Kerner.net

Flash Versions: schweitzerumc.org

 

I was evaluating some new content for the church web site this morning and I got to wondering what the ubiquity of Flash Player 9 was for the population that accesses our site. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to quickly look at the information. I was pleasantly shocked by what I found: 

Flash Player 9:  91.20%
Flash Player 8:   5.67%
Flash Player 7:   2.20%
No Flash:          0.93%

If you look at the chart below you'll note that the blue is FP9 and the tiny green sliver is no FP installed. 

That's right, over 90% of our web using population has FP9 installed. This pretty well eliminates any concern I have about using FP9 specific content (that content might even drive the other 7% to upgrade).

So why did this surprise me? Schweitzer is a multigenerational church. In our case the population is pretty evenly spread among retirees, middle-aged, young adults, and children/youth. I know many of the older folks in the church use our web site and assumed there might be a bit of lag in adoption. When we revised the site last winter FP8 was the overwhelming winner. It's even more interesting that there are no really old versions of Flash Player, Player 7 is the oldest  version in our population. What does this mean? Primarily it means that as we build our media player this fall we can target FP9 specific features and know there won't be a huge uproar.

onAIR Bus Tour - St Louis

Originally uploaded by kerner.

Went to St Louis for the Adobe onAIR bus tour event yesterday. I drove up in the morning, bummed around the city for the afternoon, then went to the event in the evening. This morning I got up, ate breakfast and continued to be touristy in St Louis. I even went for lunch on the Hill at Rigazzi's and did some required shopping at Vivianos and Trader Joes.

Many of my readers probably don't know anything about the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) an SDK/framework for building desktop applications using web app technology (Flash/HTML). The digital signage control system I'm writing for Schweitzer is an AIR application.

I love this type of event. They always give me ideas for user group meetings, an opportunity to meet new people, and it makes me want to code more often. Even though I'd heard most of this material before I enjoy seeing these presentations live. The energy from the presenter and the room makes a huge difference. The Adobe team has done an exceptional job with this tour. If you're interested in making desktop applications using web app skills you should try to attend one of the remaining stops. If the bus tour isn't coming to your city (or you missed it) most of this content will be at MAX the Adobe designer/developer conference. Also an event I would highly recommend (although it's not free like the bus tour).

Willow Creek Leadership Summit: Day 1 Thoughts

Most of the staff and several other leaders at the church are attending the Willow Creek Leadership Summit (at a satellite site) this week. Day one was fairly good, the highlight was clearly Marcus Buckingham. I've read some of his writing and heard him speak before and it's always informative and entertaining. I wonder how much more effective the church would be if we spent most of our time focused on our strengths rather than having people working in areas of weakness. Butch Witmire from Granger has a great summary of the presentation.

Early in the day Nancy Beach made a comment about wanting to just process the opening talk by Hybels. I agree completely. I could have had only the first and last sessions.

Worship Planning Retreat

Last week we did a two-day worship planning retreat for the entire team. We've had some level of team-based worship planning for the entire time I've been on staff, but this takes it to a new level. We're using a modified version of the Big Idea approach used by a numerous churches. Our worship team (four pastors, media director, traditional worship leader, music director, unnamed contemporary worship director) is going to meet four times a year to hash out six to nine months worth of weekend material.

Last week's retreat went exceptionally well. We planned big idea topics through Easter next year (although we've got two series options for Lent we'll wrestle with when we meet in November). We spent Tuesday morning talking about values in worship then in the afternoon we took all of the message topics Bob had prepared plus additional ideas from the team (we discussed roughly 60 ideas). By the end of the afternoon we had narrowed all of the messages into series, set aside the ideas that didn't fit where we felt God was leading, and put things onto the calendar. We spent Wednesday doing creative brainstorming for the remaining messages in August and for all of September.

The goal is that each week we'll  spend our weekly worship meeting covering the following:

• recap of last weeked - what was good, what was bad
• last minute updates for this weekend
• discuss sermon manuscript for two weeks out
• finalize service elements for two weeks out
  
• creatively brainstorm for the weekend six weeks out
• pray

Most of the time in the meeting (ideally half) is used for the weekend six weeks out. We've already got the core concept, big idea, main takeaway thought through so this is our time to push boundaries. We'll all toss out ideas for the weekend for media, drama, music, sermon illustrations, possible information for the person preaching, etc.

Our next long-range planning meeting is in early November. This first week went fairly smoothly, we've made some adjustments to the template document we're using for planning. I'll write about that next week. I'm very excited abuot the potential for planning this far in advance - a big step for us.

Catch Up Rambling: Contemporary Worship Shifts

We're still short a contemporary worship leader, but some of our prospects are outstanding and Zak/Angelia are doing a great job in the interim. If you know a talented worship leader that would be intersted in a part-time gig - 6-8 hours a week in Springfield, MO send him/her my way. The next several weeks we have candidates running practice and leading our two contemporary services. Last year we added a contemporary service on Saturday night. This year we're continuing to refine our contemporary worship by having the same band/leader at both services. I'm a bit concerned to be auditioning worship leaders as college students are coming back to town, but so far people are doing an outstanding job.

Catch Up Ramblings: VBS

VBS was an exhausting, outstanding week. We had over 400 kids attending VBS during our large day program and smaller evening program. We generally always do a wrap-up, overview video for the Thursday night program. This year to provide something more interesting for the fifth graders we tossed them into the mix. They helped collect video footage for two days and then recorded voiceovers about VBS in general and each of the daily lessons. Over the course of four days we collected nearly 400 photos, and five hours of video. All of that got cut down to a seven minute video for the Thursday night program. This year we planned ahead to allow the first two minutes of the video to stand alone and be featured in our weekend worship.

Catch Up Ramblings Intro

It's funny how three weeks can go past without any blogging, but not uncommon on this blog. A quick recap of the past few weeks. I've had several posts queued up but never finished. I'm going to do a quick edit and post them as-is.