Josh Young

Just read a post over at Lifehacker about a new feature that was rolled out in Gmail (which I just noticed this morning also). Now when someone e-mails you a Word document as an attachment, you have the option of opening it in Google Docs. They’ve been doing this for a while with Excel documents, but now Word is included. It apparently also works with Open Office docs and some others.

I love Google. As if you didn’t already know that.

Lifehacker

Hallelujah! No more bloated systems from Dell! (unless you still want one)

I’ve always been sick of uninstalling the buttload of programs that Dell puts on their systems that are totally useless to me (and whoever I might be setting a Dell computer up for). Now, you can buy a Dell system that has a blank hard drive — ready for you to put whatever OS you want on it. It’s great because you don’t get all the stuff you don’t want, you don’t waste time, and they’re finally promoting opensource operating systems and programs (which more people need to be doing).

Way to go Dell!

Dell: Dimension n-Series

Well, I’ve officially switched to Wordpress. There may be a bug or two that I need to work out today, so be patient.

The new site for Luminous Student Ministries is getting dangerously close to being released.

Here’s a little teaser for those of you who are curious.

More details to come later.

For those of you who are subscribed to my RSS feed, please make sure that you’re subscribed to the following address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeekToReach

I’m getting ready to make some changes, and if you’re subscribed to that feed, then you won’t have any problems.

Any feeds that start with www.joshandmarie.com will no longer be functional after the changes.

Thanks!

I just read a post over at BetaChurch.org that talks about a very helpful site called BrowserShots.org. You can input a URL and it will give you screenshots of what your site looks like on different browsers, resolutions, colors, etc. No more downloading and testing on a ton of different browsers!

For any of you who do any web work, this is priceless. It’s always frustrating to get something looking good in Firefox, only to find the IE rips it to pieces. Or that two little things work differently in Safari.

The only caveat to this is that other people can see your site in the screenshot queue (which usually isn’t that big of a deal, not to me at least).

I tried it out on our site for Amelia Church of Christ, and I found that Safari was center aligning text in two table header cells on our front page. Not a big deal, but I added a simple line to the CSS file, and now the site is even more consistent across browsers.

I’m a big fan of simple, helpful tools (especially free ones), and BrowserShots.org is great.

I just read a great post over at Lifehacker about free (mostly opensource) software.

A website called SoftwareFor.org put together a CD (which you can download and burn) full of free software for “starving students” (or whoever else would find it useful). There is also another great website that provides a CD full of opensource (free) software called TheOpenCD.

These are two great resources for some software that you might find extremely useful, but not have the budget to pay for some of the higher end, namebrand stuff. Sometimes the money in churches has to be stretched extra far, and this is a great way to help the funds go further while still using some great tools to do some really cool things.

Bottom line, with so many free and opensource options out there, there’s no excuse for churches to say that they “can’t afford” to do certain things that are tech related. Sure, this isn’t the answer to everything, but it’s just a small example of what you can do without spending any money.