The past weekend our diocesan Facebook page came under attack after our bishop wrote about the spiritual implications of voting for intrinsic evil. Some of the posters engaged the substance of the arguments; some, while disrespectful, were at least not vulgar or obscene; and the rest made for the most soul-damaging work of my life. I won’t describe the types of things I had to delete from our page. Suffice to say that the language, while course, was nothing compared to the brutality of the photoshopped pictures that people posted. I was sick to my stomach and sick in my heart.

So how does one maintain faith, hope, and charity amid such a morass of filth and hate? How can you weather such a storm with your heart still ready to reach out to others? Here’s how I handled it:

1. Find some beauty. I was fortunate that, in the middle of this mess, I chanced across a picture my friend Dorian had tweeted of a beautiful cathedral dome. Taking in that beauty for just a few seconds lifted me up a bit and reminded me that, while my computer screen was filled with ugliness, there is beauty in the world.
2. Take a break. Sometimes you just have to walk away for a little while. While I didn’t like the idea of something obscene being posted in my absence, the truth is that policing our Facebook page is not my most important job — either in my work for the Church or in my life. Taking time with my family, reading a book, making a meal — anything to get my mind off the Facebook page for a little while helped me to get back to a sense of “normalcy.”
3. Remember it is temporary. Just remembering that this, too, will pass came with a great sense of relief. Our Facebook page has been attacked before; this one, too, will subside with time as people get bored and move on to the next confrontation. And in fact the main brunt of the attack was over in under 24 hours.
4. Pray, pray, pray. We’ve been praying the St. Michael Prayer after Mass in our diocese for a couple years now, but never has the phrase “defend us in battle” taken on such immediacy for me. Asking the archangel for his intercession — especially on Saturday, when it was the Feast of the Archangels! — helped me to soldier on through the attacks. St. Michael is a powerful patron when undergoing spiritual trials — rely on him!

How do you maintain your spiritual wellness when confronted with sin and ugliness online?

Right now a survey that my company did suggest that only about 30% of Catholic Churches have an online giving system.  My guess is that in 5 years that number will (and should!) be closer to 90%.  If you’re church doesn’t yet have an online giving system, check out the list of vendors we’ve compiled here, http://catholictechtalk.com/giving-solutions.

In this day an age, chances are the only check you’re writing is to your church and maybe your children’s school.  Take a look at an Online Giving provider today.  Its like getting a 5th Sunday in every month!

If you want to easily publish a video online, I recommend using either YouTube or Vimeo.  These sites are especially helpful for those parishes that do not have the resources to host and publish videos through their own web hosting.  Embedding a video into your parish web site is extremely easy through either of these sites.

Here’s a brief summary of these two video sharing sites and then a quick thought on what I recommend.

YouTube

YouTube is now a product of Google and as you may already know, there are few things that Google charges to use.  Uploading a video to YouTube is extremely easy and free.  Your parish can create an channel that is a home to all of your videos.  With YouTube you can select three privacy settings; share the video publicly, only allow people who have a link to view it, or only allow people you choose to be able to view it.  You can allow embedding of your video which allows you to embed it on your own site.  There will occasionally be ads on your video, this is the price you pay to use YouTube.

Actually as a sidenote, if you plan to use a lot of video it is possible to collect a portion of the revenue from the ads shown on your videos from YouTube using Google Adsense.

Vimeo

The benefits of Vimeo are very different from YouTube.  There really are not many differences between the free version of Vimeo and YouTube.  It is the paid version of Vimeo (Vimeo Plus) that allows for much more flexibility.  The beauty of Vimeo Plus lies in the customization possibilities in the player and the embed options.  There are no ads and my personal favorite perk is that you can use Vimeo as a storage dump for your videos, meaning, you can download the original file and/or allows others to download the file as well straight from the site.

I recommend

There is one feature with Vimeo Plus that sells me every time.  This feature is the embedding option that allows you to choose which sites can embed your videos.  With YouTube it’s all or nothing.  Either everyone can embed your video or no one can, not even you.  With Vimeo Plus you have the option to embed the video on your parish web site and no where else, not even Vimeo.  This is the control that I appreciate and am willing to pay $60/year for!

As someone who works full-time in support of helping parishes increase their ability to communicate and engage their parishioners, I am all too often confronted with the lack of familiarity and use of technology by parishes. It is infrequent, even at some of the larger and more financially blessed parishes, that I find a strong use and adoption of technological solutions, even solutions that have been well vetted and a familiar in other aspects of our life.

Typically, introductions of technologies to parish staff members are often met with major hesitations. Often it is the case that parishes are considerably late in adopting new technologies, the industry term for late adoption is called “laggards”. I’ve narrowed down, at least in my own mind, why I think this is happening.

