Well, we're only seven years into this century and finally, there is some good forward movement on the creation of a website for the parish. Hooray!
I got a phone call from a parishioner late this afternoon who said she had to spend an hour in town and perhaps we could work on the website she has started so we can show it to the vestry on Tuesday? Of course.
What makes this process fun is she also is a devoted Mac user, which means we are already starting from a common place. So I took my 12 inch recovering iBook over to my office and she brought her 14 inch iBook and the two of us sat down at my messy desk to start planning the website. (Over her head is my late grandfather's license to operate unlimited steam boilers for the city in which the family ran a commercial laundry. When the church furnace gave up the ghost four winters ago, and I had spent hours peering into it, I rummaged through the family papers, located the certificate, framed it, and hung it up under my ordination certificates.)
We're doing it in iWeb, which is a very basic application. Dreamweaver, which is what I use to maintain the Cristosal, website (www.cristosal.org, a foundation that works with the Anglican Episcopal Church of El Salvador) doesn't recognise iWeb. The Mac application, meant to enable just about anyone to set up a blog and website, has set formats (like blogger), which then allow for a little bit of tinkering, but not a whole lot. Even Dreamweaver, a good solid application, doesn't allow for a lot of design; that you have to do ahead of time and then throw it into a gif or jpg (if you want to use weird fonts).
The long-term hope is to podcast sermons (oh my!). B has the dream of parking hers or my laptop up front, hitting 'record' in Garage Band and letting it rip. Since she has a fifth generation iPod, I am thinking of something perhaps a little more discrete, like Griffin's microphone that can attach to the top of the iPod. I am not sure I can bear the thought of my voice being recorded every week. We'll post in writing the sermons, as well.
In any event, the phone call was a welcome interruption. Maybe we'll even have the website up and running by the end of the month.
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