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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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 received an e-mail from Catholic Exchange addressing their decision to sacrifice a great amount of income, for the good of their readers.  This could be an advantageous lesson for other Christian blogsites as well.

About a year ago in an effort to create a new revenue stream, Catholic Exchange subscribed to rotating Google ads based on keywords. A lot of you noticed and commented on the ads, which are ubiquitous on the internet and are used on many other Catholic sites. Some of your comments were simple expressions of annoyance. We understand; many people are tired of seeing these ads. We admit they were kind of cheesy, but you know what? Cheesy or not, they helped us generate some very much needed income.

Other complaints about the ads expressed more than just annoyance. Some of our readers were outraged when, for example, under an article about adoption, Google presented an ad for a gay adoption lawyer. Others fumed when they noticed ads promoting certain anti-Catholic sites. Our editors handled these complaints explaining that we could block ads, but only after they ran and only if we were given the URL. After a while, we blocked all the most egregious ads and the complaints dwindled to a trickle. We think most of you came to understand that even when you saw a questionable ad, CE was not responsible for it and you learned to ignore or help us get rid of them.

I don’t have to worry about these annoying ads, because I’ve implemented the steps from my posts How to get rid of sponsored ads on Google and MySpace & Mozilla Firefox.  I think StBlogs uses Google ads as well, but I never see them either.

Some say that the blocking of ads is unfair to the companies who spend money to post their ads, or perhaps that it is unfair to the sites hosting the ads.  I disagree.  The way Google ads work is that a person must click on the link in order for the transaction to take place.  I don’t normally click on Google ads, so I’m not hurting anyone by getting rid of them altogether.  If anyone is doing a disservice, it’s the type of ads that Google’s service recommends for certain key word searches.

Cleaning Our Temple

In this season when the pursuit of holiness in preparation for the joy of Easter becomes a greater priority, we felt the special need to cleanse our site of anything that does not glorify our all-holy God. So we have made the hard decision to stop using the Google ads.

We have sacrificed a reliable funding resource, trusting that God will supply our needs through your generosity and help us meet our budget each month…

By getting rid of the Google ads, we have made CE a more attractive daily stop for the tens of thousands of visitors from 139 countries seeking bedrock answers to the seemingly intractable problems of our day. We have shown you that our commitment to the Faith and to prudent use of the internet means more to us than the thousands of dollars we were generating annually.

I commend Catholic Exchange for making this decision.  It was not an easy decision for them to make.  They will need the support of their readers to bridge this financial gap!

Do you use Google ads or ads of another service on your blog or site?  Not including the ones that you have no control over, like StBlogs’. Is it worth the income?  Is it wrong for the average web user to block ads?  We’d love to hear your opinions.

Finding images for your post is an important part of blogging.  Your images should relate to what it is you are writing about.  The image should be intriguing and cause a person to think to themselves, this might be something I’d like to read more about.  You should have permission to use any images that are not taken/created by you.  Sonia Simone, an Associate Editor of Copyblogger, added in his post titled “The Lazy Blogger’s Guide to Finding Great Post Images,” that the image should also set an emotional tone.

But, what if you are having trouble finding an image that does all of these things?  How about using a cartoon!  There are several Catholic cartoonists out there, whom allow bloggers to post their images.  Each have their own guidlines, so be sure to check out their websites first, or e-mail them and ask their permission.   Most are more than happy to grant permission as long as appropriate recognition is given.

Here are just a few:

Posted with permission of Gary Cangemi
(www.umberttheunborn.com)

Posted with permission of Paul Nichols
(www.catholiccartoonblog.blogspot.com)

Posted with permission of John Francis Borra
(www.veritatisthecartoon.blogspot.com)

If you know of any others, feel free to post a comment.

StBlogs has begun using gravatars next to comments and elsewhere on the site. This will really help your comments and posts stand out!

Uploading Your Gravatar:

Step 1: Go to www.Gravatar.com and click “Sign Up.”

Step 2: Enter a valid e-mail address.

Step 3: Next, click on “My Account” and go down to “Add an Image.”

Step 4: Select where you’d like to get the image from (for the sake of this tutorial, I chose “My computer’s hard drive”).

Step 5: Click the “Browse…” button and find the image that you would like to upload.  Once you have done so, click “Next.”

Step 6: Now, you can choose to crop only a selection of the image or select the entire image by moving and stretching the dotted bounding box.  Once you are satisfied, simply click on the “Crop and Finish” button.

Step 7: Next, choose a rating for your gravatar based on the image itself (As a blog administrator you may set how high of a rating to allow and other blogs that you post comments to can do the same.  For instance, StBlogs.com has their rating set to “G” and thus, any gravatar that is higher than a “G” rating will be replaced with a generic icon).

Step 8: Choose the image that you would like to set as your default gravatar by clicking on it.

Activating Your Gravatar Settings:

Step 9: Login to your StBlogs Dashboard and click on the “Design” tab.  Then click on the “Gravatar” link.  Make sure that the “Enable Gravatars on your blog” is checked and then click the “Update Gravatars” button.

Step 10: Next, click on the “Settings” tab…

…and followed by the “Discussion” link.

This is where you can set how your blog handles avatars (Remember when I mentioned above how you can set the rating of gravatars for your own blogs?  Well, here is where you can do this, along with how your blog handles non-gravatar users).

And your done!

As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or if I have confused you ; )

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Blogger’s Choice Awards is accepting nominations for this year’s competition. Sign up and vote for your favorite blogs to help determine the winners for next year.

In this tutorial I will show you how to embed a YouTube video into a StBlogs post.

Step 1: Make sure the Viper Video Plugin is enabled.  To do this, login as the administrator and click on the “Plugins” tab at the top righthand of the page.  If the Viper Video Plugin is not already activated then go ahead and activate it by clicking the “activate” link under the “Action” column.

Step 2: Find the YouTube code of your video.

Step 3: When you go to “write” a new blogpost, simply add the following script you see below where you want the video to appear.  Remember to replace the center text with the code you found on YouTube.

Step 4: Test it!

[youtube width="272" height="234"]DDrRe1EajLk[/youtube]

Click Here for more StBlogs Tips or Here to search PickAFig

Athanasius contra mundum of the 50 Days After blog thought of a really cool idea.  He calls this idea “Adopting a Catholic Blog”.  Contra says that “By adopting you would keep the author(s) in your prayers and link to their site on your sidebar (if you have a site). But you would also read their blog with some frequency, maybe blog on one of their posts, and comment on his or her blog as you see fit.”

Four Easy Steps to Adopting a Catholic Blog:

1. Choose one of your favorite Catholic bloggers (preferably a St Blogs Blog.)
2. Add a link to this blog in your blogroll or links section of your own blog.
3. Post your selection in the comments section of Contra’s post (try not to adopt the same blog as someone else.)
4. Pray for this blog’s author(s).

Please direct your comments to Contra and let him know that you are praying for him as he is being deployed soon.

Technorati, “the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web,” has a way to search only blogs (very much like Google, but for blogs). It is called Technorati Search.

On that note, We added the Catholic Tech Tips blog to Technorati’s database. One of the neat things about this is that now we can track how many people link us to their blogs. This is what Technorati refers to as authority.

Also, if you have a Technorati account, you can add us to your Technorati faves!

I recently found out about this cool new site called PickAFig (www.pickafig.com) from a comment on our site.

Just what is PickAFig?

Think “Digg”, only Catholic!  It is a place where you can “pick” your favorite blogposts, online news articles, and really anything Catholic related.  It is social bookmarking at its finest!

So head over to PickAFig now! (or whenever you have some free time, which is never, so you better go there now ; )

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