Today, I’m going to step back from the usual platter of praises for Firefox and Google stuff and talk about technology that can help encourage you in your walk with the Lord. In ministry, it’s is always important to make sure that you’re taking time away to learn lessons from the Lord and from others who are in a relationship with this same God that we’re following and serving.

I have found that listening to sermons and podcasts from different pastors, ministries and speakers has been one of the biggest encouragements to my ministry and my personal walk with Christ.

Like is says in the defenition podcasts are delivered via RSS which Rob Williams taught us about last spring in a 3 article series (1, 2, 3) which means they come to you when there are new ones, you don’t have to go out and get them – convenient!

So, the question now: How do you get them?

First you’ll need an audio player that is set up for to receive and deal with podcasts. If you are new to podcasts, I’ll reccomend Apple iTunes (don’t worry, it works with a Windows computer; you already have it if you have a Mac). You can get it from iTunes.com.

At the iTunes.com page, click the Download Now button at the top right of the page. On the next page, you don’t need to give your email address (so don’t) just pick your current operating system and download away. Don’t forget to install it.

After you download it and install it, open up iTunes and click on the “iTunes Store” link.

After the page loads you’ll have a lot of options in front of you, let’s start by searching for Cru’s podcast on reaching out to your friends, called the “Overflow Show”. To do that, go to the top right and type in “Campus Crusade for Christ” in the Search iTunes Store box and hit Enter.

It should bring up a page with a number of different options, including “Campus Crusade Today” as well as the “Overflow Show”, click the subscribe button next to the Overflow Show (or you can click on the logo for more information).

When you click the button it may or may not take you to your “Podcast” screen, if it does not click on Podcasts on the main menu underneath Music. It should now look something like this:

If it’s just showing the title Overflow Show click the gray arrow next to it to show all of the episodes. If you want to download all of them, click the Get All button. Notice the orange circling arrow, that means that it’s already downloading the newest episode! It should be ready listen to pretty soon (depending on your internet connection speed)! If you notice, there’s now also something on the menu to the right that says Downloads and has a similar spinning arrow from now on when you start iTunes up it will check to see if there are new episodes of your podcast and try to download them, this will let you know how many new episodes of podcasts it is currently downloading.

Now, if you want to try other podcasts that are listed in the iTunes program click on the iTunes Store button again and it will take you back to the last page you were at. You have a few options…

You can click the See All button and see other podcasts that were found under the “Campus Crusade for Christ” category (or you could look at the list on the bottom – for those of you in Central PA area, there are even some of the talks from Penn State’s Cru movement).

You could go back to the main page and browse through the podcasts and look for other ones you might like.

Sometimes you might run across a link for a podcast on a webpage, often when you click on it your iTunes will start up automatically and it will subscribe you to the podcast. Such was the case with the talks from RADIATE07, I took the audio from the talks and uploaded them as a podcast. With that site down and RADIATE08 just around the corner, let me suggest checking out RADIATE08.com in January for those!

If you have an iPod or another MP3 player you can now load them onto it (follow the instructions that came with your MP3 player) and listen to them wherever you go. You can also listen to them on your computer or burn them onto CDs to take with you in the car. Have fun with your new podcasts, and let me suggest some of the ones that encourage me (just for the record, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the podcasts, but I find myself encouraged to seek God’s face because of them often); search for them in iTunes:

Campus Crusade Today
Desiring God Sermon Audio
Grove City Alliance Church
Mars Hill Church: Mark Driscoll Audio
McLane Church – Edinboro
National Community Church Audio Podcast
Overflow Show
SermonIndex.net Classics Podcast
Veritas Media

One note: another great site for Podcasts is Odeo.com, search by topic or speaker to find some great stuff there. Search for “Resonate Audio” and listen to anything from Mike Frost!

Another note, some seminaries (most notably Reformed Theological Seminary) have started offering audio recordings of some of their courses complete and completely free as podcasts. Last summer my wife and I listened to much of the “History of Philosophy and Christian Thought” class on the drive back from CSU.

