Is it just me or is everyone having problems with Firefox 3 crashing often?  Don’t get me wrong, I love it… but, it keeps crashing… on many different machines.

Actually, several of my staff users have reverted back to IE.  Yuck.  I’m still hanging in there Firefox.  I won’t give up on you.  I’m just a bit disheartened by clicking “Send Report” so often.

When you go to buy something on eBay, you look at the seller’s reputation, their “Feedback Profile.” It’s that magic number that says this person is okay to buy from. What is interesting to me is that a rating of 97% is great, but you may not buy from the person if you see two people saying the same bad thing about the seller, even if there are 300 people saying the opposite same good thing about the seller.

If you’re looking at ChMS products for your church, don’t throw Fellowship One out of consideration because of one post that I’ve written.  For my church, ACS is the right solution.  For your church, Fellowship might well be the direction you need to head.  Weigh the pros and cons of each heavily before making such a spendy decision.  I write posts, good and bad, about what I know and who I’ve interacted with.  To me, not sharing what I know would be burdensome, so I hang it out there.  The decisions are always yours to make.

Please hear me well that I am not bashing Fellowship Technologies.  My interactions with them otherwise have always been positive.  They seem to be a terrific company overall.  In fact, I’ve personally recommended them to a couple of churches who have ended up purchasing the product.

I am very encouraged by the quick response of Fellowship on yesterday’s post, and I wanted to share that with you here.

Curtis Harris wrote in this morning:

Matthew, I can’t apologize enough for the blog comment that apparently came from our company.  This is nothing we would ever condone and certainly not something I would want to be a part of; for so many of us, me included, this is a chance to use our God given skills for His purpose… it is our mission field.  I am very embarrased that this type of thing has happened and prior to this took some pride that we were above all that.  Sorry again.  Curtis Harris, Co-Founder and Director of Product Strategy.

Ah, just as I’m writing this post, I noticed that Jeff Hook, the CEO of Fellowship Technologies commented on the previous one.  It’s certainly worth a read.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using Firefox 3 (RC2) all week, and I’m very impressed.  Several of my add-ons did not work with the new version, but a couple of them were automatically upgraded to their Firefox 3 counterparts.

The new user interface looks quite different, but it still has that familiar Firefox charm.  The best thing I’ve noticed so far is that complex pages like those from Zoho and Google Docs render so much faster.  Honestly, it’s surprising how much difference there actually is.  I was never displeased before with those services, but now I almost can’t stand to use a computer with IE or Firefox 2 because that “Loading” bar appears all the time.

Sign up for Firefox 3 Download Day.  They’re trying to set a a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

I posted a month ago about an easier way to install Wordpress. Well, David Szpunar was kind enough to drop me a comment about installing with Subversion. I don’t have the desire or energy to explore Subversion in much detail, but it is very cool. Anyhow, I followed David’s instructions yesterday and got a WP blog up in running in less time than ever before. I’m including his comment here:

Hey, that’s still the old-fashioned way! If you’ve got SSH and a decent host (i.e. one that has the svn Subversion client installed), just run:

svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/ .

(for example, or use /branches/2.5/) inside the (empty) directory you want to be your WordPress root. Run through the web install and enter your database and blog information and you’re done. Best of all, you can switch to a new version with the svn switch command at any time, also a one-liner!

There are a few more tricks than that but the whole deal’s on the WordPress Codex. After your 2nd, 3rd, or 10th WordPress install (or upgrade!) you’ll be, well…really happy you’re using Subversion!

Next time you need to install Wordpress, try using Subversion.

Today, I trained our staff on searching for information in ACS. It was a very basic training session, but it seemed to be helpful for those who attended. What are you doing to make sure that your staff are well trained in your Church Management System (ChMS)? I know that some of you have a dedicated training staff, some of you bring in trainers from your ChMS on a regular basis, and some of you just kind of let it ride. I’m interested to hear how you train staff on technology, specifically related to your ChMS. Are you intentional about it? For the ACS users out there, would you be interested in videos from our staff trainings?