Over at the fshbwl we are looking to embrace open, common, and sharing technologies to help people grow in faith, have real and non-superficial conversations, and search for the answers to those tough questions we all have. So, we have been asking ourselves if you have a Internet ministry what ways would you share it with others? What technologies and services would you embrace?
Moving beyond the standard email and RSS subscriptions we wanted a way to better integrate the content and conversations from the fshbwl into other technologies like desktop widgets and gadgets and Internet homepages. To do just that there is now the fshbwl widget.
The fshbwl widget works on Netvibes, igoogle, Windows Live, Opera, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista.
Have you thought about these questions in your ministry? Does your church work to integrate these technologies into the applications and websites people are already using? If so, how? In what ways do you see to expand?
Integrating technologies and plugging into the things people are already using is an area there is a lot of room for growth in the church. It's a field ripe with opportunity ready to be picked.
A special thanks to Netvibes and Greg Cohn for producing this widget. You can find more details about the widget on the fshbwl blog.
widgets
I should know this... because I am a web designer, but how easy is it to create a widget? is there an app that you may use to create one?
wondering if Geeks n God did a cast on this topic?
It Depends
This is really a tough topic. It's like asking how easy is it to write a program. That depends on the systems you want it to run on, what you want it to do, and a number of other factors.
In the case of this widget it was easy for us because we didn't do the development. Netvibes has system to create these widgets. It's not a final release system that everyone can tap into just, yet. But, it's getting there.
Other widgets, like the Geeks and God Mac Desktop widget, are easy because there are tools (in that case part of xcode) that make it easy. But, they don't run everywhere.
If you're familiar with javascript and apis you can make a igoogle widget. You can get details at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/. This really depends on your knowledge base.
So, it's not such a simple question. I don't think we've covered it on Geeks and God, yet.