WHY? Focus on the web updates you really want to digest while skipping or saving others for later makes you more effective.

Now that you are motivated to receive updates from your favorite websites and you know how to get updates all in one place, let’s talk about how to make streamline your online experience even more by using Google Reader well.

Viewing Options

There are a few ways to have your web updates displayed in Google Reader. One option is deciding how the items are to be displayed. One is called “List View” and the other is “Expanded View”. You’ll find the tabs to change the view on the right side of the site.

List View allows you to see the items in one line. It’s like only seeing the subject of an email. Unread items are in bold and are typically unbolded to show you read items. Expanded View allows you to see some or all of the content.

The other option is to decide if you want all of the items from a website listed (read and unread) or if you only want to see what you have not read. You make this choice by clicking on one of the options on the left side of the site.

Organizing Your Updates

If you are only subscribed to a few updates then organizing them may not be of great concern to you. But if you are like me and subscribe to many (over 200 for me!) updates, it will be more effective to get some control over them!

You can add a tag (or folders) each update feed with as many tags as you like. I use several like “friends”, “business”, and “fun”. I have several others I use as well.

One trick I use is to double-tag my favorite updates as “top”. This way when I’m running short on time or I just want to read the “best of the best” as determined by me, I can just click on the “top” tag or the + button beside it to show which ones are updated. When I read one in the “top” tag and it’s also tagged “friend”, for example, that update will be marked as read in both.

You can also drag and drop the entire tagged set of items so it doesn’t have to be in alphabetical order as you can see in my example. This also works for individual feeds as well.

One last bit of customization in how new items are displayed is by choosing to show only the feeds that have an update or show them all even if there are no new updates. I like to have Google Reader only show me what is updated. This keeps the list a lot cleaner.

Save and Share Your Favorites

At the bottom of every update item are several options you can do with that particular update. Let’s look at each

Adding a star will save that particular update in Google Reader. I use this all the time if I want to save an item or come back and read it later. You are able to access all starred items at once using the top-right menu (see below).

Pressing the Share button creates a blog of just those items you choose. People can then visit that site (or subscribe) to see what you are finding interesting.

If you want to send that item to a friend, you can use the email button to do so.

You have the option to keep an item marked as “read” or “unread”.

You can also edit the tags for that item.

In the top-left corner of Google Reader you will find several choices you can make. Though it’s first on the page, I saved it for last because some of these choices make more sense while you are reading your updates.

One interesting link is the “Trends” link that lets you see some basic statistics about what feeds you are reading, who’s updating frequently or infrequently, etc.

And to round out the options, Google Reader will collect your friend’s shared items in one place. To configure how that works, click on the “manage friends” link.

If you’d like to watch a video about how a guy named Robert Scoble can sift through over 600 web updates, check this video out!

You can also learn some new tips (like keyboard shortcuts) and basics from the Google Reader FAQ page.

What experiences have you had using Google Reader more effectively?

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Editor’s Note: This post is the final part of our “RSS Awareness Week” Festivities. It was originally written by Rob Williams for his website 170spoons.com and is copied here with his permission. Thank you very much Rob!

WHY? You know there is a way to get your website updates in one place, you just need that place!

Earlier this week we talked about why it’s not such a bad idea to subscribe to RSS way of life. Now that you’ve tasted the Kool-aid, let’s get into how you can actually do this!

We Need a Reader

Each item of RSS is called a feed. It’s like the websites send out a feed of information but we need something to capture the feed. That device is a feed reader (also sometimes referred to as an aggregator).

Feed readers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Instead of going through all the options, I’m going to show you my favorite – Google Reader. It’s a free website that requires a Google account (if you have gMail then you’re set). So head over to Google Reader (aka: gReader) and sign up and/or in with your Google account.

We Need to Grant Permission

Subscribing — this model for receiving information has been around for a long time. Just like when you subscribe to a magazine, you’re giving them permission to send you the latest information. Now that we have something to read our feeds in, we need to go give some websites permission to send us the latest!

