Tech Tips for Catholic Teens

MyChurch.org is donig a great job of using applications to draw folks to their social networking site.  These include a Facebook app simply named My Church, a MySpace app called Famous Christian Quotes, and they have a couple blog tools as well.

Here are the descriptions of each of these apps that I’ve listed above:

Famous Christian Quotes (MySpace App) ↓


Display Inspirational quotes from famous Christian preachers and leaders on your profile and share them with your friends.

My Church (Facebook App) ↓


Show what ministry, denomination, or church organization you’re a part of. You can also find others on Facebook who are members of your church organization. Stay in touch with your larger church body.

Your Church Calendar on your own Website (Blog or Website Script) ↓


Share your church’s events on your blog, Myspace, or church’s main website.

The critically acclaimed, pro-life film Bella was released on DVD several months ago. Netflix has made the movie available for instant viewing on their web site for all of its subscribers. Currently, the film is the eighth most watched out of thousands of films available for instant viewing. If you have Netflix, this is a great way to show the film to others.  That is if you can actually stand to sit in front of a computer monitor and watch an entire movie.

If you don’t have Netflix, I would encourage you to check out www.faithandfamilyflix.com.  As of right now they don’t have the instant viewing feature, however in most other ways they are very similar to Netflix.  Faith & Family Flix has a great selection of movies. Plus you don’t have to worry if a movie has questionable content!  They screen each movie so you don’t have to.  They have also just launched a sister site where you can purchase movies.

I had an interesting conversation with my mom today - the most interesting part of it was that she SKYPED me!! This is the woman whose most exclusive computer usage revolves around playing solitaire and forwarding “funny” stories from her Juno email. So needless to say when I heard those familiar skype tones, I was not expecting my kids’ grandma to be on the other end!

Good for her - I’m so proud of her for choosing to investigate cost-cutting measures, for figuring out the technology involved, and for actually following through on something productive. That last part is not a surprise - this woman raised five children and continues to actively parent each of us as well as our spouses and children. But for so many of us, we put things like learning to use Skype on our “maybe someday” list and never seem to get around to them. Mom mentioned to me yesterday that she and my dad were contemplating some economizing and I mentioned Skype to her - less than 24 hours later, she’s dialed in and good to go.

What cost-cutting or time-savings measures have fallen onto your “someday maybe” list? What can you do, today, to cross one item off that list? It’s ok to start small - even baby steps take us in the right direction towards greater personal productivity and lives lead more fully and happily.

In the mean time, if you’re trying to Skype me and my line is busy, you know with whom I’m likely chatting!

Skype official website – free download and free calls and internet calls

This post is courtesy of the Productivity @ Home Blog.

My new favorite application for Facebook is Pieces of Flair.  I noticed a few weeks ago people adding this app to their profiles, but I’m pretty picky about what I add to my profile; that was until I saw my parish priest’s profile.  I actually thought he had a collection of pins and that he had taken a picture of it and posted it to his Facebook profile. It wasn’t until I clicked on the picture that I suddenly realized, So this is Pieces of Flair.  And then I spent about three hours searching for some of my own flair before creating some custom pieces.  Below is a picture of my flair collection : )

So if you happen to be my friend on Facebook and create some cool Catholic flair, be sure to share them with me! : )

I just wanted to share this really neat newsletter with anyone who likes to study the Sunday Gospel readings. Each week you receive an e-mailed summary of the Early Church Fathers’ commentary on the Sunday Gospel. I find this newsletter to be quite fascinating in my study of Scripture. God bless.

Subscribe to Fatherseyes and you will be sent an email requesting confirmation, to prevent others from gratuitously subscribing you.  And that is it!

Now I know that AppleTV Has been out for quite some time now, but I still don’t have one. Here is a look at the AppleTV complements of Fr. Geek’s Video Podcast.

FeedValidator.org is a great tool to see if your syndicated feed (RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and Atom feeds) ia validated.

Simply enter the address of your feed and click Validate. If the validator finds any problems in your feed, it will give you messages for each type of problem and highlight where the problem first occurs in your feed. If you’re unsure what a message means, click the “help” link next to the message for a fuller explanation.

The important thing is that your Feed comes back as Valid.  There will most likely be listed recommendations, but the main thing is that it is valid.  It is up to you if you want to make the suggested improvements to your feed.  Probably a good idea, but not always necessary.

You can find out more information about Feed Validator on the About page of their website.

As many of you may have heard, Summize.com has been acquired by Twitter.  For those who don’t know what Summize is (was), think Google for Twitter.  It lets you search Twitter for key words or phrases.

In a post titled “Finding a Perfect Match”, on the official Twitter blogsite, they stated the following:

“We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.”

Below is a before and after shot of the Summize interface.

As you can see, there really isn’t much difference.

Want to search Twitter?

So I decided to give a new downloadable software a try.  It is called TweetDeck!  What is TweetDeck you ask?  Well, according to their website, “TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.”

Here are just some of the features I love about this little program:

• It enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets.
• Being database driven TweetDeck allows the user to continue twittering even when offline or when Twitter is down.
• Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between.
• Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor.
• You can filter tweets from up to 1 hour to the last 7 days using the Timeframe bar.
• Auto updates from the Twitter API.
• TweetDeck is available for Mac OS X, Windows (Vista & Windows XP), and Linux (manual installation).

I asked the TweetDeck Team if there will be skin/theme capabilities or different color options, as well as what other types of things are in the works?  The Developer & Co-Founder of TweetDeck, Iain Dodsworth, answered with the following:

“You’ll be pleased to know that there is a version of TweetDeck coming which will have multiple themes. We are also looking at notifications, support for different languages, integration with TwitPic. Then we will start with integrating other social networks, more about that nearer the time!”

If you are really into Twitter, this might be a program you will want to try for yourself.  Feel free to comment.

The Faith & Family bi-monthly magazine has just released a new blogsite!

Enjoy a FREE trial issue of the printed edition by clicking here!