Our Story

“Honda Mousetrap Ad”:http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/newcars/300k_player.swf. This is one of those rare email forwards that is actually worth passing along. Honda Europe designed a fascinating mousetrap-like ad from Honda parts. The result is incredible to watch. Read the details and then click the link below. “More info”:http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/accord/index.html at the Honda (UK) Accord site. (via my mother-in-law)

There are NO computer graphics or digital tricks in the film you are about to see. Everything you see really happened in real time, exactly as you see it. The film required 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again. The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. By the time it was over, they were ready to change professions.

Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in “free” viewings. (Honda isn’t paying a dime to have you watch this commercial!) When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation — including the costs. There are six and only six hand-made Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.

Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) is parts from those two cars. The voiceover is Garrison Keillor. When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real.

Oh…about those funky windshield wipers. On the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start functioning automatically as soon as they become wet. It looks a bit odd in the commercial.

As amazing as this is, the commercial is actually based on an earlier film from the 1970s called “How Things Move” by two Swiss self-destructing artifacts artists.

P.S. Some sharp-eyed folks claim that tires rolling UPHILL necessarily require computer-generated effects. Not so. The sequence where the tires roll up a slope looks particularly impressive but is very simple. There is a weight [in each] tire and when the tire is knocked, the weight is displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tire rolls up the slope.

It’s official: the Village Church site is now running on WordPress, the open-source content management system. The migration didn’t take a lot of time, but was spread out over a number of nights and weekends. I’ll go into detail about the actual implementation, but, for the uninitiated, here are some the main advantages of using WordPress.

h3. Advantages

h4. Lowers the geek barrier

Anyone who can use the web can use WordPress. WordPress, in the vein of other popular blogging systems, makes publishing on the web as easy as writing a Word document. You don’t need a Computer Science degree to use it, or even to be very technical at all. This is huge in “democratizing” our web presence — it lets more people take ownership of it.

h4. Quicker updates to content

The overhead involved in updating HTML by hand is significantly greater than typing in a web form and clicking submit. Plus, kludging together HTML code by hand — even if it’s cleverly organized, efficient HTML code — just sucks. WordPress makes posting on the web quicker, easier, and, quite frankly, more fun.

h4. Huge development resources, sweet plugin architecture

When I constructed the Village Church web presence, the church was able to take advantage of my talent, background, and free time. When we implemented WordPress, we’ve suddenly tapped into the vast resources of a thriving open-source community _plus_ any third-party plugin developers. Yesterday, I found out that the “contact form”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/contact/ I wrote (“which had it’s own issues, anyway”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/09/14/secure-contact-forms/) broke after we moved over to WordPress. Whoops. That meant I had to slap together a quick replacement. I had it done in about 30 minutes by using a plugin which is more robust, maintained by much better developers, and is _way_ simple to implement.

h3. Implementation

So, on to implementation. The Village Church uses “Pages”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages pretty extensively for our static content (such as the “About”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/about/ section), which were able to reproduce the pretty URLs we had set up with the old site. Aside from the Contact form I mentioned above, the News and Sermons are the only “Post”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts content we have on the site. We’re using “Categories”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Manage_Categories_SubPanel to determine where a post should appear: if it’s News, drop it on the homepage, if it’s a Sermon, drop it in the “Sermon archive”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/. We also have put conditions in the individual archive pages to change the display, based on what category we’re looking at (“here’s a helpful article on that”:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/22/creating-multiple-single-posts-for-different-categories/). That way, Sermons and News items don’t look like each other. We’ve also set up a Featured category (which is a child of Sermons) which floats a copy of the sermon information to the top of the page, making it easy to feature or un-feature content. There is also a little include file that show the latest Sermon on the homepage (“using WPDB”:http://codex.wordpress.org/WPDB).

Initially, I thought our “Events”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ page could work this same way, where each event would be a Post with an Event category. I found that after testing this, though, that it was very kludgy. WordPress is just not meant to be a calendar, and it’s *really* not supposed to be a calendar mixed with other content types as Posts. In the meantime, the calendar is still a page of hand-coded definition lists, but we’re looking for a better web-based calendar (and preferably one with an “iCal feed”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/) to make our church administrator’s life easier. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Speaking of feeds, the Village Church is now sporting some spiffy XML goodness. WordPress makes it dead simple to syndicate any content by adding a /feed to the end of any URL. Want a News feed?

“http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/feed”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/feed.

This makes Podcasting “laughably easy”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting:

“http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/feed”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/feed

This link works in iTunes without a problem, so I published it to the iTunes “Religion & Spirituality” directory. You can now subscribe to the Village Church in iTunes. We’ll hold off on announcing that, though, until I write some warm and fuzzy “getting started” content “like WNYC”:http://www.wnyc.org/about/podcasting.html has.

