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Audacity is a free, open-source audio editing tool. I have found it to be very useful for recording, processing and manipulating audio files.

We use Audacity to record our worship services, and then for post-processing Pastor's messages for podcast and radio broadcast. We also use Audacity to record and process voice-overs for Pastor's radio broadcast, and for our PowerPoint announcements shown during services.

I've created step-by-step instructions for both the sermon processing and announcement recording tasks. Both of these rely on not only Audacity, but on some additional free plug-ins that are needed. Here are the steps for installing Audacity for use with the other instructions on this site.

I've become a strong advocate of VMware Server. I composed this collection of links back in June to give a coworker some background info.

It was actually a SecurityFocus editorial by Scott Granneman that got me interested in VMware: (04.12.06) Virtualization for Security. That's what prompted me to download the VMWare server and start testing it out. Then I stumbled upon the ChurchTechBlogs.com aggregator right around the time that Jason Powell and Tony Dye were posting about VMware.

I run Fedora Core on the Linux boxen I manage, and in most cases, they're configured for text-only operation. However, there are cases where running X is desirable, but usually remotely and generally not with all the bloat associated with a full desktop installation. (I've got nothing against Gnome or KDE; I just don't need them most of the time.) For this scenario, I generally use Xvnc and the Blackbox Window Manager.

Greg Nilsen over at If Jesus Had A Website has been running a rather humorous series on ineffective church web site design.

Here are some photos I took about three years ago. There have been many updates since these were taken.

Main Sanctuary

View from FOH, with return view inset.

What led me to choose Drupal as a website platform? To answer that, I first need to explain what led me to choose a Content Management System (CMS) in the first place.

I've been creating and maintaining web sites since 1995. Some good, some bad, some in between. Most of this was monolithic design with static HTML, using everything from notepad and joe (I never really went for vi, though I can use it in a pinch) to FrontPage (yeeccch!) and DreamWeaver. I've written vbscript in asp, hacked together some perl (with and without the CGI module), and even dabbled very cautiously into the realm of php.

Any of those would work for me as long as nobody else was trying to publish, and/or I wanted to do everything by hand. Pretty soon, it's time to move past brochureware and static pages and start creating dynamic sites. After all, this is web two-point-oh, right?

Two years ago, I worked on a family member's computer. It was so messed up that I couldn't fix it, so I reloaded Windows and started over. (This was anticipated, so they'd backed up their data ahead of time.) I saved the email that I wrote, intending to post it somewhere. Here's a copy, updated a little for the two years that passed.

Photo by Vaughan, found on flickr.