04/29/2009
It seems today that Twitter has hit the mainstream. This means that there will be a lot more businesses using Twitter as a means to pimp themselves and there will be many more annoying people using Twitter to post every meal they eat and every thought they think.
However, this also means that the Twitter application market is much more attractive to developers. If more people are using the service then more people are interested in using applications to make their Twitter experience better. Let’s face it, Twitter’s web interface isn’t amazing. I’ve taken a few Twitter clients for Mac (and a couple for iPhone) for a spin and here are my favorites.
- Tweetie – Free with ads or $15-20 (also for iPhone)
- Twhirl – Free (requires Adobe AIR)
- Nambu – Free (also for iPhone)
- TweetDeck – Free (required Adobe AIR)
- Twitterific – Free with ads or $15 (also for iPhone)
- EventBox – $15-20
Things I look for:
- Small footprint with a lot of power
- Menubar icon or simple show/hide functionality
- Keep feed window on last read tweet when new tweets arrive
- Free option
- iPhone version
- Choices for URL shortening services and picture attachments
- Be beautiful and functional
What’s your favorite Twitter client?
04/27/2009
A group of several bloggers are on a trip to Kolkata, India, right now. Each day they are visiting projects run by Compassion International–meeting kids, discovering hope in the midst of poverty, taking pictures, and telling their stories on their blogs. It’s probably the closest we can come to being there without actually taking that 16 hour flight and enduring the 120 degree heat.
I have not been overseas with Compassion (yet) but I love reading these stories. It helps gain a little more of a world perspective instead of being stuck in my American bubble and realize that there is both great need and much hope. Check out the Compassion Bloggers site and take a little trip to India this week.
04/24/2009
I’ve spent a lot of time the past five years traveling with guys who play instruments on stage. That means I’m used to being the “uncool” one. I have accepted this role. I am married to a hottie who loves me and so I have no one I need to impress by being cool. I buy normal clothes from normal stores and I have a normal haircut.
The other day I was in Target with my lovely wife. While she was looking at jewelry and purses I decided to step over to the wall of sunglasses to find a new pair (mine are getting pretty scratched). I figured Target would be just the right mix of uncool, suburban, normalcy with a hint of trendy mixed in. Remembering how cool I thought my dad’s aviators were when I was a kid, these were the first pair I gravitated towards.
Obviously, I bought them. Now I feel like a poser every time I put them on… like I think I am cooler than I am. This is the same fear I had when I first got my iPhone. I was afraid people would think that I was trying to show off, or that I thought I was better or cooler than they were because I had it. So, let this be my public admittance that I know that I am not cool, but I thought I was cool enough for Target sunglasses.
Have you ever wanted to buy or wear something but been afraid people would think you were cocky or trying too hard to be cool?
04/22/2009
I really like Evernote. I suggest it to a lot of people, especially anyone who owns an iPhone. Evernote makes it so easy to take a picture, write a note, or record some audio on your iPhone and retreive it later on your Mac, PC, or even online. This has so many potential uses from comparison shopping to simple reminders. However, as I was using Evernote the other day I realized one fatal flaw in the system. Evernote only exports “notes” as Evernote-compatible files. Why is this a bad thing? Let me share my experience…
Right now Shaun is in song-writing mode preparing for a new album and a new round of completely free songs. While at a church in Iowa the other day Shaun was messing around on the church’s piano and wrote this beautiful melody. A few hours later before the concert, it was completely gone from his head. In his own word, “I’m not too old to write music, just too old to remember it.” Hoping it would return to him I told him I would record it with my handy-dandy iPhone and then send it to him later. Sure enough, the following morning Shaun woke up and the melody had returned. I immediately opened up Evernote for iPhone, started a new audio note, and within a few seconds the melody was captured and sync’d up Evernote online. So far so good, but that was only the first step.
Read the rest of this post »
04/21/2009
I had the privilege of attending Compassion International‘s artists dinner (a part of GMA week) last night. The main speaker for the evening was a former sponsored child through Compassion named Michelle Torentino. She was an amazing reminder of why we do what we do.
She also challenged me to consider every single child sponsorship packet that I set out on a table at a concert as potentially being an amazing servant of God. Every great leader of the Church was once a little child. I realized that we aren’t just releasing children from poverty but we are also releasing them to opportunity. We can each play a part in God’s perfect plan by enabling children to grow up to be the persons that God created them to be. Amazing.
Please, take seven minutes out of your day and watch her tell her story below. I promise you it will be worth it and you will be changed. Then, either sponsor a child or help us challenge your church community to get involved in the lives of these children.
04/17/2009
It is so easy to give your blog a professional look these days by grabbing a well-made, free WordPress theme and tweaking it to your specific tastes. The biggest hurdle is filtering out all of the poorly-made themes that are floating around the interwebs to find the right one to start with.
There are tons of websites that offer free WP themes these days, but I have found that many of those themes lack features, flexibility, usability, or simple beauty that even beginning bloggers deserve. However, several design companies and individual designers who make premium (for-pay) themes offer certain themes completely free of charge. Usually these are older themes or simplified themes, but they are often higher quality than 80% of the other free themes you will find.
So without further adieu, here are a few of my recent favorite places to find free WordPress themes:
Do you have a favorite place for free WordPress themes?
04/16/2009
Shaun Groves is participating in a blog-based book tour where he asks Skye Jethani, author of the book The Divine Commodity, a question about the future of the Church in America. I have to say, I very much agree with his response. I don’t think that the Church has to be a massive entity with great influence in order to positively change the world. I also think that greater impact is often made through the smaller channels rather than larger.
For example, I grew up in the South where most people go to church on a regular basis. I have noticed that the larger a single church body grows the more people show up just to be seen. However, I have also witnessed smaller congregations who are much more committed to changing the world around them in Jesus’s name. While the large church may have a much greater sphere of influence, the smaller group is likely more determined to actually make use whatever amount of influence it may have. As Skye Jethani says:
The overwhelming witness of Scripture is that God transforms the world using the smallest and most unlikely methods—the outcasts, the underdogs, the forgotten, and the under-resourced.
That’s just a small part of the discussion so I encourage you to head over to Shaun’s Blog and read the full post.
04/14/2009
I see a lot of websites/blogs and a lot of them are running WordPress. Sometimes I see a blog with a theme that looks familiar… as if someone took a standard theme freely available online and just tweaked it a bit. Inevitably one of those “tweaks” is to take the credit of the original theme creator out of the footer (where it usually lives). However, most people stop there when it comes to removing the original theme branding so a quick peek at the HTML source can reveal the original theme.
In Firefox head up the to “View” menu and choose “Page Source.” Next, toward the top of the HTML look for a line that looks something like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://website.com/
wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME_HERE/style.css" />
Except, instead of THEME_NAME_HERE you will probably see the name of the original theme. Now you can do a quick search for that theme and see how much (or little) the blog owner actually modified from the original. It really is that easy.
