Search results for: “good news”

  • Strike Update

    Just to update a post from yesterday. In the middle of the night, UAW and GM reached a deal that sent 70,000+ workers back to the production lines today.

    As with all negotiations… when both sides leave thinking they’ve won… it’s a good thing.

  • IMC #12: Extreme makeover website edition

    Looking at this from a internet ministry perspective.

    Criteria for evaluating websites…

    • Don’t care about data architecture
    • Content
    • Design
    • Usability
    • SEO
    • Something else you want looked at…

    Victim #1 Center for Student Missions

    • Conversion goal isn’t all that clear.
    • Probably too much navigation
    • Replace all that navigation with a paragraph explaining your conversion
    • Nice use of text link navigation at the bottom
    • Need a cue for the rollover map

    Victim #2 Intervarsity Corporate site

    • Small text is nuts
    • Calls it "one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen"
    • Limit the choices
    • Make the "find a chapter" thing bigger
    • Think about building a site map into the navigation

    Victim #3 Sports Spectrum

    • UNC colors is a nice touch, popular team colors
    • Nice design
    • Some of the boxes are tough on the eye, not offset enough
    • Great use of red for navigation

    Victim #4 Act of Grace Radio

    • Move logo and text under it to the footer
    • Swoosh design is 1995 look
    • Microphone icons are tough, maybe a little sloppy
    • Top navigation is simple, easy
    • Remove the white "welcome to actofgraceradio.net."
    • It does look, overall, very good.
    • Needs Podcast, RSS feeds, player on home page, etc

    Victim #5 Destino Community

    • Looks like a porn site
    • Red/black is "like 1984"
    • Serif fonts are bad
    • All the font sizes should match
    • Nice use of YouTube… just make sure you link back to your site from YouTube
    • Stick with colors in fonts… adding yellow/orange is a weird addition in about page

    Victim #6 Prophecy Today

    • Looks like a news site
    • Ditch the scrolling text
    • Text is packed a little too tightly
    • Create a little more white space
    • No "who is Jimmy" link even though he’s mentioned a lot

    This was actually a lot of fun. The folks who volunteered their sites were quite brave.

  • Some smokin’ stuff at Youth Ministry Exchange

    Ymx_nofullnameWith fall in full swing all over, things at YMX are rockin’ along. And I don’t just mean the forum community, but all over at YMX things are doing quite well.

    We’ve got better content than ever, better access to artists and new music, better reviews of books and other stuff, and quite nice free giveaways.

    And people are noticing! There is nothing more exciting for a small publisher than seeing people finally start to recognize that you are a producer of good content. And it’s fun from our point of view because we can see that loads more people are signing up for our free weekly newsletter and getting our stuff delivered to them on their feed reader.

    I may sound like a dweeb, but it is just plain fun to see stuff go from idea, to development, to implemtation, to "consumers" consuming and liking what you’ve produced. It’s kind of a little boy high.

    Perhaps again, I’m a dork. But it’s also very exciting for me to see that this infant site, which wasn’t more than a crazy idea 2 years ago… now is getting first class content from people like Thousand Foot Krutch, David Crowder, Erwin McManus, Shane Claiborne… and of course youth ministry "names" like Jeremy Del Rio, Dave Rahn, and Len Evans.

    Ateam
    All the time the YMX team just kind of sits up and looks around long enough to say… "Are you kidding me? Is all of this good stuff really happening? We’re just learning how all of this works!" YMX is clearly a God thing because we really just worked hard and dreamed and the rest of everything has fallen into place for us.

    The best part of where we are right now is that this isn’t the end of our dream for the site. In fact, this is just a milestone… a point of celebration from where we were on the way to where we want to go. Gotta love crazy goals!

  • CSR: MailChimp

    MailchimpFor about 2 months now, YMX has been using an e-mail marketing service for our now weekly newsletter.

