Tech Geek

As I have freely admitted before, I am a Google fan, and I think they get how the internet should be used in a way that I agree with. I am excited about the Android operating system that they have brought to mobile phones and how open that is. I look forward to having one of those phones myself, but I'm holding out to see if something better than the Droid comes around. It looks great, but there are some rumors I'm waiting on.

I have used, and still do use, Remember the Milk for much of my task management. It's a great product and I only scratch the surface of what it can do. I haven't gotten into using tags, locations, contacts, or many of the other features. I just add things to my list, often using Dial2Do, and then I take them off when they're finished. Or, sometimes I just leave them there forever, like my oldest task of setting up an annual physical which is over a year old, which sort of defeats the annual part! I also use the Remember the Milk for Gmail gadget and Firefox extension, available at http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/gmail/, so that I can see my tasks from within my Gmail account.

Remember the Milk does also have some integration with Google Calendar, but I found it wasn't for me. I wanted something that would sit alongside my calendar and let me add things easily and have them show up both in the list and on the relevant calendar date. I also wanted to be able to modify the list from my iPod Touch, whether I had internet access or not. I could have paid for a pro membership to Remember the Milk in order to use their iPod Touch application, but I didn't feel I was using the service enough to justify paying for it.

Awhile back, Google came out with Google Tasks, a task manager of their own. It isn't nearly as robust as Remember the Milk, but it does much of what I was looking for. I've found myself using it more and more, even though it doesn't have Dial2Do integration, yet. (I have contacted Dial2Do and asked them to consider adding Google Tasks to their service.) I find that Google Tasks also works well for the check-off lists that we probably all use to keep track of things like who has paid for a retreat! I just create a new list and add the names of everyone who needs to pay. Then, when they pay, I check them off. I don't "clear completed items" until everyone has paid. If I need to make a note, I can leave the name as the "task" and add a note in the Notes field.

To access Google Tasks from Gmail, click on Tasks, which should be right under your Contacts. This pops up a Google Talk style window with your tasks listed in it. You can add notes and due dates by clicking on the ^> at the right hand of each item. If you click on the pop-out arrow, your task list will float in a new window.

To access it from Google Calendar, click on Tasks, which should be right under Quick Add. This will open a sidebar to the right of your calendar screen and it will have the same tasks in it as you see from any other method of accessing Google Tasks. Once you start using Google Tasks, you'll also notice a new calendar under My Calenders which is, appropriately enough, called Tasks. Selecting or un-selecting this will control whether or not your tasks are displayed on your calendars.

You can also add Google Tasks to your iGoogle page, if you use that, by adding the Tasks gadget. Or you can visit gmail.com/tasks from your mobile phone or iPod Touch and access your list that way.

Finally, I found an iPhone/iPod app called GeeTasks which lets me quickly add tasks to any of my lists whether or not I'm connected to the internet. There is a YouTube video explaining the application at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXy5jY5lSUQ&feature=player_embedded. It's a $2.99 application, but that's close enough to free for me! There is always a chance that Google will change the API enough that the developer won't be able to keep it working, but it has worked well for me for a couple of months and there have been a couple of new versions that have improved the user experience.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing, and get rid of those sticky notes!

If you've been around the Lutheran church for awhile, you've seen the Augsburg Fortress Little Red Books. They are the smaller cousins to the Thrivent Big Red Books, also known as the Lutheran Pastor's Desk Diary. Go to a meeting of any Lutheran clergy and you're sure to see someone reach into their shirt pocket or briefcase and pull one one of these Red Books out to scribble a note or write down an appointment. Both of them have info about the lectionary texts assigned for each Sunday, which saints go with which days, and when Easter and Ash Wednesday actually fall this year! Both of them are very paper based, and not all that useful for people like me, who haven't used a paper based calendar in over 15 years!

Today I received this tweet from @bethalewis: Free downloadable "Little Red Book" is available for 2010. http://www.augsburgfortress.org/redbook/ (Beth is the CEO of Augsburg Fortress, along with being a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister,  and KY Wildcats basketball fan.) I didn't think I'd have any use for a downloadable book, then my curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked the link.

Augusburg Fortress has provided a DBA and a CSV file that can be downloaded and used within Palm Desktop (DBA) and Microsoft Outlook (CSV). There is a helpful link for additional instructions on how to insert the dates into either of these software programs. Great! But I use Google Calendar. Can I use them too? Yes!