Migrating our site design wasn’t trivial, but wasn’t really hard, either. Since we’d already moved everything to valdiating HTML/CSS, putting in the WordPress tags instead of static content was just a matter of time. We also needed to work out some of the text formatting on the pages once we were done with the design.

The implementation of WordPress isn’t huge in terms of adding features or new functionality, but it does create a stable platform for us to build on as we continue to bring more of our community experience to the web. Things like comments, adding more types of “Worship” content (not just the Sermons), and involving other ministry leaders in posting their own material will enable others outside the church to see what the Village Church is all about.

No, really. Apple may have announced their “new iPod”:http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html today, making it just as dificult to choose between the Nano and the iPod as it was to choose bettween the Mini and the iPod a year ago (and, yes, I want one). But, don’t miss the new front in Apple’s blitz to become an “entertainment company.” I’m talking about the iMac G5, which ordinarily is not something worth drooling over if you’re already satisfied with your existing computer.

“And then I saw this.”:http://www.apple.com/imac/tour/

Go ahead and take a minute to spin through the demo of Apple’s latest application called “Front Row.” On the face of it, it seems like a nice piece of software to navigate through the media on your computer, and you kind of think, “gee, that’s nice.” Then you watch a DVD on it. And you listen to a playlist from iTunes on it. Then you watch an on-demand television show on it. Then you catch up to your favorite news podcast on it. Then the first thought hits you: “Wow, it’s like a giant iPod.” Then the second thought: “What if I hung one of these on the wall?” Or, if you’re a home theater enthusiast, you might think, “What if I hooked it up to a projector?”

Now the third thought: “If I did that, why would I use a television anymore?”

My wife and I started out our marriage without television because we thought it would be a good way to make ourselves commit more fully to spending time with each other. At the end of a year, we took another look at our decision and found out that neither of us really missed TV. It’s been over three years since we’ve had television service into our apartment. Reading books, watching DVDs and browsing the web have all replaced time wasted in front of the “idiot box” where I spent way too much of my teenage life. When we first got rid of TV, I thought we were being countercultural. Now, I wonder if we were just ahead of the curve.

That you can replace two or three or more remotes with Apple’s rediculously simple two-button device is staggering, but, then, they did it with the iPod, right? Will Apple’s ease-of-use engineering beat out Microsoft’s floundering efforts to get a “Home Media Center”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/ into the cultural consciousness? Hard to say. But my first glimpse of Front Row tells me this: I’d use it in a heartbeat.

And, once you’ve got an Apple in your living room, a dozen other thoughts spring to mind like:

* How cool would it be to have a conference call with three of my friends on iChat AV on a 42-inch screen from my couch?
* Can I stream content such as movies, photos and music from my laptop (or friends’ laptop) to my Apple set-top box?
* Could this mean that Apple will start selling huge LCD screens “like Dell”:http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/tvs?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs? (Oh, wait, don’t they kind-of “already do this”:http://www.apple.com/displays/?)
* What do we make of ??Steve Jobs??’ statement that “TVs and computers won’t likely merge”:http://www.macworld.com/2004/02/features/themacturns20jobs/index.php? That you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on?
* Who cares about “TiVo”:http://www.tivo.com and similar PVR devices that “time-shift” the TV networks’ content when you can just order your TV a la carte?
* Could it be possible that the analysts are “missing the big picture here”:http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1205949?

All very interesting questions, indeed. But the question that I really want answered is this: the “Mac Mini”:http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html already ships with built-in S-video, so when do they ship it with an infrared port and an Apple remote?

Ever get the feeling that you’re not doing enough with the resources you have? My brother-in-law “just recently wrote”:http://www.posegate.org/russ/Oct2005/givin_it_up/ that he’s thinking of moving over to a free “Blogspot”:http://www.blogger.com/start account–primarily because he’s trying to squeeze the most out of his single-income, graduate-student, baby-on-the-way budget.

It occurred to me that our use of our hosting account is way underutilzed: we’re using 19% of the web space we have available and we have three domains registered out of our unlimited domain hosting. Our host costs us about $115 a year (which doesn’t include incentives like the $40 gift certificate they just sent us), and Google just mailed us a check for $100 for “hosting their ads”:https://www.google.com/adsense/ for 18 months.

*Aside:* Why did Google send us this cash? As you can see, we haven’t hosted ads here since our “Wordpress migration”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/02/12/migrated-to-wordpress/ back in February. However, while Wordpress hosts the majority of the pages you see on this site, the MovableType HTML pages are still on the server (I never removed them), and they still get traffic from random search engines or bloggers. So, we’re basically getting paid for hosting ads that 90% of our visitors never see. This will change, though: now that I realize we can get real money for hosting these ads, we’ll be adding them to the Wordpress site real soon.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that it costs a whopping $4.50 a month for us to host the blog here, and we’re not making the most of it. Donating some space is totally not a big deal for us at all, so I think we’ll do it if Russ wants in. What have you done with your free web space?