Now, remember last week I told you that the Firefox browser has all sorts of goodies built in? This is one place it pays off. To get ready for some streamlined subscribing, in the Firefox menu click on Tools and then Options. You will then see a window that has an option for Feeds. Click it and change the settings to “Subscribe to the feed using:” and select Google. Press OK.

Now, let’s head over to 170spoons.com (if you’re not already here) because you want to make sure you always get the best tools, tips, and tutorials for technology! Look up a the web address bar and you’ll see at the end of it a little orange icon which means this website has a RSS feed for you.

Editor’s Note: This will also work if you type a http://www.CruTech.org in.

Click the icon and you’ll be taken to a page that has two options. We want the one that says “Add to Google Reader”. Click that blue box to add it.

Once you have clicked that button you should be taken back to your Google Reader with 170spoons.com loaded and ready to be read! Note that the number beside the item (in this case 2) is how many unread items you have for that feed. Your number may vary.

If you want to use a different browser or a different reader, you can still go through the subscribing process. Go to your website and when you get there, look for the RSS button that on most pages looks like this.

Later in the week I’ll give you some tips on how to use Google Reader better and faster. But for now, you should be set up. Go around to different websites that offer updated content and see if they have a RSS button somewhere and load up your reader!

I know many people reading this use different readers than Google. What is your favorite and why?

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Editor’s Note: This post is a part of our “RSS Awareness Week” Festivities. It was originally written by Rob Williams for his website 170spoons.com and is copied here with his permission. Read the rest of this entry »

WHY? Going to one website for many updates is better than going to many websites with no updates.

Ever since I began talking about opening this site for tools, tips, and tutorials for technology, I began getting requests to explain something called RSS. I decided I’ll take a few days to go over this because it’s just that good! Before you freak out and stop reading, all I ask is you hang with me a moment. I’m going to take us through this nice and easy and I think you will at least know why RSS can be a very useful thing for you.

Let’s get the irrelevant stuff out of the way first. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. All that means is that there are agreed-upon rules for people to allow their online content to be rebroadcast somewhere else. Just like when you watch an old rerun of The Brady Bunch, Frasier, or What’s Happening? what you are watching is the syndication of it. Like I said, this stuff really is irrelevant for us.

Today it’s my goal to get you motivated to the idea of taking advantage of RSS. Later in the week we’ll get into some more tips of how to use it better.

The Problem

Let’s say you have several websites you like to check for new articles or content on a regular basis (like CNN.com, 170spoons.com, Facebook, and your best friend’s blog). The traditional way to find out what’s new is to either remember all of the web addresses and go there, or go through your bookmarks clicking on each. When you get to the sites, you may not be able to tell what’s new, what you’ve already read, or if there is anything new at all. It could turn into a colossal waste of time!

If only there were some way to have these updates delivered to us when those websites have an update…

eMail is to People as RSS is to Websites

I’ve seen many, many attempts to explain what RSS is and I’ve tried different analogies in the past and I think this is the one that makes the most sense. When you get an email, you are basically getting an update from a person. When you get a RSS update, you get an update from a website. To read eMail you need an eMail reader (like Outlook, gMail, Yahoo Mail, etc). To read RSS, you need a RSS reader.

What RSS is Solving

When you set up a RSS reader and tell it which websites to check for updates, you then have one place to go for all of your website updates. You don’t have to go all over the web to find anything new. Just go to one place and it’ll tell you if there is anything new or not in all of the sites you’re monitoring. In fact, using a RSS reader allows you to monitor even more sites if you like since you’ll only know when something is new.

Later this week we’ll go over how to use RSS to your advantage. Today I just wanted to help you understand a bit about what RSS is.

RSS in Plain English

I admit that I may not have done the best job in explaining RSS. So let me show you a short video that was made about a year ago called RSS in Plain English.

