Month: December 2007

  • Romeo Elves: Paint the Rock

  • Romeo Elves: Paint the rock teaser

    Since Patti told me I was being a tease about the next elf video, I thought I’d post a little taste test. The final video has a time-lapse premise.

    I wonder how the peeps over at the church marketing labs would like our elf videos? Probably not snobby enough for them.

  • vConvert allows you to save YouTube videos for use later

    vconvert_logoOne of my constant frustrations is that we struggle to use all the media we can find at our different ministry environments at Romeo. We feel like we always want to push the envelope and shape the culture around us instead of being a church that responds 2-3 years after the fact.

    In the last two days we’ve jumped past two big obstacles.

    1. We couldn’t use stuff from YouTube in MediaShout. For whatever reason, we just struggled to get a stable enough file to use consistently.
    2. We couldn’t use every DVD. For some reason MediaShout struggled with certain types of DVDs which is quite frustrating. Even if we could get it to work, it was just one DVD per service as changing discs wasn’t pretty.

    This week I’ve managed to find solutions to both problems.

    1. Enter vConvert. This allows me to easily convert a YouTube video or any other format I find online into a format I can easily use in MediaShout… like Windows Media’s .wmv.
    2. Enter Pinnacles Movie Box. This allows me to easily import any analog signal onto our video PC and capture it. So let’s say we want to show a clip from a movie. (and we obtain permission to do so) I can run it from a DVD player and capture the clip I want in Windows Movie Maker easily.

    Both of these tools will help us in the back of the house on the production side of things. It both makes our lives a lot easier and will make the whole presentation much more stable. I’m very happy to pass along these as recommendations!

    Mega kudos to myhook-ups on these tips. Patti for the Movie Box and Tim for vConvert.

  • Some elves painted the rock in Romeo

    Romeo has a “rock” that people paint to celebrate football victories, birthdays, and just about anything else deemed worth an hour or so of spray painting the 9 foot rock in front of KMart.

    Well, today was our turn to paint the rock. So Jimmy and I, dressed as elves of course, spent an hour or so freezing our elf butts off for comedies sake.

    I’ll be editing the video tomorrow. Amazing stuff.

    So, if you drive by the rock and see that it’s got red/green colors for Christmas. We were the insane people who wrote “Merry Christmas from Romeochurch.com.” Because we know you thought that the Lutheran church did that.

  • Bloggers: Turn off post excerpt

    blog tipWith the tremendous increase in feed reader users and mobile blog reading… I really have to insist on this. You must make sure your feed is sending out the full post and not an except. (Called summary in WordPress)

    Why? The reality is that, as a blogger, you want your readers to actually read what you write and not just see that you have written. Right? Well, having the except feature turned on eliminates a large portion of your readership.

    What’s changed? And why do I need to change? Let’s say your average reader is like me and subscribes to 50-100 feeds. And each day 125-200 things pop up on my reader to read. Let’s say I spend 15-30 minutes per day doing just that, reading blogs. While it is true that I am quickly scanning your posts so an excerpt may be all the more I’ll read anyway… but when I see it’s an excerpt I immediately skip over it. I just don’t have the time or interest to go to your blog.

    Why do people have excerpt anyway? I think it has something to do with stats. Such as, you really want to see that pageview number go up.Just keep this in mind… every day you can take the number of RSS readers you have and add it to your unique visitors! Why? Because people who are subscribed to your RSS are highly likely to read your stuff or else they’d simply unsubscribe to your feed. Other than that, I can’t think of a single good reason to keep excerpts turned on. It certainly doesn’t effect my comment rate as I think some may think it does.

    Let’s say I did want to read the rest of your post? (Which I won’t because excepts are annoying) I am forced to click on it and load another tab. And if I’m mobile (where I do about 25% of my blog reading) I couldn’t look at the rest of your post even if I did want to as most blogs won’t load on a mobile browser very well. And they definitely aren’t worth the time it would take to load the page and then go back to what I was doing. When I’m mobile, an excerpt is just a waste of my time.

