Josh Young

Tomorrow, my wife and I “officially” start our week-long vacation (we’re not actually leaving until Sunday, but calling tomorrow the official beginning). It will be nice to get away from everything for a few days. Luckily, we’re going somewhere where there isn’t a whole lot to do except be outside, hike, and whatnot, so there won’t be any distractions from just plain relaxing - which will be great.

Later!!!

I was reading a post on Godbit.com the other day, and it got me interested in looking at this more. I had read things about Ruby on Rails, which is similar in some ways, but for some reason this caught my attention more than Ruby.

I don’t do a lot of development with PHP from the ground up, but after looking at Code Igniter, I might be tempted to delve into it more now. I like the fact that there are tools out there that make it easier to develop things (which are also open source - hooray!), and it makes me want to explore them more.

Anyway, this is more of a rant than anything else, so I guess that’s it for now.

We had a great practice last night for Apex (if you don’t know what Apex is, go here). I’m really looking forward to us kicking off this new ministry, and I’m excited to see where it goes. It should cover a lot of new ground for our church, and to me, that’s really exciting.

Also, things will probably start to kick more in gear with our new website this week (or next). I have set the tentative release date for July 1, and it will creep up on us if we’re not careful! Things are already starting to take shape with it. I have already integrated our e-newsletter, The Connection, into the site so that you can view archives of all of them (if you want to sign up for the newsletter, leave me a comment - you’ll be able to do all of that through the new site when it’s done, but in the meantime, you can leave me a comment here or send me an e-mail). Also, I’ve included an e-vite, support for all of our weekly messages to be either streamed or downloaded (along with the full text of the message), contact forms, and I think Mike may even enter the world of blogging!

Anyway, there’s a lot of new stuff on the horizon for the Amelia Church of Christ that will be unfolding over the next several months (and years), and I’m just glad to be a part of it.

I had a great meeting with Mike Edmisten (my good friend and our minister) last night about our new church website and some other technology possibilities. I think I may have scared him a bit with my overwhelming geekiness, but other than that, things went extremely well.

I’m really excited about the direction of our church and especially the possibilities that the web brings to us. It’s such a great tool, and I just want to see Christians using it in the most effective ways we can. There is so much opportunity there.

I think we’re hoping to have the new site done by early July, but we haven’t decided on an “official release date” yet. That will come soon though.

One of the things that I’ve become extremely interested in over the last several months is how to get more organized and find a way to sift through all of the data that I come across on a daily basis. I just read an announcement earlier on lifehacker.com that Google Labs have unleashed yet another awesome product. It’s called Google Notebook, and it’s a great way to keep track of snippets of things that you stumble upon on the web.

But then I read a comment from someone who mentioned Clipmarks, which I had never heard of before. So, I checked both of them out, and I’ve gotta say, I like them both. I like the feel of Google Notebook - it’s familiar, just like all of Google’s other tools. But I also am extremely impressed with Clipmarks. It seems to be more powerful than Notebook. Both have great integration with Firefox, so that’s good too.

Both of them allow you to highlight or “clip” things from the web pages that you are on and then save them, tag them, add them to collections, etc. Then, you can go back to your page and look at all of the snippets that you’ve saved instead of having to glean it all over again from whatever site you were on.

I’ve also been using a TiddlyWiki for sort of the same purpose, but that’s more similar to Google Notebook than Clipmarks. Anyway, if you’re looking for something to organize what you find on the web, check them out. They’re all free, so sign up for an account and test them out.

Well, I’ve officially entered the world of blogging. We’ll see how this goes.

I’m not exactly sure who would actually want to read what I’m thinking, but maybe this will be more for my benefit than yours.

And we’re off!