Our Story

At times, the blog can be a bit like Audrey II — never really satisfied until it’s sucking the “life out of you”:http://wavcentral.com/cgi-bin/log/log.cgi?id=4252&sound=/sounds/movies/little_shop/lshfeed.mp3. I exaggerate, but the feeling of blogger’s guilt that kicks in after successfully maintaining an online presence for the better part of three years can be a powerful motivator. The fact is, being brilliantly original and witty — and doing it for free — is difficult to sustain unless you, oh say, take a 6-week “vacation in Europe”:http://www.posegate.org/russ/topic/france_2005/index.php. Of course, the only thing worse than a prodigal blogger is one who whines about his inability to make blogging a priority, so let’s move on.

So what have we been up to? Well, I recently discovered that Schmoo is swapping animal stories on two or three message boards now. I gently guided her to contribute something to Our Story (“Are you telling stories on these message boards that could be on our blog??”), so watch for that sometime soon. When I haven’t been working at the new gig, I’ve been working on any number of side projects. Like the manufacturing business idea that my Dad wants to start. Or the coffeehouse ministry in Newark set to launch sometime next year. Or building an extremely tech-savvy and innovative web presence for The Village Church. Let alone the family stuff like making time for my bride, making sure the electricity stays on, and — oh yeah — we almost moved again.

Of those things, the Village Church site has certainly been the most technically interesting and fulfilling. The migration to a highly accessible, semantically meaningful, and CSS-driven website last year felt pretty good in and of itself (“before”:http://web.archive.org/web/20040920153241/http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/, “after”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com). But, in fact, was simply one small step towards a flexible and sustainable architecture for the long term. I spent about three months evaluating Content Management Solutions and am currently in the process of migrating the site to WordPress.

This is one of those tech decisions you make after a long, thoughtful cost/benefit analysis. We could have gone with another CMS product such as MovableType — I even had permission from Six Apart to use a not-for-profit free license and already had a full two years’ experience with the platform — but the fact is that WordPress has too much going for it to be overlooked. While WP is generally regarded as “just a blog tool,” it’s elegant codebase, flexible plugin system, “effective leadership”:http://www.photomatt.net, and thriving “open source ecosystem”:http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000484.html positions it as a leading contender for publishing on the web today. The kicker for The Village Church, though is that *three years from now*, we will continue to benefit from the technical and political stability of the WordPress community. ??Mark Pilgrim?? noted in his seminal “Freedom 0″:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0 (which, arguably, was the tipping point for WordPress’ already growing popularity) that free software will persist because it is built on principles of openness: long after most commercial software ceases to be useful, open source will continue to thrive because of the communities that form around it.

Anyway, that sounded like something we wanted for the church.

The decision to move to WordPress was also critical because we need the acceleration. As far as a web presence is concerned, we’re moving too slow. Every component of the site is hand-rolled HTML and CSS (with the occasional dash of PHP), so simple posts “like this”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/2005/07/village-life-deux/ can chew up a good couple of hours of copy, paste, upload, preview, edit, upload, preview, tweak, upload, preview, post. A good portion of the site is chunked up into include files that help with writing content in one place and having it show up in several other places (a design I learned with MovableType and intend to leverage for WordPress), but only enough to keep from absorbing even more time. Even our process of updating the site through CVS — which is otherwise a brilliant technology — is far too high a barrier for a non-techie.

But, aside from “making things easier to post,” WordPress is showing some pretty interesting potential in its core functionality. Take, for example, the hierarchical categories for posts. The plan right now is to tag any new content we post into a main site section using categories: news, sermons, events or ministries. Each of those pages will then show the “posts” for that category, which is kind of nice. But, because we can drill down even further, we can create “book” and “topic” sub-categories for sermons. So, for each sermon that Sam preaches, we will be able to associate it with the book on which it was preached (say, “Genesis”) and an overarching topic (“marriage”). Our pastor already has a taxonomy of categories he uses — we would just need to integrate it. The benefit? Being able to look at sermons preached by book or by topic, as well as chronologically listed. And all that by clicking two checkboxes.

