Tech Tips for Catholics

The Mozilla Open Badge Project is in development to encourage life long learning, through the form of digital badges. Digital badges are visual representations of a real life skills or achievements. They can be used in both formal and informal learning environments. Anyone who uses foursquare or klout, is familiar with digital badges. What Open Badges does is gives you the platform to build a digital badge program in your own class room, youth-group, unconference, etc.

The nice thing about Badges is that you, as the administrator, get to set the criteria in which to earn a particular badge and award them to your students accordingly. The student then can organize their earned badges in their Open Badge Backpack.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/46490072[/vimeo]

WordPress plug-ins:

• WPBadger ― lets you “bake” badges from within the WP Admin panel
• WPBadgeDisplay ― lets you display your badges on your WordPress site as a widget

But what if I don’t have a WordPress site? Now worries; ForAllBadges.com let’s you bake badges and add students from within its cloud software.

If you need any help with implementing an Open Badges program, the Open Badges Community is more than happy to help.

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www.youtube.com/grfilmschool

Below are some related links to this topic:

• YouTube “Alternatives”
• i-Confess & WYD Video Contests
• Using formspring to Evangelize

For about the past week, I thought StBlogs.com was down, and sometimes YouTube, because all other websites worked just fine. But then I was playing around with my friend’s new Kindle 3G, visited our site, and it loaded just fine. So I tried it on my Linux laptop and it worked fine. It had to be something wrong with my home computer. But what?!

• I thought that it might have something to do with my Firewall, but after disabling it, I found that not to be the case.
• Then I thought that it might have something to do with my Avast! Anti-virus, but after uninstalling it, I knew that this was not causing the problem.
• After doing some research, I found that most forums and other help sites suggested that I try disabling IPv6 in Firefox.

None of these solved the problem, until…

• I simply tried shutting down the computer and unplugging the power to the modem. I waited a couple of minutes before turning the computer back on and then plugged back in the modem.

Success!

Long-story-short, I’m glad to be back up and running and I plan to post a couple more How-To’s later this week.  God Bless.

This tutorial will help you replace that “blank page” that comes up when you open a new tab in Mozilla Firefox.  There are a lot of add-ons that deal with the tab feature, including: Setting the “new tab page” to your homepage, Custom tab settings, or Removing the “new tab” button all together.  But, this tutorial is for the New Tab Page add-on.

As you see in the below screenshot, the page that opens by default (in Mozilla Firefox) is a blank page.

Step 1: Go get the New Tab Page (add-on).  Click on the “Add to Firefox” button and then restart Firefox.

Step 2: Once Firefox restarts, open a new tab (Ctrl+T).  You will see the custom page, but none of the “Favorite Sites” are filled in.  Click the “New Tab Settings” button at the bottom right of the page.

Step 3: On the settings’ page, click on the “Add Site” button and fill in the name and url of your top favorite site.  Click the “Add Site button again to add additional links to the list.

Step 4: When you are done, click on the “Save Settings” button.

Here is a screenshot of what your new tab’s page should look like when done.

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If you’re like me you probably have a hard time managing the barrage of information hurled at you via Twitter, Facebook, and every other web2.0 social media platform. And even though it’s estimated that we only use a small portion of our brain capacity, let’s face reality: there is just not enough brain cells to remember everything we want. So while there are lots of tools to help us keep a reference of things (Evernote, NoteScraps, spiral notebooks, stickies, etc.), I find that many people have a hard time keeping in their mind the things that really matter to them. As a Catholic, it’s important to me to leave at least a little bit of room in my brain for things related to my faith. That’s why I use Evernote as an external memory, which allows me to free up my memory for other things.

Still, I need some way to get all of the Catholic goodness into my brain. Let’s say I want to memorize scripture, or quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Or say I want to remember all the incredible things that Padre Pio said. The best way to remember something is by repetition (though language experts might disagree with that) and for repetition and memorization, the best tool possible is the old flash card. But since this is a tech site, let’s talk about a tech version of the flash card that can help all Catholic tech heads: FlashcardExchange.

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted a MyChurch.org tip.  Well, they have been doing some tinkering around and one the new features that I am pretty excited about is the ability to sinc your Twitter account to your MyChurch.org update status.  It is pretty easy to setup, but just in case you need a little guidance, I am posting this little how-to.

What will this do? When you post a tweet to Twitter, it will automatically update your MyChurch.org status as well.

Step 1: Log into MyChurch.org and sinc your Twitter by clicking the icon shown below from the status update page.  Then click the “Integrate Your Twitter Account” link and allow Twitter to share information with MyChurch.org.

Step 2: Post to Twitter.

Step 3: The tweet is then automatically posted to your MyChurch.org update status.

Simple as that!

Over a year ago, I suggested they figure out a way to integrate Ping.fm with MyChurch.org and they were going to look into it.  I think with this new sinc feature, there really is no need to integrate Ping.fm, unless of course the user only wanted certain key updates to their status (rather than posting all tweets to their status update).

Hope this tutorial has been beneficial to some of you.  God Bless.