I downloaded the CSV version of the file to my computer and saved it on the desktop as Year_C_2010.csv. I opened my Google Calendar and Click Add --> Import calendar at the bottom right of the Other calendars box at the bottom of the left column. This brings up a new window which asks for the file name (the Year_C_2010.csv file I just saved) and what calendar I want to import the file into. I used my daily calendar. After clicking the Import button, I waited a few seconds, and then my calendar had lots of new entries. Some of these are duplicates to things I'd already put there, but most of them are new entries. You could also create a new calendar (before starting the import process) and import all of these dates to that calendar, if you wanted to keep them separate from your regular events.

Updates:
Paul Amlin has provided this comment below, but so you don't miss it, I'm moving it up here.
Hey gang, for the mac users out there who are google challenged or don't use that amazing tool, but who wish to use the LRB calendar in iCal, I've converted an iCal friendly version and posted it for download on my website: http://www.paulamlin.com/downloads/ This has been a popular request by many on the facebook group I admin, hope it's helpful to others here as well. peace, Paul :o)

Beth Lewis, who I mentioned above, also posted some more information on her blog, available at http://blogs.augsburgfortress.org/?p=210 .

Thanks to Rev. Matthew A. Smith (Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Church, Lansing, MI) for compiling this information for us into the Downloadable Little Red Book.

I've been fascinated by Google Forms ever since it was announced as a part of what was at the time called Google Docs and Spreadsheets, also known as Google Dachshund! One of my cousins, who is getting married this summer, is using Forms to help with her wedding planning. But I've never actually used them myself. So I have invited Justin Snider to help all of us learn a bit about how they work. Thanks Justin!

P.S. - It was good to see some of you at the Extravaganza! I was the one running around setting up projectors for the workshops, in case you saw me and didn't know who that was! - Pastor Andy Arnold, the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Tech Geek

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In this stressed economy and working with a tight church budget our large church staff was told by our council to "reduce printing and publication costs." I immediately thought of finding ways to convert some printed publications into digital publications. One big one for me was our registration for our annual high school winter retreat with another church. I would mail a packet to all 50 of my high school youth that included a flyer, a registration sheet, the rental forms, and the tubing forms which created a heavy, costly, tree-killing, paper mailing. This year I have a created an online registration, using Google Forms, that I posted on our youth site. Google Forms is a part of Google Docs, the free online application suite from Google. Youth and volunteers can go online and register, and using options within the form, this creates a neat spreadsheet with all their data including name, cell number, rental information, if they needs lessons, etc. I then share this spreadsheet with the other church, so we both have one spreadsheet with all our vital data for when we call the ski resort to make our lift ticket, rental, and lesson reservations.

So here are some helpful steps in creating your Google Form:

1. Go to docs.google.com and sign in. If you have never used Google Docs, you may need to create a free account. You do not need a Gmail account.
2. Getting started. When you are logged in, click the New tab on the left side on the page and click Form in the drop-down menu. (You may also create another type Google Doc from this menu.)
3. Creating the input form. Here is where you give a name and description to your form, then create all the questions. For each question, you can give it a title, help text, then what type of question you want (text, paragraph text, multiple choices, checkboxes, choose from a list, and scale 1-?), and finally an option to make that question a required question in your form.
4. Tweeking the questions. To add a new question click the Add Question button at the top left of the page. To change the order of the question simply drag the question box and drop it in the order you like. To edit a question click the pencil on the top right of each question box. To delete a question click the trash can.
5. Getting it out there. Once you have your form how you like it, you can either email the form to the group or individuals you like, or, as I like to do, embed the form into your website or blog. This is done by clicking More Actions, then Embed, copying the address it gives you, and pasting into a web design software or some blogging sites.
6. Viewing your results. You can choose to have the Google Forms email you when someone completes a form. Or, docs.google.com will have a list of your forms. Click on one and it will show your spreadsheet with the results, which you can edit, export to to Excel, a PDF, a website, or other programs (under the Share menu). You can also share with others or view a summary of the answers that magically appear in pie charts (for multiple choices answers) and graphs.

For an example of a form that you can fill out click here.
For the results of this example form click here. 

