I’ve been involved in a project to provide free Youth Ministry resources online at umyouthpastor.com for a while now.  We thought about doing a training podcast for a while, but wanted to make sure that we were adding something worthwhile rather than just creating more work for ourselves.  After consuming a lot of podcasts, I realized that what I wanted was a periodic training/idea podcast that was short and to the point.  That is where the idea for 10-minute Training (itunes link) began.

Each episode is an interview with a talented youth minister about a specific topic covering everything from having hard conversations to indoor game idea roundups.  Every episode then concludes with a resource recommendation from the guest.  All in about 10 minutes.

I love and listen to tons of long-format podcasts like the SYM podcast (iTunes link), but know very few people who are both entertaining enough to listen to for that long and experienced/talented enough to have that much quality content (Doug and the gang are some of the few in youth ministry).  The point of the podcast is to get you some usable information or idea as quickly as possible, or as the tagline suggests… we get to the point so you get the training. Check it out by going to the website or subscribing via iTunes.

I’m not quite sure what I can add to this, but my son thought this looked like a good idea.  I think I should be afraid.

I thought these stats on internet pornography were really interesting:

(click the image to view full size.)

Stats on Internet Pornography – Online MBA.

Peter Krough has written an excellent article on backup in which he suggests the 321 system.  It says that you should have three copies (one primary and two backups) on two different media with one off-site.  Not only is this incredibly easy to remember, it really helps me sift through the myriad of backup solutions to get what I need and not a lot more.

For my on-site backup, I have mentioned before that I like to use Chronosync to automatically backup selected files whenever I mount a specific hard disc or thumb drive though Apple’s Backup (free with Mobile Me) or Time Machine will meet most mac user’s needs.  On the PC side of things, I have heard good things about Paragon Drive Backup and NovaBackup.

For offsite backup, I use and am really satisfied with Carbonite while Chris has written a bit about his preferred offsite backup service: Mozy.  Both are great and both support Mac and Windows.  The point is that you need to have your mission critical files and irreplaceable memories (photos, videos) stored somewhere that fire or flood will not cause you to lose money or memories.

I think Peter Krough said it best in his article, “There are two types of people, those who have experienced hard drive failure and those who will.”  Do yourself a favor and get your 321 system in place today.

It was a perfect storm:  1. I realized I could save well over $200 a year on seminary text books purchasing them on the kindle store.  2. I found $100 off deal when you subscribe to Audible 3. I made the decision to wait until the next revision to buy the iPad.  It culminated in the purchase of a kindle.  The first question I had was, how do I get news and free books onto it without having to manually copy and paste, and transcode into the Amazon format blah blah blah.

That is the problem for which Calibre is the solution.  Calibre is an ebook management program that allows you to automate all the tedium of dealing with ebooks.  After doing some basic setup, all you do is import files and then click the “send to device” button and voila!  It appears on your reader.

But it does more than convert and upload ebooks; it will also manage fetching your favorite news and blogs.  It comes preconfigured with a myriad of news sources in 25 languages complete with a place for login information if that service has a paywall.  Once you select the  news source, you tell Calibre how often you want it to be retrieved, and it will download the news and automatically send it after it is obtained.

Want to keep up with your favorite blogs that are not listed already in Calibre?  No problem!  Just click on the triangle next to the “fetch news” icon and you can choose to add a custom news source (think rss) and it will then appear in your list.

The only problem I could find is that the user interface is not totally transparent.  For example, you should be able to click and hold the icons that have the dropdown options.  Add to that several other oddly located things and you see where the future improvements will need to be focused.

That being said, it is the best implementation I could find of these features.  And it’s free!

I, like many in our field, have ADD. That makes assigning, completing and following up on tasks an adventure with our team. It is common for us to be in a car on the way to Starbucks or walking down the hall when we remember an essential task we need to do, or we need someone else to do.   Until now, we have had no solution outside of everyone carrying a pad of paper around with us at all times to remedy this situation.

Fortunately, we found Remember the Milk and production is up something eight percent.  Remember the Milk is basically a todo list system that is stored online.  What caught our eye was its ability to create lists that are shared with each other.  Once shared, we can each put tasks on everyone’s list.

It does all the standard stuff like priorities, due dates, and notes, but it also has fields for an estimate on the time it should take, location for the task, and tags.

However, none of these are the reasons we went with this over another service.  The reason we chose Remember the Milk is because of the sheer volume of ways in which you can access the information.  It has an iPhone app (like everyone else), but it also has an Android app and a way to sync it with your Blackberry or Windows Mobile device.  Want it to appear in Gmail?  They have a gadget.  Want to access it offline?  They have gears integration.  It also interfaces with Jott, twitter and a ton of stuff I’ve never heard of .

Its interface is not always transparent, but is easy to navigate after a couple of minutes fooling around with it.  For us it’s a great solution. It’s free for the basic account and $25 for the pro account which adds a couple of features and the ability to download the phone apps.  Worth every penny.

The number one tech question I am asked is still, “How do you download a youtube clip?”  Well I have a new favorite and a Vimeo video grabber that has been great!  The youtube grabber is simple and sweet!  Just remove the “http://www.” and replace it with the word “kick” and you will be redirected to a new site where you can choose your format and download.  Here is the countdown clock I used at SYMC, click the link and try the “kick” and download it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ieR706LjrQ.

The Vimeo grabber I have been using is called Clip Nabber…Check it out clipnabber.com.

Enjoy!

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister.  Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more.  My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.

That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS.  After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random).  Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.

Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time!  Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.

There’s also a prayer journal where you can keep more detailed info on the prayers.  The only thing I wish it did was have some group option to be able to use it to remind a whole prayer group and an iPhone app for adding new requests, but there’s always future updates to look forward to.  Check it out at www.echoprayer.com And, let me know see any cruise ministry openings!

It’s my experience that I can often tell when a site is going to spam me. However, there are those times when I need something, and the site requires me to fork over my email and “verify” it forcing me into the conundrum of deciding between and endless barrage of spam and whatever I think I “need” from the site.  This is where Mailinator comes in.  You simply give anything @mailinator.com … anything you choose… and Mailinator will have your email waiting for you when you surf over to their website:mailinator.com. Once you check your email you can have it deleted or just leave it and Mailinator will automatically delete the email in a couple of hours.

Of course there are other applications for this like giving a “persistent” teenager the wrong address or giving it to a vendor at a conference to obtain a free glowing pencil topper, but we do not endorse or participate in anything like that here.  It’s just a quick tip.  And it is FREE!

I’m at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference this weekend, and we’ve setup some opportunities for you to watch even if you weren’t able to come.  I setup the site SYMCLive.com to host live video from the event.  You can check out the schedule on the page.

And if you are here at the event come say “hi”, I’d love to meet you.  You can find me in the Media Room (when I’m not shooting for the live events)