A quick look into the results so far:

We’ve had some great responses to our Church Website Survey, but we need more!

Please help us out by telling people in your church about our survey. If your church has an IT department or someone in charge of the website, this is a great way to get feedback about your church’s website. It’s free, easy, and I’ll be happy to share the results.

To give you an incentive, here are some quick bits that I pulled out of the survey recently.

There's more! Read the rest of this entry

OaktreeIdea is a social community built especially for Christians.

Oaktreeidea is not your average online social community. If you want to make a real difference in the world, then our site is for you. We have built the site for the innovators, the out-of-box thinkers, the emerging churches, the creative people and those living life with purpose, passion and meaning.

It’s kinda neat – go check out my profile at www.oaktreeidea.com/ryenski . I have no friends yet (poor me!) – please add me as a friend!

I just got Memed by Robert Evans, and this will actually be my first meme ever. So, without further ado, I bring you:

5 things that most people don’t know about you (me)

1. Our home and office are 100% powered by the wind, so I can feel good about leaving the computers on all the time.
2. I grew up on a farm in Haiti.
3. I really miss the mountains. Texas has no mountains.
4. I’ve only held a real job (where I worked for someone else) for a total of about 2 out of the past 12 years. The rest of the time I’ve either been in school or working for myself.
5. I shaved my head two weeks after we found out my wife is pregnant. Not out of protest or anything – but I usually buzz it, and I thought I’d try shaving it to see if I liked it. It honestly never occurred to me that I should pass the idea by her. Yes, I am that stupid.

Now therefore, insomuch as the aforementioned Meme herby concludith, heretofore letitbeknown that the passage of said Meme shall go to the belowmentioned Individual, provided that that Individual hath not already received said Meme, nor hath that Individual completed said Meme on his or her own regard, and also provided that the Individual doth keep, maintain, host, and provision a suitable Website Log (“Blog”) upon which to post said Meme:

• Matt Heerema

Here’s a quick snippet for your ApplicationController:

layout proc{ |c| c.request.xhr? ? false : "application" }

HTTP requests using get and post will be processed normally, but AJAX requests will be rendered with no layout. This saves you from having to put render :layout => false every time you do an AJAX request.

Notice any difference? Yeah, good guess! This website is now run by Mephisto.

Mephisto is honestly one of the best blogging engines that I’ve tried. And I’ve tried a lot, from Radiant to Typo to old standbys Wordpress, Textpattern, and Expression Engine. So here’s a go with Mephisto, and so far I’m highly impressed. It’s fairly fun to use, and the admin interface is beautiful.

Oh yes, about the red. This is a work in progress. I decided not to migrate the old design, partly because I wanted something simpler, partly because it would have taken too much time, and partly because I was sick of it. So your feedback is appreciated, because as you can see, there is room for improvement. In any case, the colors are probably here to stay, and they hint at some things to come.

Yeah so I haven’t blogged for a while. Amazingly, you folks are still subscribed. Thank you for that. Honestly I’m a bit burnt out on blogging. It takes a lot of energy, and I’ve been busy. (Thank God for good business though – better busy than the alternative.)

Now. I’m about to break the silence. Prepare.