apart 2008 conference held at the at the Sheraton Chicago.

Sky News is reporting that Russia is doing to the entire state of Georgia what Sherman did to the city of Atlanta - in doing so making the case for engaging in editorial controls for online content as this horrible conflict is actually taking place in Eurasian country formerly the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic now simply known as Georgia; and not the U.S. State immediately north of Florida.

Ever contemplate saying bye-bye to Outlook forever? How about your church volunteers and staff - are they missing important messages because they can’t afford, nor figure out how to synchronize, the latest version on their home machines? Is the portability and price of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions like gMail sound almost too goo to be true?

Tim Bednar is offering a free theme for WordPress that makes building, customizing and maintaining a ministry, para-church, nonprofit, political or small business web sites as easy as cake.

The new.facebook.com is out, and with it comes a cleaner and leaner interface that is not only more configurable, but addresses the growing needs of its of an audience that is stretching well past the niche of the college students. Here are 5 things I like, and 5 things I dislike about the upgrade based on what I see on my own Facebook page.

Want to get hacked? It’s easy, just ‘chmod 777′ everything the next time you install a bbs or photo gallery application. Don’t want to get hacked? Read on and ‘find’ how hackers see, and exploit the unsecured areas of your system.