Enjoy using a new tech tool in your ministry!
Justin Snider
YouthDirector - at - GloriaDeiOlympia - dot - org
www.GloriaDeiYouth.org

If I've done it once, I've done it a thousand times; meant to send an e-mail to someone that had an attachment attached, but forgot to actually hit the paperclip to attach the attachment. Sometimes I catch it myself and send a second e-mail right away, but other times the recipient or, even worse, recipients, have to e-mail me back and tell me that I forgot to send them the attachment that I neglected to attach. It's annoying to them and makes me feel like a real dunce. I'm guessing that at least some of you can relate, having sent the same, shall we say, detached e-mails.

So I was excited to notice a new feature in the Gmail Labs a few weeks ago. Forgotten Attachment Detector by Jonathan K which prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so. If you use Gmail, sign-in to your account and click the Settings link at the top right of your screen and then click the Labs tab. Scroll down to Forgotten Attachment Detector and click the Enable button. Now if you indicate in your e-mail that you're going to attach a file, but you haven't actually attached it, you'll get a pop-up window asking if you really mean to send the e-mail without the attachment.

For those that use Thunderbird to manage their e-mail, there is a similar extension called Attachment Reminder which scans your outgoing e-mails for certain keywords and asks if you really mean to send them without attachments if any of those keywords are present.

I would imagine that there are similar tools for Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and other e-mail services that I haven't used as much. If you know of an attachment reminder for one of them, please post it in the comments section below and help others avoid sending e-mails without their accompanying attachments.

Bonus Gmail tip: Add the dragdropupload extension to Firefox and you can drag your e-mail attachments onto the screen without having to browse for them!

I received an e-mail this week asking about online calendars, so I wanted to make a few comments and then share my system. Yahoo unveiled a new version of Yahoo Calendar this past week as well, which I have not yet had a chance to explore, although I used their old calendar way back in 2000! You may remember that awhile back I wrote a post about Online Scheduling and talked about a few sites that I had discovered. The one that impressed me the most at that time was probably Presdo, a site that helps you and others make time to do something. It avoids the back and forth e-mailing that so often creeps into planning, even when scheduling something with just two people.

Presdo has had a busy summer and you can learn about some of the advances they've made to the service at the Presdo Blog. I have not been using the service much, but I've now added the Firefox Extension that lets me add events directly from GMail and other sites. It "adds a simple “Create a Presdo Event” button next to Gmail’s Reply and Forward buttons, so that when it comes time to organize that get together as a result of an email thread, one click is all it takes to start the planning process."

Presdo may be helpful in setting up the time for a meeting or event, but for tracking and publishing events, I am using Google Calendar. I use it to track both my personal calendar and a variety of church events calendars. I also link-in my Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins calendars! When everything is working smoothly, my Google Calendar synchronizes with my Palm Desktop and my Palm handheld using a program called CompanionLink for Google Calendar.

The primary reason that I like using Google Calendar as my central calendar is that I can get to it in a variety of ways and display the events in a variety of ways. It also basically eliminates the process of keeping up the church website calendar because that is the same as my calendar.

Using Google Calendar in other websites allows you to have an automagically updating calendar that always shows the right day at the top. Go into your Google Calendar, under the My Calendars box, click the arrow on the right next to one of your calendars and choose Calendar settings. Scroll down to Embed this Calendar and you'll see a box of HTML that you can put into any website. Click the Customize link and you can embed multiple calendars (color-coded) or change the way that a calendar is displayed.

Users can then subscribe to your calendars with iCal, their own Google Calendar, or even the new Yahoo Calendar. To see how it works, visit one or both of the sites below:

• My church home page, which shows a calendar including three types of events.
• My confirmation home page, which uses the same calendar as the home page, but just shows events relating to confirmation.

The tabs are all live, so while I pick the default view, visitors to these pages can change what they see. These calendars are also shared with my office staff, so they can make additions or corrections as well. I can even add something to my Palm and, after the synchronization is complete, it will show up on the website.

If there is interest, I'll walk through some of the steps that I've sort of glossed over above. Please post a comment on the Tech Geek Blog or send me an e-mail.

You've probably seen the initials RSS or seen the logo on a website or blog that you read but maybe you haven't understood what makes RSS tick. Even as a geek, I didn't get it for a long time. I'd read other geeks talking about how great RSS was, but I didn't see the use. It just looked like another form of getting information that I didn't need. So I ignored it for a long time. Then two things happened. A few of my friends started blogs that I was actually interested in keeping up with and I found an on-line RSS Reader. That's when it began to make sense to me.

