Moving...

I'm moving this blog over to a TypePad address. Please use the address below in the future:

http://blogs.churchcrosstalk.com/jonedmiston/

Hyperic: Open Source Management Platform

I stumbled across Hyperic, an open source management tool, while reading ComputerWorld the other day. As I do often, I dog eared the page for later investigation. Tonight I was going through my piles and visted their site. This tool looks like an awesome find! Reading through the capabilites I'm really impressed. I can't wait to get some time to dig into it! The product appears to have a great architecture. They also have a good open source/ support model that gives hope that they'll be around for a while.

As a developer I'm very interested in their cross-platform SIGAR API for agents. I'm thinking some cool Arena functionality could seen in the future replacing the current reliance on WMI (yuk...).

HTML E-mail

To get any kind of attention in e-mail today you have to be using HTML/CSS. The problem is each e-mail client provides a varying level of support. Below are a few links that provide guidance to ensure your HTML e-mail displays the way you envisioned it.

• CSS in Emails
• Optimizing CSS presentation in HTML emails
• CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree
• HTML Email and Using Style
• How to Code HTML Email Newsletters

Screen Capture

If you're looking for a free screen capture program check-out FastStone Screen Capture. I've been wanting a screen capture utility for a while but never wanted to shell out money for SnagIt. FastStone has most of the features of SnagIt but it's free.

I came across this utility from Chris Tingom on the Brain Fuel blog. I highly recommend his blog. He has great recommendations on both websites and tools.

Great Ad

For those how missed MinistryCOM... here's a great ad one of the presenters showed. Very funny...

New Creative Activity

Today we, the Communications Team, did a new project in our staff meeting to help boost our creative juices. We each went through a pile of creative ads and individually answered the following questions, then shared the results with the team.

1. What is the product?
2. What is the message?
3. How did the advertisers creativity in coming up with the message?
4. How could we use the same process to help promote the church and the value of a relationship with God.

Here's an example:

Product: Land Rovers

Message: With our product you'll be able to learn the back country better than the natives.

Creative Technique: Show a 'learned person' being schooled by a owner of your product. This goes back to a concept of not focusing on 'how your product rocks' but instead 'how you'll rock with our product'.

How we could apply it: OK, these may not fly but you get the point.... Show a member instructing a yoga guru on peace, or a monk on scripture....

What's more important than the initial output of ideas is the creative process that was used by the advertisers. Product -> Attributes of Product -> User better person because of the product attribute. Then, incorporating these processes into our everyday thinking.

We came up with quite a few ideas many of which may turn into actual projects (this is not one of the best, but it's one of the only ones I have in front of me right now...). I'll post more in the coming weeks. If this one sparks an idea, post it in the comments.

It's also important to point out that this process doesn't just help the creative types (i.e. church communications). IT folks can use these same techniques too. I'll post an example of that soon also.

What's Slowing Down Your PC

Found this interesting post on what makes computers slow down over time. Some findings are pretty basic (i.e. installing 1000 fonts), but some findings are surprising. For instance installing Photoshop CS slows down your system by over 5%. Net 2.0 runtime almost 9%. VMWare Workstation almost 11%.

Read more about the tests and results.

Textures

Here's a souce for great (free) textures for your next design project.

Texture King

MinistryCOM Slides

Here are the slides from my MinistryCOM presentation for those who would like a copy.

Download