1. Adoption happens over time.
Most people, and most organizations for that matter, slowly accept and begin to use newer technologies as they become affordable and available. At the parish level, and even some (arch) dioceses, we seem to have skipped an entire decade of technology adoption. In the majority of cases parish websites have never been refreshed, which means the user experience remain less than optimal. Only when much of society is embracing mobile applications, online communities, and social media, the parish is just beginning to invest in updating websites. For us to catch up and be in step with today’s communications standards we’re now forced to take technological jumps that seem bigger than we are ready for. Had we kept and followed a normal pace of adoption the next natural step wouldn’t seem so intimidating.

2. Adoption takes consideration and focus.
With limited staff resources and a singular focus on meeting today’s challenges we can often forget to set aside time to look ahead to tomorrow’s opportunities. If someone or some group is not responsible for planning for the future and continuously looking for how we can be more effective in our communications and engagement strategies, we simply will not adopt new processes and tools along the way, we will just keep making do with what we have. Every parish today should establish a technology committee. The committee should work with the parish ministries to understand their needs and then evaluate if any current technologies could be used to solve their problems or enhance their effectiveness.

3. Adoption presumes a technological need.
It has been my experience that past investments made in parish technologies are based mostly upon administrative considerations. We do not often consider the needs of the parishioner or make investments that benefit them directly. If we only consider the internal needs of the parish we will think we have all the technological tools required, therefore we do not find it necessary to consider making new investments in such things as parishioner-facing technologies and/or additional means of communications.

To improve in this area parishes need to think about the needs of their parishioners and what is required to reach, connect, and engage effectively with them.  Here, we can draw from what works in secular organizations. Their investment in “customer-facing” technologies develops strong and lasting emotional connections with the people who buy their products—and what they have to offer is not nearly as important as what the church delivers. Considering the eternal ramifications, parishes need to keep up with technology’s applications for ministry and ensure they are using the tools of the time to reach and engage people in relevant ways.

4. Adoption of technology requires a decision.
Often good ideas do reach an interested parish staff member or active parish volunteer. This particular person gets excited about the opportunity to use a new technology and brings the idea to the larger team of decision makers. Typically from this point forward a painful process of reaching consensus and getting “everyone onboard” begins.

Reaching absolute consensus is the surest way to halt progress and is part of the reason why so many parishes lag behind the rest society of when it comes to technology adoption. It is here again that I would advise parishes to establish a committee of competent parishioners that are tasked with the review, evaluation, and presentation of new technologies. Members of the committee should have a broad understanding of how the parish operates, know the demographic makeup of the parish, be staffed with people with various strengths, be able to work in team, have a passion for the faith and sharing it with others, a healthy sense of curiosity, and be open to change even if it means doing things differently.

Of course all is not doom and gloom and hope springs eternal. With a broader knowledge and familiarity with new technologies, even with older parishioners, I am seeing signs that parishes have a greater willingness to consider new technologies and invest in them. Maybe the coming years will bring a shift in our adoption of technology, moving us from laggards to the early majority.

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 even disable completely the the startup sound.

It looks like development on it has pretty much ceased, but it’s working fine for me in Snow Leopard.

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 will be in your camera roll.

Slick! Works on the iPad as well!

Instead of performing a physical battery pull or buying an app to restart your phone, simply press, Alt-right Cap-Delete simultaneously and your BB will perform a soft reboot.

Be aware that this will take a few minutes to complete in most cases so don’t do it if you are waiting for that all important call or need to use your phone right away.

One (not so effective) method is to paste everything into another application such as NotePad (Win) or TextEdit (Mac) … and then copying and pasting the text from there. Essentially, doubling your work.

There are however, many apps that can handle this for you…and there are very good free options.

For Windows, PureText.

For Mac, Jumpcut.

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 the same website. WPML is available here: http://wpml.org.

A different approach is to offer parallel websites: for instance one in English, one is Spanish. With WordPress 3, this can be done in a single WordPress installation by setting up the Network option. This effectively turns your WordPress installation into a network of sites. Instructions are here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_Multiple_Blogs

Which one to use? It depends. If you seriously need for the information in both languages to stay in lock-step, go for WPML. If the communities simply co-exist under a single parish umbrella, but have vastly different needs, then the WP-3 multi-user is a winner. If you fall in between, just check out both options.

Tech Tip Submitted by Beth Nicoll

Enter the 301 Redirect.

Here’s a very simple redirect…just replace the contents of the .htaccess file in the root of your ‘SOURCE’ site with this (replace with your ‘TARGET’ domain)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://targetdomain.com/blogs/$1 [R=301,L]

You’ll need to keep your old site up for at least 30-40 days.

H/T http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-to-setup-a-301-redirect/