    So if you want to increase your blog’s potential to grow do yourself a major favor and turn off the feed excerpt right away. Otherwise I’m killing your feed because I’m sick of scrolling past it.

    Did you do it yet? Really. I’m serious. Do it now so you don’t forget.

  • Elf HQ

    Elf HeadquartersJimmy and I are off to shoot 2 more elf videos for services this weekend. If we have time there will even be some bonus commercials available online only.

    The whole point of these is two fold…

    1. Enjoy them! Seeing church staff dressed like elves should be fun.
    2. Share them! The reason we’re doing all of this is to promote our service on December 23rd. So if you want to see more stuff like this, take action and get people to that service. We’re looking to pack the church out.

    Go to the elf HQ

  • The RIAA is killing itself

    RIAAI don’t think I’ve ever met a person who actually thinks that artists shouldn’t get paid for their work. But the RIAA has clearly lost touch. The idea that consumers can’t share, edit, or even make archival copies of the stuff that they buy is seriously out of touch.

    The RIAA has told a court that ripping your CDs to MP3 format is “unauthorized” and illegal, in a brief filed with the Arizona US District Court where Atlantic Records is suing Jeffrey and Pamela Howell. The last time this issue came up, in the Grokster Supreme Court case, the RIAA’s lawyer said that ripping CDs was not illegal and was implicitly authorized by the record labels. Story

    The internet has changed the ownership game. Consumers have taken the right to edit, share, customize what they buy and they aren’t going to give it back. It won’t be long before the Supreme Court will have to revisit copyright laws for the internet age because we just don’t have a clue how these old laws work in today’s society. Is the RIAA going to sue every person in the country with a computer and an internet connection?

    When the Supreme Court finally comes to its senses and puts this lobby out to pasture, the RIAA will quickly bankrupt itself. Particularly when the major labels start to bolt for a new, better way.

    I predict a new organization will become recognized  by the recording industry that gets the desires of consumers (Who ultimately fund things like the RIAA) and make sure artists are paid fairly for their work.

    At the same time, we need to be responsible consumers and actually buy music instead of stealing it. Artists deserve to be paid, make sure you aren’t part of the problem.

  • Not a snow day

    Kristen and I woke up this morning secretly hoping for a snow day. It didn’t happen. There’s just something about having a Saturday morning on a Wednesday and we were kind of hoping for that relaxed-ness this morning. So instead today is a normal morning. Megan is off to school and Paul is already playing video games on the computer.

    In completely random news: Stoney (our 4 year old yellow lab) is a pathetic beast. He carries around his blanket to sleep on and is hopelessly in love with Kristen. Whenever she leaves he just kind of wonders around and cries. He sits by the back steps and just stares out the window and every once in a while you hear him wimper.

  • YMX: remix

    I don’t know if my blog readers know all that is going on at Youth Ministry Exchange.Here’s a quick snapshot of recent articles.

  • Praise God for Jeanne Assam

    Jeanne AssamNo matter what you think of having an armed security detail at a church, Jeanne Assam was at the right place at the right time. Praise God for her actions.

    I hope others see it in this news report… but God’s hand was all over protecting New Life on Sunday. It’s a miracle that the shooter didn’t do more damage.

    Read the news account

    Here are some statements that impressed me from her statement.

    “did not think for a minute to run away”
    “It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God,”
    “Boyd said Assam was the one who suggested the church beef up its security Sunday following the Arvada shooting, which it did. The pastor credited the security plan and the extra security for preventing further bloodshed.”
    Assam said she was ending three days of fasting on Sunday when fate put her in the path of the gunman.

    “I was praying to God that he direct me” in what to do in life, Assam said. “God made me strong.”

    Amazing stuff there. Sometimes God calls us to do things for Him that make no logical sense. I praise God this woman took action to hear God’s direction and was bold enough to act on it. I hope she is an example for Christians everywhere in that regard.