Golden Anvil

Well, I made a final decision on a publish schedule for the church website. Mondays will be blog posting day. Wednesday will be the latest sunday sermon. Friday will be the sermon archive.

So, this evening was spent preparing the audio file to go out Wednesday (since the later half of my week is usually shot I'll need to get both audio files prepared at the beginning of the week). I also was discovering a variety of permissions and settings that needed to be taken care of in order to get stuff running properly.

Hopefully the process will continue to smooth out. Right now it's promising to eat up a good chunk of my time...

Well, our new church website has finally gone live. If you are interested in taking a look, you can see it here.

You might be able to tell that I built it using the same software that I'm using for this website. It's called drupal, and I've grown quite fond of it. It is very flexible, and very powerful. On the church website I've put a whole publishing workflow into place so that each post that a blogger writes up has to go through me (for basic editing) and then our pastor (for blasphemy checking, as we like to (semi) jokingly say). Then it gets placed in a queue for later publishing. It's all very slick.

Anyway, there are still some things I want to tweak about the site, but I think it basically works, and it needs to stop sitting on the back burner.

Well, it took a good bit of playing around, but I got the church website set up to host and display podcast files. It generates an iTunes-style RSS feed, meaning that we can be listed in apple.com's podcast directory. I got all of the tagging, cover image, embedded streaming player, etc. issues all worked out, and tested it using the first mp3 file I put together yesterday evening. It all seems to work, except that my Google Reader page doesn't show the first entry. I'm not sure if that's just a refresh/timing issue or what, so I'll check it out tomorrow.

Anyway, glad that's out of the way. My next task will be to get one of our archived sermons cleaned up and ready as well (I need to do at least two each week). But, I'll save that for tomorrow. Time to go play some EVE.

One of the things that will be on the website I'm setting up for our church will be the recordings of our sermons made available in a manner much like a podcast (in fact, we hope to make the feed available through iTunes as well).

This last week our music minister finally got me some guitar instrumental music that he'd recorded to use as intro/outro music with the sermon recordings (it's wonderful, by the way). So, that meant it was time for me to sit down and edit the first sermon. This is actually good timing, since our pastor has just started a new series on 1st and 2nd Timothy.

Phew! It took a good longer than expected, but I finally managed to finish it up. It should get faster as I get better at it. The plan is to release the current week's sermon plus an old one from our archive once every week, so I certainly hope I get faster at it.