Josh Young

We just shot, edited and uploaded a new welcome video to our church website.

You can check it out here.

Just reading through one of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, this morning, and I came across the beautiful gem known as Songerize.

Really want to listen to a song right now? Just go to Songerize, type it in, and it will play. That easy. If it doesn’t find your song, try another (FYI, it’s found every song I’ve tried so far).

This is ridiculously cool, especially if you’re in the mood to listen to a great song but don’t have it handy. Plus, it’s dead simple.

Give it a try. Let me know what you think.

Songerize

HT: Lifehacker

Awesome new feature for Google Docs.

Now you set up a form that users can fill out that will populate a spreadsheet in Google Docs. Instead of sharing a spreadsheet, you can just set up the form and people can enter information that way.

Looks pretty cool. I’m already thinking of a few possibilities that this could be used for.

Do you have any ideas?

Official Google Docs Blog - Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information

Yeah, so my whole “making time for more posts in 2008” isn’t exactly roaring, but whatever.

Yesterday, Joomla 1.5 (stable) was released. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I have a great fondness of Joomla. It’s open source, and I’ve used it on several church websites in the last few years. It has its quirks, but once you get past them, it’s a great CMS.

There are some HUGE updates with version 1.5. They basically rewrote the entire core of the CMS, which is great news for developers and designers. Much improved from what I read.

I may be starting some projects soon that require a robust CMS, and Joomla will certainly be first on my list to try. I’m anxious to see how 1.5 works in action. If you haven’t tried Joomla, now would be the perfect time.

Read more about Joomla

HT: Innovating Tomorrow

Everyone’s talking about Google’s new addition to Gmail today. They’ve added IMAP support.

What the heck is IMAP, you may ask? Well, let’s just say that it’s a very cool way to use e-mail.

Say you have an iPhone and a Gmail account. You’d like to be able to use the mail app on your iPhone, but you’d also still like to be able to login to Gmail when you’re at a computer and view it over the web. And you want them both to be the same (you’re awful demanding, aren’t you). So if you check a message on your iPhone, you want it to show that you’ve read it and/or moved it online too.

Well, with IMAP, that’s exactly what happens.

I could explain more, but why would I when so many other people have already done it? If you want to read the nerdy details, check out Wikipedia’s IMAP entry for more info.

Read more:

• Official Google Blog
• Lifehacker
• Ragamuffin Soul
• Leave it Behind
• Lifehacker (again)

Edit:

Here’s the video Jeff referenced below.

Looks like iTunes is dropping their DRM-free iTunes Plus music from $1.29 to $0.99 (which is the same price as their regular DRM music).

I posted recently about Amazon’s new DRM-free MP3’s. Good to see that it’s spurring on changes.

HT: Lifehacker

Well, I have officially entered the Facebook realm. Up until this point, I had kind of ignored it, but I thought maybe it was time I check it out. Interesting social network. A lot easier to find people that you would “want” to find. I’ve got a link to my profile in the sidebar here if you’re interested.

I guess maybe I’ll start paying attention to all of the Facebook blog postings I read about now relating to the church.

Amazon has launched their new MP3 Downloads store where you can download 256 kbps DRM-free MP3’s for as low as $0.89 per song or $7.99 per album.

This is awesome news.

However, the selection is a bit limited (at the moment). For example, I did a search for “Leeland,” and it didn’t produce any results in the MP3 Downloads store. But they do have Crowder, Tomlin, Bethany Dillon, and lots of others.

Pretty impressive.

Amazon.com MP3 Downloads

via Lifehacker

Yes, another Google post. I know, I know…I have other stuff to post, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Soon.

I was doing some Google Reader-ing, and I came to a post by my favorite productivity blog, Lifehacker, where I learned that Google has officially added presentations to their docs suite.

I took it for a quick spin, and it’s not too bad. You can even have people join you online for the presentation. And it has chat built in to the side panel for just that.

Looks like an excellent way to collaborate on presentations or show some slides to an online audience (public or private).

Give it a try, and let everybody know what you think in the comments.

EDIT: Check out this great video that summarizes the benefits of using online document management services like Google Docs.

Google Docs (now with presentations)

Lifehacker - Launch: Google Docs Adds Presentations

Official Google Blog Announcement

Hallelujah! Google finally added a search function to Google Reader! RSS junkies rejoice!

There are even options to search all items, starred items, shared items, or items in a specific folder/tag or from a specific blog that you’re subscribed to.

This is a huge benefit if you’re ever searching for something that you know you’ve read before.

Kudos for Google to finally giving us what we’ve been asking for!

Google Reader