RSS originally stood for Rich Site Summary but the acronym has evolved to now mean Really Simple Syndication. The concept is to provide a simple way to let you know when a site has updated content. This content can be a web page, blog post, podcast, or just about anything else. As a user, you subscribe to the feed with a feed reader. Generally, you'll get a snapshot of the content and then, when you click a link, be taken to the full content. The beauty of a reader is that it keeps track of what you have and haven't read.

There are lots of feed readers out there that let you subscribe to RSS feeds, and their similar standard, Atom feeds. They come in two flavors, web-based, and desktop-based. Some of the desktop ones look similar to many e-mail programs. The Firefox browser lets you subscribe to feeds as Live Bookmarks that update the links every so often. This is great for things like news headlines.

A web-based reader is my preference, because I tend to operate from different computers and don't want to have to mark items as read in two or three different places. I use Google Reader to track a variety of blogs, so that I don't have to visit them each day to see if there has been a post. When there is a post, it shows up on my screen. If there isn't one, I don't see anything and don't use any time visiting a blog to see if there happens to be something. I also track a variety of news sources. I can quickly skim the headlines and then read the stories I'm interested in. I follow international, national, and even local news that way, plus anything in the Pittsburgh paper about the Steelers!

Wikipedia has a list of desktop-based and web-based readers here so that you can find the one that works for you.

Common Craft has a video that also explains RSS (far better than me) in plain english here. Watch this video even if nothing I said to this point made sense to you!

A quick update to last week's post. If you wondered (or are still wondering) what Twitter is, check out the short film at http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter . The Common Craft folks have done an excellent job of explaining what Twitter is and why you might want to use it. They have some other great videos there as well!

This week I want to take a look at badges that you put on your blog or website to show your online status or latest status updates. I don't have much of a blog myself, but I'm going to point you to it so that you can see what I'm talking about. Visit http://pastorandy.blogspot.com/ and look at the right column which updates dynamically depending on what I'm doing online.

At the top of the column, underneath my profile, you see my Facebook Profile Badge. This is a small bit of HTML that I pasted into a section on my blogger page. To get your own, visit http://www.facebook.com/badges.php while you're logged into Facebook. There you create your badge and get the HTML that you will paste onto your site. There are options for vertical and horizontal badges displaying as much or as little information as you wish. It's all updated to reflect your latest Facebook status.

Next you'll see the Twitter Updates section. I have this set to display my last five Twitter updates, which are also my last five Facebook status messages. To get this one, I visited http://twitter.com/badges/ and clicked the appropriate links to get a badge for Blogger.

The Online Status section contains my Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk badges. They're all clumped together because I was tired of adding individual sections!

The Skype one comes from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/ where you enter your Skype username and choose a button type to get the HTML code. I like the one that shows my online status to blog visitors.

The Yahoo Messenger one comes from http://messenger.yahoo.com/addpresence.php where you put in your Yahoo ID to get the HTML code.

Finally, the Google Talk one comes from visiting http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New while logged into Google. You get the HTML code and paste it in.

I haven't had too much of a problem with extra SPIM or SPAM from these badges, but if you're nervous about putting your Skype username, Yahoo ID, or Google ID out on the web, you might not want to use these features.

Many of us know that Google has practically become a verb up there with Xerox, Band-Aid, and Kleenex. We use it to refer to searching for something even if we're using another site like GoodSearch to do the actual work. GoodSearch is a site that donates a penny or so for each search performed in its site to a charity of your choice, including Lutheran Disaster Response, the ELCA, or Lutheran World Relief.

Google has lots of other great features in addition to searching for web sites. I'm writing this very article on Google Docs, their online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program. I keep my calendar at Google Calendar, because it allows me to access it from any computer or even my cell phone. I use Picasa Web Albums and the desktop photo management software, Picasa (available for Windows, Macs, and Linus), because it lets me easily tag photos and use them in web albums, blog posts, or e-mails. I even use GMail for my e-mail, because of the sorting features, and my chat client.

I use all of these services from Google because they get how the web should be used. I can get into my stuff from different machines, even different technologies. They provide interfaces for other programers to use in developing tools that branch out from these services. I've also used Google to create web pages and, yes, even to search for things! As the ELCA Youth Ministry Network's new Tech Geek, I'd like to share with you, my youth ministry colleagues, some of the ways I've found to use technology to enable ministry and relationships. I'd also like to hear from you about the sites, widgets, and gadgets that you use in your daily life and ministry. E-mail me at techgeek@elcaymnet.org with your suggestions and thoughts for use in a future TGIF.