And, yes, there will be Podcasting. Which, incidentally, is why doing this all by hand is too slow: Podcasting is huge, now. People in my Bible study are reading about it “in the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/technology/circuits/28pogue.html?ex=1123214400&en=874553f0af6bd6b5&ei=5070&emc=eta1 and downloading the goods “in iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/podcasting. If we’re out the door with a Podcast any later than September, I fear we’ll miss the buzz window. I mean, people will still be able to find us in iTunes, and the site will certainly advertise the feature, but that “wow” reaction you hope to get with cutting edge technology slowly turns into a “you, too?” after only a few weeks.

Anyway, this is just a little bit of the online geekery I’ve been up to lately. When we go to launch, you can be sure that the Village Church will announce it on the homepage and that I’ll have an even geekier blog than this to share the gory details.

In the meantime, I’ll try posting some of those 54 links I have stacked up in my Backpack for the blog!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One of the crucial necessities of being efficient on a new machine for me is to know a few often-used shortcut keys. It’s a nerdy programmer/analyst thing, but I love being able to navigate through the operating system without hardly touching the mouse. Some people think this is actually a sign of some sort of bizarre elitism — that geeks relish in the ability to memorize arcane shortcut keys as a sign of an implicit geek hierarchy (not too unlike the “Rock Snob”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767918738/103-8439184-2867862?v=glance, for example). I think I have enough sense not to fall into that camp, though. Mousing over to an icon takes just enough context-switching to be distracting:

# You’re doing something interesting which requires lots of keyboarding (like blogging)
# You hear a crappy song on iTunes that you want to skip past
# You Command + Tab over to that window but…you had minimized it^*^
# At this point your brain goes “What? Where’s the window? Oh…” and your blogging (or whatever) slams to a halt
# You wave the mouse around a few times to figure out where it is
# You drag it down to the Dock
# Meanwhile, you’re brain is asking these subconscious questions:
## Is your aim accurate?
## What’s that other icon doing there?
## Is this the one I want?
# You click on the icon and the window maximizes
# You use a shortcut key to advance to the next track
# You Command + Tab back to what you were doing
# Brain: “What was I doing again?”

Anyway, for all my digging around and asking questions of Mac heads, I haven’t been able to figure out how to unminimize a window from the Dock without using the mouse. On Windows, you’d use the Window Key + M to minimize, and then you could use Alt+Tab to cycle back to your minimized window, which would automatically restore it to the previous window size. Not so with the Mac. While there’s a perfectly acceptable analog to Windows Key + M — in fact it’s Apple Key (“Command”) + M — there’s no good way to unminimize without using the mouse: Command+Tab won’t do it automatically.

I did some digging online and a quick Google search turned up these helpful pages:

* “Magical Macintosh Key Sequences”:http://davespicks.com/writing/programming/mackeys.html
* “A (Near)-Complete List of Mac Keyboard Shortcuts”:http://www.macobserver.com/columns/firstmac/2005/20050422.shtml
* “Keyboard Control”:http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/keyboard.html

But, alas, no “unminimize” command.

^*^Actually, there is a way to unminimize iTunes by using Command + 1, but most other applications don’t use this shortcut.

Finally, finally, finally, after four years of waiting, drooling, and pining, I was able to buy one of these. And all I had to do was lose my job.

(Well, okay, and then find another job before the severance ran out).

Update: thanks, Mike! I’m definitely open to suggestions for favorite Mac programs!

As a follow up to my goal of boosting our Google rank for the words “greenwich village,” it occured to me while hacking some site templates that a very minor tweak could possibly reap some huge benefits. If you check out the site for a moment, you’ll notice The Village Church logo at the top of the page.

Typically, this kind of thing would be placed on the page using something like a CSS background-image or perhaps an <img> tag. But, for some semantic bonus points, I’m using a method that’s somewhat like Fahrner Image Replacement (design geekery here) to display an image inside of an <h1> tag. You can view the page source to see what I’m talking about. The upshot is that while people see our logo, Google sees the text embedded in the header which, until today, has been “The Village Church.”

The beautiful thing is that I can place whatever I want in that header tag and Google will take note without disturbing the human user on the site. Even better, this header is contained in one include file for the whole site, so I can change this text in one place and see the effects across the site. Sweet. The header (and its title, for what that’s worth) now read “The Village Church in Greenwich Village.”

