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Since I started blogging last June, Akismet has caught over 10,000 spam comments. Of course that’s less than what TechCrunch gets in a day. Akismet makes it possible for me to allow anonymous comments. I have gotten very few false positives and only one or two spam comments slip through a week. Most of the comments that slip through are on old posts so I am considering using the Comment Timeout plugin.

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

- Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

The above quote definitely applies to me – not to say that I am an inventor but rather someone who is always hunting down new solutions just because I don’t want to go through the headache of using current solutions. In a way that is what much of Information Technology is about – enabling people through more efficient solutions.

Last Tuesday, in a retreat planning meeting, I was tasked with printing a PDF on Holy Week, it was simply a 50 page document that we needed 120 copies of in book format. Traditionally we would just run it down to the local office supply store or quick print shop, but my experience is that the process is a lot of headache, not that cheap and the end product isn’t impressive. Wanting to avoid the headache, I started searching on the net and found several printers that will publish a PDF into a book.

I stumbled onto 48HrBooks.com, they looked like a good fit for what we wanted to do and great prices. We could get 125 “Perfect Bound” (paperback) books printed for $2.19 each. After checking that they were legit, I reformatted the document for 5.5″x8.5″ and uploaded it to them. The following day, they sent me an email asking to approve a proof of the color cover online and that was it – the books were shipped two days later. We received the books yesterday and they came out great – much nicer (and cheaper) than the spiral bound option we would have gone with if we used the local suppliers.

Looks like retail computer and electronics stores (except Apple) aren’t faring too well these days with RadioShack closing 700 stores and CompUSA closing 126 stores. I just saw the 30% off everything sign at my local CompUSA.

Store closings can be a great opportunity on two notes. First, many of the employees that are losing their jobs often simply need someone to talk too and sympathize. Second, they are good opportunities to find heavily discounted source of equipment (not just consumer goods, often you can great deals on fixtures, security systems, computers, etcetera). Recently, when Tower Records closed its doors, we got a boatload of gear for pennies on the dollar. While dismantling and removing equipment, we had quite a few deep conversations (hopefully planting a few seeds) with the disheartened employees.

The Non-Profit Tech Blog mentions a rumor that salesforce.com will offer discounted licensing for nonprofits with more than 10 CRM users – ballpark figure is 75% off the normal licensing fees.  The post also mentions that their have been successful conversions from Raiser’s Edge to salesforce.com.  I know that salesforce.com is a well regarded player in the commercial CRM market, have any churches looked into or are using it as a Church Management System (ChMS)?

For those of you who are interested in an open source VoIP PBX but don’t have the time or desire to build your own Asterisk box, Fonality is releasing the Trixbox Appliance. Trixbox is the new name for Asterisk@Home, the platform we currently run at church. Asterisk@Home 2.7 is working well for us, although we do look forward to upgrading soon so that we can take advantage of the new features in trixbox.

Pricing runs from $999 for a base VoIP only appliance to $3,199 for an enterprise unit with support for two T1s.

Digium, the creater of Asterisk, is also releasing a smaller appliance, designed for 2 to 50 users. The standard (development) kit is going for $2,195.

“Confess? Why Should I?” is a four part small group series on the sacrament of confession. The series features video clips by Father Bishoy Andrawes and a discussion guide.

Here are a few suggested curriculums, please feel free to add suggestions and reviews in the comments.

We decided to go ahead post our small group resources on Scribd, to start here is the leadership manual:

Last year, Amazon rolled out it Simple Storage Service (S3), which allows you to store and retrieve data on the same infrastructure that Amazon uses to run their own sites. Almost instantaneously you can get access to “highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure” with minimal cost outlay. While initially designed for developers to build scalable applications, Amazon S3 can also come in handy if you want to publicly distribute large files without tying up bandwidth on your own web server.

1. Sign up for Amazon Simple Storage Service, you can use your Amazon.com password.
2. Install the S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) extension, then restart Firefox.
3. In Firefox, click on Tools, S3 Organizer, click on Manage Accounts, enter your Account Name and copy paste the AWS Access Identifiers from your Amazon Web Services Account. Click Add to save the settings.
4. S3Fox works like a typical FTP application, with local files on the left and the Amazon S3 storage on the right. Start with right clicking on the right pane and click Create Directory (this will create the “bucket” in S3 terminology). Open the directory and transfer over the file you wish to make public.
5. Once the file is uploaded, right click and choose Edit ACL. Give Everyone Read permissions and click Save.
6. Right click the file and click Copy URL to Clipboard. Now you have a publicly accessible link to publish on the web.

Amazon S3 Pricing

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

Private label Amazon S3 (s3.anchorite.org) with Virtual Hosting of Buckets.

To add BitTorrent support (no additional charge) just add  “?torrent” to the end of the link.

Earlier this week, TechCrunch and Lifehacker highlighted Scribd – “a free online library where anyone can upload.” Scribd has potential to be a great help for churches to easily make their homegrown resources readily available on the Internet, just like YouTube has done for video. Scribd lets you upload, tag, comment and embed documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit). There is also a cool text-to-speech feature that will read aloud uploaded documents or let you download them as mp3.

We are considering using it to share small group resources.

I uploaded a text on Holy Pascha (Passion) Week compiled by our church and embedded it here (they use Adobe’s Flash Paper Technology).