    Location:
    www.mailchimp.com (based in Atlanta, Georgia)Csr_excellent

    Description:
    For those who don’t know how things like this work… an e-mail marketing service is the way that e-mail marketers get stuff into your mailbox in a mass kind of way. Way back in the day you could just send out messages via your e-mail out box… but that’s not working anymore. There was simply too much spam and ISP’s started blocking that kind of mail. So places like MailChimp popped up on the market who are extremely diligent in helping companies of all sizes get their wanted, not-spam, newsletters out to customers who actually have requested it. (By definition, that’s how something isn’t spam.) How MailChimp works is that they give you all the code for embedding your opt-in form onto your site (see our example) and then set-up a process where the person who says they want the newsletter "double opt’s in" to make sure they really want it. This makes your e-mail campaign 100% legal in the United States. If someone double opt’s than you cannot be sued by them as being a spammer.

    But MailChimp also offers two fantastic features. 1. The stats are unreal. 2. They have some smokin’ good looking templates for users.

    Service:
    First off, they have live assistance via instant message. Mega-kudos for that. next, they don’t have a nasty hierarchy for getting your stuff fixed. You talk to Dan or Jennifer directly, they are the experts. More than that, they do an incredible job of following up. I had a small issue this week and Jennifer was completely honest… she didn’t know the answer. But within an hour she sent me an e-mail, explained everything, and made sure I was 100% satisfied. One other thing that makes me give them my highest ranking is that they are not done learning. They are making a huge effort to learn from their users by actually leaving their offices and doing site visits. How cool is that for an online company?

    Cost:
    As you would expect, a super professional service with great customer service isn’t free. But it isn’t expensive either. They have two main options… you can buy credits to send your mail… like $.03/message or you can pay a monthly fee and send up to 8 messages per month. (This is what YMX does.) But we’re getting all of this, which really equals no hassle, for only $15/month. (Go here and click on "pricing") That’s the perfect cost for a small business or church.

    Rating:
    This is a first for me. But great/personable customer service, a powerful tool for any small business or church, and a reasonable, grow with you, price forces me to declare MailChimp my first ever Superior. It doesn’t get any better than MailChimp. They are best in class.

  • Journalism… what’s wrong?

    A member of my small group is a journalism major and asked Kristen and I the following question. (She doesn’t know that I am part of a site that publishes stuff)

    Q: Why should people go into journalism, why is it a good major?
    A: I think journalism needs more people with integrity. People who embrace the ideals of journalism and stand up for truth.

    Q: If journalism were to go to the doctor, what would the doctor say is wrong with journalism?
    A: Your writing for an audience and advertising dollars and not for the sake of journalism.

    Of course, another thought is that the face of journalism itself is changing. Gone are the days when a tiny group of people (by percentage) dictated the news stories out there. With blogs, newsvine.com, digg.com, and the burgeoning power of social networking and other stuff labeled "Web 2.0" the face of journalism is much different than it was just a couple years ago. Check out wikipedia’s page on journalism and you will see that the definition of journalism itself is morphing. What a fascinating time we live in!

    Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. That phrase seems hopelessly dead.

  • Glutton for Punishment

    Yeah, I’m spending my morning doing site maintenance and a big upgrade. I even had to take the site and forums offline to make this happen. So far so good… a little bit of sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen.

    Equally bored or just morbidly curious? Watch what I’m doing… live!

    Licensetowed
    In other news, Kristen and I went to see License to Wed last night. Robin William was stinking funny. There were many moments when you could hear the audience roar with laughter. I think I may be putting together a proper review for the site. I thought it was worth seeing, cute, a little crass at times but not over the top. Actually, while there was some good pre-marital counseling sex talk there wasn’t a lot of cussing. And as someone who has actually done pre-marital counseling… there were many new ideas to implement. (Yeah, right!) There were some sacrilegious moments as well but not over the top. Long story short… it was a good date flick.

  • Why I blog.