A lot of thought went into the site architecture when I was doing this redesign–it’s always nice to see a good design carry forward benefits into situations like this.

So, there’s a new free Google product available for download called the Google Accelerator. It’s available here, but you’d best to let this one pass you by. The accelerator uses a concept called a proxy to store web visited pages and “prefetch” others that you might visit, giving you the perception of a faster online experience. Aside from the security concerns over passing all of your personally identifiable traffic and browsing information through one company (though one could argue that your ISP technically does this, too), the accelerator also caches files that may contain vital information that you might pass along the web, such as your back account number.

What’s worse is that Google’s method of prefetching links — downloading all the links on the page that you might click on — has the unfortunate side effect of breaking some web applications (via). For instance, if your using a database application with a “delete database” link on the page, well, when Google prefetches the link, it deletes your database for you. Bad news bears.

Last week I went on eBay and bought a device that I thought I’d never have another use for: a Palm organizer. If you’ve known me for any amount of time (or perhaps even dug through the archives of this site), you’ll likely know that I’ve had a long history with these fantastic-but-sometimes-maddening devices.

I purchased my first Palm back in 1999 as a college student at CCM. I had been drooling over these devices for years, and finally was making enough money to bring the then-antiquated Palm Pilot within reach. Keeping track of a calendar with full time classes, a part-time job, and other church commitments really helped me justify the purchase. That, and I was already keeping fairly rigorous track of personal contacts in a .txt file on my PC, so this was the evolutionary next step.

About 18 months later (an upgrade cycle that would become pretty common for me), I dropped an additional $150 on a Palm M100. This brought me up-to-date with Palm’s offerings (leapfrogging over the Palm III and Palm V devices), but with very little benefit. Palm OS 4 was the latest and greatest at that time, and actually offerred some time-saving improvements that were difficult to explain to friends asking why I’d spent so much money.

By this time, Microsoft was well on its way to attempt to overtake Palm in the handheld market. Offering more memory, color screens, and document tools, Microsoft’s apparent plan was to out-feature Palm. However, Palm was not willing to overcomplicate the renouned “simplicity” of their devices — indeed, a large reason for Palm’s inroads into corporate America could be attributed to the fact that these devices were drop-dead simple to use. Instead, the company responded by licensing out the Palm platform to third-party device manufacturers such as Sony and Handspring. In this way, Palm was in the priviledged position to have their cake and eat it, too: they could continue to maintain the simplicity of the Palm device, while generating revenue from innovators seeking to play in the handheld market.

And so began the feature war. Microsoft’s lumbering efforts towards featureful devices were beset by stability issues, where early WinCE users complained about system crashes on a regular basis. It’s interesting to note that early versions of WinCE were actually modified, pared-down versions of Windows 95 — an operating system that introduced the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” and made Ctrl-Alt-Del a household name. Meanwhile, Sony and Handspring — to the credit of the extensibility of the Palm platform — were rapidly catching up on Microsoft and, interestingly enough, crowding in on Palm’s own marketshare. It wasn’t long before Palm responded with their own color devices. I didn’t wait around, though, and got a Sony Clié.

The Clié T415, purchased in 2000 for $299, was a charmingly slim, aluminum-encased device. it was one of the first to include a Sony Memory Stick external storage slot (which later determined what digital camera we bought: point one, Sony), and a side scrollwheel. It also featured polyphonic sound effects, a flip-top cover, and a 16-bit grayscale screen. The Clié, however, was not without its issues. The grayscale screen was embarrasingly murky in most indoor lighting situations — such as, oh say, the flourescent light at my workplace. The cover had also not undergone much endurance testing, either, as its flimsy connection to the back of the device wore out within months.