If you use RSS to receive notifications of new website content, leave a comment as to why you do it this way instead of the traditional way.

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Editor’s Note: This post is a part of our “RSS Awareness Week” Festivities. It was originally written by Rob Williams for his website 170spoons.com and is copied here with his permission.

This week I’m going to take a “week off”. It’s not that there won’t be anything posted this week for you to learn, it’s that it won’t be me writing those posts. I’ve asked Rob Williams (former staff at HQ in Orlando) to share some posts that he wrote a few weeks ago for his own tech blog 170spoons.

In celebration of May 1st, which is both May Day and RSS Awareness Day, they will discuss the nature and advantages of newsfeeds (also known as RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”). Most of you reading this are already taking advantage of a form of RSS Feeds in the email that is sent out when I update the site.

Let me suggest at this point that you go ahead and sign up for a Google/Gmail account as it will help you understand better what he is talking about in the upcoming posts.

See you all again next week!

I need to begin by noting something that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote last week’s Beginning with Firefox post; the Preferences window (called Options in the Windows’ version of FF) is not in the Tools menu, but the Edit menu in non-Windows’ versions. That is where we’ll spend a lot of our time this week.

Before we do that let’s look at the (I believe) universal Tools menu.

Web Search – This simply puts your cursor in the (customizable) search box at the top right of the screen. While we’re looking at it click on the small arrow to the left of the search box now, you’ll see the standard search engines that come pre-installed with Firefox – you can ad more which is something that we’ll cover in the future.

Downloads – Here is the window that pops up when you download a file. It’s a way to keep track of them and even monitor where you’re downloading them to on your machine.

Add-ons – This is one of the beautiful features of Firefox (and really just about any open source program). Add-ons are mini-programs that you can install into your Firefox that can make it capable of performing tasks that in can’t “out of the box”. The Firefox installation that I’m using right now has 25 add-ons running that do everything from notify me when I have a new message in my inbox to blocking ads to spell-checking things that I put in text-boxes online… and more.

If you bring up the box it will have a few options that will allow you to change the Theme (just the look of your FF browser window), and add on items that will allow you to play Flash videos (think YouTube), or other media (think CNN or games). If you click the “Get Extensions” or “Get Themes” it will take you to the page on Firefox where these are available.

Java Console, Error Console, Page Info – Probably not something you want or need to dive into if you’re not designing a website.

Clear Private Data – This will enable you to clear your cookies, browser history, and other data that your browser keeps about your habits. It does it relatively thoroughly, be careful that you don’t delete passwords that you want to keep saved!

Now on to the options…

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we talked about Firefox and why (I believe) it is the best general web browser available and got it downloaded and installed for you (hopefully). Today we will talk through some of the menus in the menu bar.

If you have everything installed and nothing else going on, your screen should look something like the image above with normal web browser menu names displayed. Let’s walk through them and I will explain some of the items that might require it.

File
New Tab – Like we talked about last week, one of the advantages of Firefox is its tabbed browsing capabilities. Where you would have opened a new window before now you should open a new tab. You can do that by going to File -> New Tab or hitting Ctrl+T.

Open Location – All this does is take your cursor to the location bar at the top of the page where you type in the webpage you want to go to.

Close Tab – It closes one tab at a time, rather than closing down the whole of the Firefox browser.

Import – This is for importing bookmarks that you might have from another browser or saved as a document.

Edit
About the same as the Edit menu in just about every program.
Note: In non-Windows versions of Firefox this also contains the Options menu which is covered in the next post in the Beginning with Firefox series.

Find in This Page… – When you have a lot of text in the page you are viewing and you want to find something specific.

Find Again – Looks for the next instance of the search you just executed.

View
This is the first one with real power to change your ongoing browsing experience.

Toolbars – Toolbars are the “bars” at the top of your browser that add functionality to it. The menus that we’re looking at now are a toolbar, below that is the navigation toolbar and your bookmarks toolbar. In this sub-menu you can turn on or off toolbars that you have installed and you can customize them as well. If you click customize you’ll see a window that looks something like the image to the left.

