Thursday, February 28, 2008

My Church

I’m in training this week, which is why I haven’t been posting. But I was playing with Google Maps today, trying to figure out how to put a map on my church’s website. After a couple of hours playing with the Google Maps API, I realized something simple: there’s a tool right on the maps page, that says “Link to this page,” which will give you a map you can post.

For example:


View Larger Map

Unfortunately, I think I’m going to be building my church’s website on Wordpress.com, and they don’t allow you to embed iFrames. (Blogger does, which is why you can see the map above.) So I’m going to have to use the Static Map Wizard, instead.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Joshua 22

Joshua 22: Eastern Tribes Return Home

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

New Readers

I’ve received a few comments lately, from people who have been looking through the blog, and I wanted to thank you for your feedback.

Although I’m really just maintaining this blog for my own benefit, rather than anyone else’s—it’s very helpful, to me, to force myself to do an in-depth look at each passage in the Bible, one by one—it’s still nice to hear that others are finding it helpful, too.

Joshua 21

Joshua 21: Towns for the Levites

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Monday, February 18, 2008

Friday, February 15, 2008

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Joshua 12

Joshua 12: List of Defeated Kings

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Music In Church

I’m in some all-day meetings for the next little while, so I probably won’t be blogging here much. But in place of my next couple of posts on Joshua, here’s a link to a post on The 9 Marks blog: Some More Thoughts on Music.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Joshua 11

Joshua 11: Northern Kings Defeated

Friday, February 08, 2008

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Putting Sermons Online?

I know I don’t have a large readership for this blog—it isn’t really geared toward anyone but myself—but I’ve seen people here from time to time, so I’ll throw this out there: Does anyone have any experience putting sermons online? I’m thinking that it would be a good idea to start putting my pastor’s sermons online, and I’m wondering where to start. In terms of putting up a transcript, that wouldn’t be a problem, I could just start a blog and type it all in, but I’m wondering about putting up the audio files, too.

I guess this is very much like a “podcast,” so if people have experience with that, too, any advice would help. But really, all I’d want is a place where the audio files could go, in conjunction with the blog. (Regardless of what medium I eventually decide on, I’ll still want a text transcript for people to read.) What I’d love is an audio equivalent of YouTube; someplace where I could upload my audio files, and then, if at all possible, have a player that I could embed in the blog posting with the transcript, so the reader could click Play, to hear it. But I’m not just looking for features; I’m also looking for a reliable service, that I can figure will be around for a while. If you want to upload video, YouTube is the hands-down winner, but if you want to upload audio, where do you go?

Worse-case scenario is that I’d have to get a web hosting service with a lot of storage space, and just store the audio files there. But even when you use MP3, my pastor’s sermons are forty-five to sixty minutes, and a sixty minute sermon takes up a lot of space. (I think the sound files we’re capturing are about 40MB, if I remember correctly.) I’d be in a constant cycle of running out of space and having to upgrade my account, and running out of space again, etc. YouTube has upload limits (I think), meaning that you can only upload a certain amount per day or per month or whatever, but once you’ve uploaded something, it’s there for good. You’ll never have to think about deleting it, to make more room on the server.

As an aside, someone had suggested simply creating a video, using the audio—i.e. use the audio file from the sermon, and create a movie with a still picture and the audio, and upload that to YouTube. But YouTube limits you to ten minutes for a video, so for my pastor’s sixty minute sermons, it would mean I’d have to break each one into six pieces. That’s kind of unwieldy.

If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to comment here, and let me know.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Joshua 10:1–15

Joshua 10:1–15: The Israelites defend Gibeon, and the sun stands still

Friday, February 01, 2008

Joshua 9

Joshua 9: The Gibeonite Deception