2002 saw a new buying power of a dual-income, as it was the year in which Sarah and I were married. In a moment of weakness, Sarah admitted to me that she was interested in getting her own handheld and the chase was on. She graciously agreed to take my T415 and let me get a new device. After a couple solid weeks of searching, I found the ultimate geek machine: the NR-70. For only $300 on eBay, the NR-70 came with just about every feature you could imagine at the time (falling just short of making your coffee for you): MP3 playback, vibrant color screen with flip-top clamshell hinge, Memory Stick storage, collapsable Graffiti writing area for quarter-VGA fullscreen viewing, polyphonic sound, and, naturally, Sony’s brilliant scrollwheel. Of course, to use any of these features, the Clié came with a dozen custom applications, and the device was a monster. The hinge itself added a full half-inch of otherwise unusable space to the height, and it was almost three times as thick as the T415. The extra heft took a lot out of the gee whiz effect of flipping open the screen and was the source of a significant amount of buyer’s remorse.

But, for its time, the NR-70 reflected the state of the handheld market after the dot-com bust. Everybody was packing features into these devices — though none as haphazardly as Sony. Handhelds were becoming a technology solution looking for a problem. Gone were the days of simplisitic, easy-to-use, well thought-out architecture. The handheld market became a kludge of disparate functionalities crammed into a single device. It was at this time that Palm chose to completely re-engineer its PalmOS platform, which meant that developers had to wait about two years before being able to address any of these issues with a holistic approach. Stagnation abounded, cell-phones began to catch up with similar functionality (though I don’t know anyone who syncs his or her non-Palm based phone with their computer), and Sony — whose devices were getting downright user-hostile — saw sales drop in the US market.

It was also around this time that I landed a full-time job and was spending a lot of my time in a cubicle, obsoleting the need for mobility. That, and I found software that enabled me to download my contacts and calendars into my iPod. See, Palm had completed a study of their handheld user-base and discovered that 90% of the time when people use handhelds, they’re looking up information, and the other 10%, they’re entering it. I figured, if I wasn’t anywhere around a PC during that other 10%, I’d use my cell phone or a piece of paper to record a phone number. Wanting to be free of the extra bulk, I sold the NR-70 online.

Fast-forward one more year to today. The job search has forced me to get back out on the street and be just as mobile as I was in college. Over the past month of looking for new employment, I’ve become conviced that three-fourths of a good job search is follow-up. It’s all about taking that business card from that guy at that career fair three weeks ago and remembering to send him a very specific email about your conversation. Palms are excellent with this kind of thing. So, after consulting with the Walker Household Budget Committee, I went online and purchased a Palm Vx.

The Palm Vx dates back to 1999 as Palm’s cutting-edge device for that year — it’s aluminum case and slim profile made it a favorite among corporate-types. It totally embodies the “simplicity” of Palm’s original vision and does very little beyond contact and calendar management — though it does both very, very well. And, for $64 shipped, the price was certainly right.

Proud of having spent so little money on the handheld, I also purchased a Palm Keyboard for about $10, as well. With better tactile response than my klunky Dell at home, the Palm Keyboard folds up almost as small as the Palm and makes note-taking and “moblogging” really easy.

I have to admit that getting the Vx working wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped: most notably because USB wasn’t ubiquitous then like it is now, so I did need to get an expensive Serial-to-USB cable. So, all told, the total cost was about $104 — only $85 shy of getting the latest and greatest from PalmOne. But, who knows, if the Palm keeps proving itself as pretty handy, the next 18-month cycle puts an upgrade to right around next year’s birthday.

Russell Beattie: The $500 Mac. I found this article via Alex King, but really, the whole web is abuzz with the idea that Apple may announce a $500 Mac without a monitor at Macworld San Francisco tomorrow. Russell digs into the idea a bit more than the typical “I want one!” histrionics to really consider what the benefits would be to Apple’s business.

I’ve been watching Apple for a long, long time. I pine away over their product announcements, invite my friends and loved ones to consider a Mac before they buy a PC, and proselytize the adamantly ignorant over the strides Apple has made in the past few years. Apple doesn’t suck any more. There’s serious innovation going on in Cupertino these days–Steve Jobs put it best at MacWorld a year or two ago, “Microsoft is copying us again, it’s great!” I even own a couple of Apple products.

