Catholic Tech Talk

According to Wikipedia, Web Scraping is defined as “a computer software technique of extracting information from websites.” Now, Google has taken measures to penalize site scrapers in an effort to reduce what it considers webspam.

They’re not ALL free, so be sure to check the licensing requirements. Regardless, this is probably one of the best free icon finder/repositories out there. Enjoy! http://www.IconFinder.com

There’s nothing worse than firing up the Mac at a library and the startup sound is cranked up. Oops! Sorry! For some reason, there is no option to disable it in the operating system. Try downloading and installing this small app: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/index.en.html It’ll add an option in your system prefs to change the level or [...]

Thought I’d have to get a screen capture app for this…but it’s built into the IOS. To take a screenshot of what’s on your iPhone… 1. Goto the screen you want to capture. 2. Press and hold the HOME button. 3. Simultaneously press the reset/standby button (top right). Your screen should flash and your capture [...]

BlackBerry’s Java based OS is notoriously poor at reallocating memory. Because of this you will end up with memory leaks. What this means to the average user is that you might start the day with 108mb of ram, but by the end of the day you might only have 100mb. This can degrade your BlackBerry’s [...]

When working in a web editor, you need to be sure to copy and paste in data WITHOUT any hidden formatting from an application (e.g. MS Word). You even need to be careful when copying from your browser, since even HTML can get added to the clipboard. One (not so effective) method is to paste [...]

Does your parish website need to be available in more than one language? Our website needs to serve both the English speaking and Spanish speaking communities. If you use WordPress, there are a couple of ways to handle this issue. One is to use the WPML (WordPress Multilingual) to offer articles/pages in different languages on [...]

If you’re moving your blog or website from one domain to another, you you’ll want to retain your search result links and PageRank. Also, if people are using the old links, you want to redirect them to the new domain. Enter the 301 Redirect. Here’s a very simple redirect…just replace the contents of the .htaccess [...]

The Mac comes loaded with some powerful screenshot capabilities. Command+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file Command+Control+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard Command+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file Command+Control+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard Command+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, [...]

Want email hosting, online document storage, a website, all tied in to mobile access at about $10/year for your parish? Definitely check out Google Apps!

If you run a website or blog, be sure to promote it on Facebook with one of these social plugins. http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

If you’ve got a blog, and you find it difficult finding time tweeting out posts, try http://www.twitterfeed.com. After you register (for free), grab your blogs RSS feed* and submit it to Twitterfeed. You can adjust how often it pulls from your feed – down to every 30 minutes – and posts to your Twitter account. [...]

My dad got an iPod Touch (4th Generation) today at Target. Didn’t realize until later that I can talk to him via FaceTime! Key points: – Only works on 4th generation – Both ends must be on Wifi – You’ll be connecting to them via their iTunes account e-mail address Open up your contacts address [...]

If you’ve got a blog, getting your posts onto a Facebook page is a time-consuming task. Try Networked Blogs. Register (it’s free) your blog with them and then ‘syndicate’ your blog posts to your Facebook page. Registering your blog is the time consuming part. They give you a couple options to confirm that you’re the [...]

For those of you who have an Apple Mouse (used to be called ‘Mighty Mouse’), after a few months of use, you’ve probably had the trackball get stuck. I seem to recall that this tip was actually the ‘Apple Recommended’ fix for the problem. Hold the mouse upside down and roll the trackball around a [...]

I’ve personally used Shelfari for the last few years. It’s an online social service for books in which users create bookshelves and share that with others. One great aspect of it is the bookshelf widget that you can create and place on websites. I thought this would be a great addition to our parish website [...]

Here’s my wishlist and goals for tech in the Church for 2011.

Last November I hosted a breakout session at my diocese’s catechetical conference on “school marketing in the digital age.” I covered the topics you might expect: web sites, social networking tools, etc. But I also spent some time discussing the lowly email. Email tends to get overlooked in favor of text messaging, Facebook, and other [...]