I was going to start the year with a series of blog posts on Search Engine Optimizations. As I was getting ready to start, lo and behold, I receive a tweet from Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices about their latest post from one of my Episcopal Communicator buddies, Richelle Thompson. The title is “Google: Your Way to the Top” and it covers this very topic! Since there is no sense in reinventing the wheel and Richelle has done such a fine job, I will let her post speak for itself.
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I received this invitation earlier today for a very interesting workshop in January. It is called New Media Learning Day and will be at Emmanuel on Mercer Island on Saturday, January 21st. The conference is on equipping churches and leaders to understand and use new media in ministry. I looked at the different presentations and it looked very interesting. I am planning on being there, and if you have an interest in this, I hope you will be too. A number of people have asked me of late, “What is the social media policy for the diocese?” That’s a good question. We are working on one at the present time and it is a challenge and a balance between making it a living document/policy and not to go overboard with rules and “what ifs”. Every organization has its own variants of policy and the church is no different. Our social media policy may not work for, say Coca-Cola, and vice-versa. Province III of the Episcopal Church have come up with something that is a good starting point for the church. Building Faith, a blog moderated by Sharon Ely Pearson has a post that I offer as a beginning to that conversation called Social Media: Safe Church. Check it out. Phishing is the act of sending an email that falsely claims to be from a trusted source, in an effort to obtain your password, personal account information, or just money. One that I have gotten a great deal of lately is the “I’m in Europe, my passport has been stolen and I need $xxx to pay my hotel bill” variant. This was sent to me on several occasions by people I knew. Their email accounts had been compromised, and the phisher had sent the email to everyone in their address book. Obviously, if you see something like this in your inbox, let your friend know his or her email account has been hacked. But don’t send any money. Lastly, here are some things to do to help protect yourself from being a victim of this type of scam. 1. Change your password on your email account regularly. For the last few months I have been wrestling with an idea that may or may not be ready for prime time. I may be going out on a bit of a limb here, but I would like to talk about using technology as part of the liturgical service. What I mean by this is the idea of using smartphones/iPads/Kindles for following along in the service. It would seem to be the next logical progression in church digital communications. Continue reading How wired do you want to be? A while back, I wrote a piece about Comparing Content Management Systems. My colleague Kat Lehman in the Diocese of Bethlehem has found a nice link and a fairly comprehensive list of CMS options. She compiles a great little e-newsletter called IT@Diocesan House which I commend to you to check out. Lots of good stuff. To get on the list to receive this newsletter, you can contact her via email and follow her on Twitter @KatLehman.
Just because I’m the IT guy doesn’t necessarily mean that I am immune from the mayhem of the outside world (aka the Internet). I went to my blog late yesterday only to find out it had been hacked earlier in the day. Not only that, but the same hacker did in two of our church websites as well. Fortunately we had backups so we didn’t lose any data. However, the attack did trash some of the SQL database, so I had to restore the website, then go in to the database and manually reset things so that I could have WordPress generate a new password. I honestly do not see what possible enjoyment someone must get in making me spend the better part of my day resurrecting hacked websites. Sigh…. Then adding insult to injury, yesterday I ended getting caught up in a domain slamming scheme. Be very careful when you get unsolicited email telling you that your domain name is about to expire. I will admit it looked legitimate and it had all the correct information. Now the catch is to see if I can get the money back. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” You got me once, but not a second time. So my friendly tips for the day are: 1) Keep your backups current on your website. 2) Update your WordPress sites regularly. 3) Check through Google any unsolicited notifications of domain name expirations. In particular, avoid Domain Registry of America.
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