Here you’ll be able to add buttons to your toolbars that are available in the menus or you can rearrange items. For now all I’d suggest you do is click the “Use Small Icons” box (unless you have bad vision). My favorite “hack” using this box is that you are able to drag the Location Box and the Search Box up onto the Menu Bar and give yourself that much more screenspace by disabling the Navigation Toolbar (I’ll write about this later.)

Sidebar – Like your toolbars, but here you can look at all of your bookmarks or browse the pages you’ve recently visited; and it’s on the side.

Status Bar – This is the bar at the bottom of your screen which gives you relatively vital information such as the location of the link that your mouse is over. Plug-ins that we’ll add to Firefox in the future will also display info here. Keep it checked.

Text Size – If you have bad vision, this will be your aid on pages that have small text. The newest version of Firefox that should be out by May 1 will actually enable you to enlarge the whole page to view it better!

Everything else in the View bar should probably be left alone if you don’t already know what it is. The only other thing that might be useful is the Fullscreen option which hides all the toolbars except for your tabs and makes the most use of your screen size.

History This one is pretty self explanatory, you can look through your browsing history here too.

Bookmarks Everything here is pretty self explanatory as well (if you ignore the thing about Add-ons which we’ll talk about in a later post), there are just a few things that I want to note.

Bookmark All Tabs… – You know how to bookmark one page a time, this will allow you to bookmark everything that you have open right now. Say you have been researching a school and have a bunch of tabs open about Podunk State University click this and save them all as links in a folder in your bookmarks.

Subscribe to This Page – We talked about Feeds/RSS a little bit last time. This is the simplest way to subscribe to a page (remember to look for the RSS Feed Icon – read more about it in the Wikipedia article on RSS), if you click on it now it will allow you to bookmark the future updates for CruTech. (If you decide to do this choose the options of LiveBookmarks and place it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.)

Bookmarks Toolbar – This is the toolbar at the top of your browser that should contain bookmarks that you use virtually every day or feeds that you want to keep up with. Right now you probably just have the “Getting Started” and “Latest Headlines”.

Tools – Let’s hold of on this one, there is as much there as this whole post. Next week.

Help – This is your best friend on any new program. Whenever you’re trying to figure out how to do something in a program that you’re not familiar with use this menu (or just hit F1) to bring up the help box… it’s very helpful.

For Internet Explorer Users – If this is you, check this one out, it’s a few articles in the Help box that may help you adjust to the changes that Firefox will bring.

That is all for this week. Take some time and explore some pages in the Help box to learn more about FF. Next time we’ll explore the Tools menu and the Options box.

As we start to explore ways that technology can be something that actually makes our lives in ministry easier, it makes sense to start with the “elemental things” – the basics.

Whenever I am asked to take a look at someone’s computer there are a few things that I take the time to advise them on – anti-virus programs, memory usage, storage space maintenence (cleaning and backing up) and getting the most for the least out of quality free programs. The top three free (open source) programs in the world are Linux (an operating system – think Windows or OSX), Apatche (an internet protocol – don’t think about it) and Mozilla Firefox (a web browser – see, you know what that is).

While Linux and Apatche are probably not something that we’ll ever cover on this blog, Firefox will be a staple of its content. Firefox is (arguably) the best web browser available and we’re going to take some time today to talk about why that is and we’ll get into the basics of getting it for your own machine.

Firefox is based on the now defunct Netscape browser, it has been developed by an active community of programmers who have developed it into a the most expandable and powerful web browser available. It’s currently on the verge of releasing the newest version of the program – Firefox 3.0.

I would like to run down a list of things that have convinced me that Firefox is the current best choice to use when browsing the internet, many of these reasons can be found on the Firefox site itself as well.