But neither of them are computers, and both of them were gifts (namely, my iPod and my Airport Express). I’ll gladly spend an afternoon in the Apple store playing with the latest and greatest products, but I’ve never left having spent more than $50–usually for some iPod accessory or something. To make matters worse, I’ve directly purchased, or given advice over purchasing, six computers in the past three years. Three of them were Dells, for which I’m still doing penance. There were also two Compaqs and an IBM. All were new except for the IBM Thinkpad. Why? Because in every case, though I would have preferred or recommended an Apple, it always came down to the barrier to entry. And, in almost every case, that barrier to entry came down to a dollar number.

There were two situations where the purchasers just would not consider an Apple because they were “used to” or had a significant investment in Windows. In the remaining four cases, Apple would have been a fine or even preferred alternative–but it came with a high premium. We bought my mom a computer for Christmas last year. It came with a monitor, CPU, and printer. Total cost including shipping and tax? About $360. Three hundred and sixty dollars! It was almost criminal. Sure it was a special case, and Dell was running some great deals leading up to the holidays. Consider, though, my sister Jaime, my wife Sarah, and our friend Alex, all of whom looking for laptops. For Sarah, we found a $300 Thinkpad on eBay, and I loaded a copy of Windows 98 for which I’d already had a license. To spend $1,200 on a new iBook was just too much money. Alex and Jaime, on the other hand, were willing to spend serious cash, and this is where Apple tends to win out over competitors. That is, until you consider the additional $340 you have to spend on the Mac edition of Office 2004. You know, if you actually want to collaborate with classmates or coworkers. Both of them went with PC alternatives.

Beattie notes that by leveraging the existing monitors, keyboards, printers, and other PC hardware, Apple has turned a hindrance into an opportunity. Rather than demand that PC users cast their investments into the closet and buy a Mac, it would seem that they’re inviting PC users to use their existing hardware the next time they upgrade their desktop machines. One might wonder if they’ve taken a key learning from their foray into the consumer electronics market–namely, the art of parlay. With the iPod, Apple is taking a fantastic product and leveraging it to present to us, their new-found adoring fans, another fantastic product: the iTunes Music Store. John Gruber makes this argument more coherently than I, but the point is this: the more barriers Apple tears down, or leverages to their advantage, to break into the wider PC market, the more likely people will be to buy a Mac.

I would go even further and suggest, if there really will be such a thing as an Apple-branded office package called iWork, that Apple offer upgrade pricing to users of Microsoft Office. Provide the discount in the form of a price break at the register or in the form of a rebate. Either way, continue to parlay the investment in PCs as an investment in Apple. If I get iWork for a discount because of my copy of Microsoft Office 2000, I won’t just see Apple taking my initial investment into consderation, but I’ll also believe I got a great deal.

Will I buy a $500 Mac? Probably not this time around. Sarah and I are huge fans of WiFi, and I love having a desk uncluttered with desktop equipment. But, for my in-laws who upgraded their desktop CPU for some $400–and countless others like them–an extra hundred bucks might seem quite justifiable if the machine has enough perks.

What do you think?

Um, hi. It’s been a little while since I’ve been here, so, er, I won’t be surprised if you don’t recognize me. That’s okay. The more I keep writing, maybe we’ll both figure out what these blog things are about. (How do you use Movable Type again?)

I think my lack of blogging has been a bit due to some limitations of this redesign (the loss of one of my favorite writers from the blog scene hasn’t helped, either). Splitting the blog content into a few functional columns–like product reviews or links–was helpful from an architectural perspective on the back-end, but I think I can count this front-end as a failure. The fact is, I’ve been avidly blogging in the strictest sense of the word (you know, linking to interesting stuff), but it’s unlikely you’ve noticed because our Link section is “under the fold” of the homepage–or, maybe, if you’ve subscribed to the Atom feed. But, seriously, RSS is just not that accessible to Joe Internet, yet.

By the way, is it me, or are these paragraphs too narrow?