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About a month ago, I participated in a blog discussion where the topic of Bishops, Priests, and the Religious posting blogs, but not having the know-how came up.  Many clergy are comfortable using word processing programs (e.g. Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, ect.), but get overwhelmed when they hear the term “blog”.  This is where the Sun Weblog Publisher extension for OpenOffice 3 can bridge the gap between word processing and the blogesphere.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of installing Sun Weblog Publisher (assuming you already have OpenOffice 3 or higher installed).

Let’s get started:

Step 1: From the Sun Weblog Publisher extension page, click the “Get it!” button.

Step 2: When the following window opens, just use the default setting and click OK.

Step 3: A box will pop up asking if you are sure that you want to install the extension.  Click OK.

Step 4: After you have agreed to the terms and the installations has taken place, click the “Options” button.

Step 5: Choose the type of blog you have (assuming you have already set up a blog on one of the supported blog formats), fill in the corresponding information, and click OK.

You should now be all setup.  Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section.

Here is a screenshot of the Extension in action.

Click Here to view other How-To’s.

I’ve been a fan of Google’s Calendar feature for a few years, as well as a user of Gmail for all of my email needs since before it came out of beta testing.  Google recently answered one of my personal productivity “wish list” items with its launch of a new “Tasks” management system.

The Tasks, available from Google Labs, enables you to add items to a virtual “to do” list, assign due dates, and document details in notes.  The feature even gives “type A” personalities like me the satisfaction of checking a box when you’ve completed a task and seeing it crossed off your list.

I have been using Google Tasks with both my Google Calendar and with Gmail.  A wonderful feature of the application is the ability to quickly and easily create a task from an email in just a few clicks using keyboard shortcuts.  I tend to keep my email inbox stocked up with items that need my attention, so this new Task feature enables me to confidently add them to my “to do” list and then move them out of the inbox and into files without fearing that I will forget to complete the necessary action item if it’s not sitting in my inbox.

If you are already using Gmail, you will need to go to the “Settings”, click on the “Labs” tab, find “Tasks”, select “enable” and then scroll to the bottom of the page and save your changes.  Once you’ve done this, you can add a task either by keyboard shortcut or by selecting “Add to Tasks” from the “More Actions” menu directly above the email you are reading.

Because the task list resides online, you can access it anywhere you have internet access simply by signing into your Gmail account. If you are fortunate enough to own an iPhone, you can easily access your Google Tasks from your phone.

For a complete overview of the Tasks feature, complete with images and easy to follow directions, visit the Official Gmail Blog.  To integrate Google Tasks with your Google Calendar, visit this post.  The simple integration of these powerful tools and their ready access continues to please this Geek Gal.  I love having access to my data and to do list at any time.  It turns waiting situations into opportunities to cross tasks off of my list, which is always a good thing in my book!

This post is courtesy of the Productivity @ Home Blog.

Want to know how many visitors you have coming to your blog? Well, StBlogs recently installed a powerful tool called Google Analytics. This short tutorial is to show you how to set this feature up from within your StBlogs dashboard. I won’t get into all of the features that Google Analytics has to offer, but you can gladly watch these tour videos.

Using Google Analytics is free, and will provide you with very detailed reports on how many visitors have read your blog, which posts they have read, and other stats.

Let’s Begin.

Step 1: Login to your Dashboard and go to Setting > Google Analytics. Click on it.

Step 2: When the page loads, click on sign up for Analytics.  (I usually right-click and open the link in a new tab)

Step 3: You shuld now be at the Google Analytics Signup Page. If you do not already have a Google account, then you will need to create one.  If you already have a Google account, then simply sign in.

Step 4: Once you are signed in, find your tracking code (it usually begins with ‘AU-,’ followed by a series of numbers).  Next, you will want to copy the code to the clipboard.  To do this, highlight the entire code and right-click and go to Copy (or you can go up to Edit > Copy in the menu bar).

Step 5: Go back to your Google Analytics Settings page (see step 1).  Now paste the tracking code into the box by right-clicking and going down to Paste (or you can go up to Edit > Paste in the menu bar).  Click the “Save Changes” button.

That’s it!  Now you should be able to log into Google Analytics and view stats and other analytical stuff : )

As always, if you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to post a comment.

Windows XP does not allow the use of custom themes, which leaves you with the three color variations of the WindowsXP style and the endless colors of the good old Windows Classic style.

In order to install third party (non-Microsoft) themes, you will first need to patch the UXtheme.dll file.  If you do not do this, and try to install a custom theme, the result is not pretty.  You end up with a theme that looks like windows 3.1 or one that you would get in super safe mode.  While installing the patch Windows will try and convince you to insert your Windows Setup disc — just ignore this.  Once you have installed the patch you will need to restart your computer before you can use any new themes.

Note: If you ever want to revert back to the original UXtheme.dll file, simply re-run the Uxtheme Multi-patcher and it will be set back to normal.

Once you have installed the patch and have rebooted your computer, you are ready to change your theme.  Where do I find custom themes? Great Question!  If you are interested in the theme shown in this tutorial, you can find it here.  You can find other visual theme styles here.

If you have any questions, post them in the comments section.

Below are some related links to this topic:

• How to Change/Customize Your Desktop Icons
• Using Fences to Organize Your Desktop