Tabbed Browsing – This was actually the feature that first “tempted” me away from Internet Explorer. In the old days web browsers has one window and if you wanted to look at another site you had to open a whole new window. Starting with Netscape and continuing on now in virtually every browser they introduced tabs which allows you to have multiple windows open at a time all organized in the same place. It has literally changed the way I surf the web, I can be reading an article and click on a link in it and not have to worry about hitting the back button when I am done to go back to what I was reading.

Embedded Search Bar – I’m sure many of you have installed toolbars that have searchbars in them so you can search easily from any page. Well, this has the feature too, but it’s part of the basic program and you can add just about any search to it from the big guys like Google and Yahoo to a search engine that searches every Campus Crusade for Christ page. Now, again, IE had added this aspect, but Firefox has always done it better in that it will even allow you to create (or “roll”) your own search engine for any page you’d like.

Web Feeds (RSS)/Live Bookmarks – So, one of your supporters has a blog and you like to read it on a regular basis but it gets annoying when you have to go to it every day and the updates are rarer than you’d like. Now think about today’s weather, and the news, and your students’ blogs, and your brother’s online photo album… it becomes a lot of sites to visit every day. Feeds are a way of looking quickly and knowing who and what has updated and whether or not you need to go and look at the new content. Firefox allows you to bookmark feeds and it will update them as the site is updated. All you need to do is browse through your bookmarks to know if your nephew has been potty trained yet (or may be your students as well). We’ll talk about Web Feeds more later when we talk about GReader.

Pop-Up Blocker – It blocks pop-ups unless you say otherwise. It’s pretty easy.

Phishing Protection – Some emails you get from “eBay” are not safe because they’re not really from eBay and they’re not really linking you to their site; same with your bank, Amazon, etc. (And the emails about “free V14Gra”) Hackers do a really good job at making the site they link to look A LOT like the real site and when you log in to the fake site, they now have your username and password… and perhaps your credit card and address and everything else. Firefox knows what to look for in these sites to warn  you that they are not real, it can protect you from identity theft.

Open Source Means Secure – Who are the best people to protect against hackers? Hackers. The same reason that major computer companies host “hacking competitions” every year to hire new IT employees is why Open Source programs are safer than proprietary ones – the people making it know where to look for security holes and they know how to fix them.

Spyware Protection – When a program tries to run or install, it asks you. If you say no, the program doesn’t download and your computer stays safe. It will ask every time. Simple enough.

Add-Ons – Here is the other advantage of the Open Source movement. Anyone can make it better. The same people that are building the browser for everyone to use also know that there are some uses that a lot of people want but not nearly everybody. The fact that the source code is open makes it possible for people to create Add-Ons that add functionality to the browser – blocking advertisements, notify you when you get email, change your keypad shortcuts, correct your misspellings, help you to share files, etc.

Web Standards Compliance – This will mean very little for people who do not work with internet technology much. It means that when a website is coded according to internationally accepted standards of web design that it will look exactly the way it is supposed to. The reason that some sites work in one browser and not another is IE’s historical ignoring of these standards.

Getting Firefox

Firefox is available for just about every Operating System on the market. From Windows 95 to Vista, OSX and any Linux build out there. There are even versions that you can install on a USB thumb drive and take your bookmarks and preferences with you!

Point your current antequated browser to www.GetFirefox.com and click the link that looks like this (it will recognize your Operating System – it probably will not say “for Linux i686″).

Next, save the file onto your computer wherever you usually save your install files (we’ll talk about keeping your desktop clean later) and follow the instructions on the page that just loaded – it will load instructions that are specific to your system.

Once you get it installed start it up (I would suggest saying “yes” to making it your default browser), import your bookmarks, etc. and read through some of the guides and tutorials that will come up on the first page that loads. (If the first page that comes up doesn’t say “Getting Started with Firefox” the head to that page here.)

Now you’re on your way to a new Internet experience! Next time we’ll talk about getting the most out of your Firefox install.  

Tags: firefox, internet, web browsers, tabbed browsing, search engines, web feeds, rss, bookmarks, phishing, pop-ups, open source, spyware, web standards