    Chris Brooks asked the question, "Why do you blog?" Here was the comment I left:

    I blog for a few reasons. First and foremost since about 7th grade I’ve journaled. I remember by 7th grade reading teacher telling the class "if you want to be a good writer, you need to keep a journal to practice." That same year I wrote a book review that got published in my hometown newspaper and I thought… Hmmm, I like that. So I kept journaling in notebooks all the way through middle and high school.

    In 1999 I started my first blog. I liked that people read what I wrote… and I quickly got tired of it. But the seed had been planted and a couple years later I tried again.

    My current blog is version 4.0. I’ve changed the "why" of it often but the original reason still stands. I want to be a good writer, so I journal. To me, if other people read it… that’s OK, but the audience is really myself.

    Sometimes I get the question, "How do you find time to blog?" I have two responses to this…
    a. I type really fast. So a thought that I’ve had in my brain doesn’t take long to type.
    b. If I don’t record thoughts… the good ones, the bad ones, and the boring ones… I won’t remember them.

    Blogging is more than just an outlet for me. It’s all part of the writing/speaking process to me. Just like I wouldn’t stop reading the Bible, I wouldn’t stop journaling.

    For those who don’t blog but read blogs, why do you do that?

    For those who blog, why do you blog?

  • Fish & Chips are Evil… apparently

    SharkfoodApparently the food I ate at the chippy last week wasn’t what I thought it was. Turns out it was shark meat! Ooops. Darn good shark meat though.

    Since "spiny dogfish shark" is not the most appetizing name, in
    recent years fishmongers have given it other names in hopes of
    appealing to consumers. In France it is sold as small salmon. Belgians
    know it as sea eel. Germans smoke the meat and call it Schillerlocken.

    It is perhaps best known in English-speaking countries, particularly
    the U.K., as rock salmon, one of the most common fish in "fish and
    chips" shops.

    "Since everything is fried, fish and chips can be almost anything," TRAFFIC program associate Jill Hepp told Discovery News.

    Hepp said restaurant demand for "rock salmon" has devastated the
    shark’s population off the coasts of Britain and France, where "the
    spiny dogifsh is widely considered to be critically endangered."
    Vendors now often look to the United States for catches. The sharks are
    fished from around the mid-Atlantic states to the coast of
    Massachusetts.     Story

  • ustream.tv experiment #2

    Our second attempt at webcasting stuff from the church will take place this morning at 9:00 AM. For those new to the ustream.tv concept… be warned. This is nothing like broadcast television. Think of this as a live camera feed, completely raw and unedited. (Something similar to the raw feed you can watch on FoxNews.com) You’ll be getting a raw audio feed as well… straight for a little mic on the sound board. Keyword for this second attempt: Experiment.

    Message notes are below

    (more…)

  • Three Cheers for Northern Ireland

    Nulster27
    I know this story isn’t hitting the news around home since it doesn’t fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" category, but it should.

    BELFAST, Northern Ireland: Protestant leader Ian
    Paisley, who spent decades refusing to cooperate with Northern
    Ireland’s Catholic minority, was elected Tuesday to oversee a
    power-sharing administration alongside his longtime Sinn Fein foes.

    The unopposed election of Democratic Unionist Party chief Paisley,
    81, as "first minister" of a new 12-member administration heralded an
    astonishing new era for Northern Ireland following a 9-year struggle to
    forge a Catholic-Protestant administration, central goal of the
    U.S.-brokered Good Friday accord.     link

    I don’t pretend to understand the troubles, but it is extremely exciting to think that long-term peace in Ireland seems to be arriving. Along similar lines, in the past two weeks both the UVF and UDA have publicly announced that they are ceasing their paramilitary actions. In the UVF announcement they basically said, "We ending all arms dealings and putting arms dealers far enough away from locals that they won’t have access to any more guns."

    Of course… this is all great news from Kristen and I as in 6 days we’ll be leaving for Northern Ireland. I know it’s just my theory, but I am certain that there is a correlation between these steps towards peace and the burgeoning "revival-like" movement of Christ in Northern Ireland.

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