I’m totally digging how Matt has his blog set up such that new links and blog entries float to the top. He put it best, The format of a weblog dictates its writing. I’ve been considering whether to undertake modifying the site to do something similar so all the content of the site floats to the top: photos, links, blogs, products (which needs to be done differently, anyway)–the total deal. Of course, undertaking that much work has got me thinking if I really want to be using Movable Type to do it. I love MT. It’s been fantastic for me, but a lot of what I accomplish with it is really an ugly hack as far as content management is concerned. Even the multi-blog thing I mentioned above; it’s really just a work around for the fact that MT 2.x doesn’t support hierarchical categories. What would I migrate to? Likely fully open source projects like Wordpress or Drupal. I’m not completely sold on WP because its still more of a blogging tool than a CMS just yet, but v1.3 promises to address some of that. Either way, it would definitely eat up a ton of free time.

Speaking of web-based projects that eat up a ton of free time, did you notice the new Village Church site? What do you think? The final product was the result of about six months’ worth of work, mostly from scratch. There was a site previous to this, and the elder who administers the box converted the hacky HTML to something that will validate, so I had usable content. However, everything from the URLs to the design to the navigation was built from the ground up. I could go on, but you can read about all the good stuff in the Colophon there.

The project taught me a lot. I got to learn CVS, which is a nice addition to the résumé. By the way, if you ever have to use CVS on Windows, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tortoise CVS, a project that does a fantastic job of abstracting the CVS geek-fu into a user-friendly GUI. You’d think that plugging HTML into a CVS tree is a little übernerdy for web design folks, but there’s a ton of benefit to be had in the small overhead cost. For example, in September when I was ramping up to work on the project after our move, it was good to look at the history of index.html to see what work I’d already completed. This wasn’t only just encouraging, but accelerated my time trying to triage what still needed to get done in the context of work completed.

At around the same time, I also set up a free version of Basecamp to help manage the project. If I was doing this web design stuff as a full-time gig, I would throw down for a monthly subscripton to this service in a heartbeat. Basecamp’s main strength lies in its user-friendly approach to project management: estimate and set milestones, then assign to-do lists to them. This is drop-dead simple to anyone who has been involved in enterprise-wide projects, but intentionally so. Not all projects need to have painfully detailed project plans and delivery estimates. Gantt charts are great, but they’re just one way to tell the story of a project path.

Another less obvious, but, I think, more powerful advantage of Basecamp is that it is a tool to facilitate conversation. Projects, says Hal Macomber are conversations (PDF). Rather than a heirarchical set of clearly articulated, fully known dependant tasks which was born out of the wishful thinking of modernity, real projects are frought with uncertainty and networks of commitments. If an on-time measurement of your initial estimate is your only measure of project success, your success rate will likely be very low (if not, please tell me why!). Projects in information technology (and probably construction) have to be measured by more than “did I bring it in by the first guessed date.” They need to be measured by quality, customer satisifaction, completion of a set of criteria, the feeling of success by the project team, and probably even more variables. These variables are measured by conversation—engaged interaction of all parties involved for the success of the project. Basecamp, essentially, functions like a blog, letting you build a project community through online communication. Each person can choose their level of involvement, but by the simple act of my posting a message every week or two inviting feedback and ideas, Basecamp creates buzz—another way of saying conversation outside of the project stakeholders.

Perhaps even more importantly, I’ve been learning that projects are journeys with starting points and destinations. Systems design is both passive and active; it’s simultaneously something that you do and that happens to you. The unfolding of the project reveals unexpected constraints which challenges your creative resonse to them–a response that is wrought out of your experiences, ideas, and interests. Add to your own experience the diversity of your team and pressures from your stakeholders, and project management looks a lot more like orchastrating a symphony than it does building a parking deck. But, the journey isn’t just measured by the output of the project. It’s also measured in terms of your professional development: what skills you’ve learned, secrets discovered about the organization, newfound interests and dislikes. For this reason, choose carefully where you put your time in and what you attach your name to–it may define your professional skillsets and your reputation in the organization for years. Projects are journeys. Where do you want to go?

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about project management (in case you couldn’t tell) and leadership. Even writing that I’ve been thinking about leadership makes me want to gag, but I have to admit that I’ve been getting hooked on books about organizations since D&B gave out copies of Good to Great earlier this year. People in organizations is quickly becoming a new interest for me, and hopefully I can make it interesting for you as well. If not, hey, there’s a whole lotta’ internet out there—go find something else to do.