Crossfire

Web links and tips for listeners to Crossfire with Len Black on Moray Firth and Nevis Radio, where Scottish Christian publisher Ian Ansdell appears each month (usually!). Please note that some older links may no longer be active. If you’ve any technical queries, or are interested in a new website for your church or Christian organisation, please email crossfire@scottishchristian.com.

Sunday 22 April 2012

• After Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has rocketed from nowhere to become the third most popular social network. And up to 97 per cent of its users are women. Here are 11 ways your church could use Pinterest.
• Blockbuster movie The Hunger Games has potential for ‘engaging teens & twenties with spiritual parallels‘.
• April 29 is Internet Evangelism Day. Stacks of resources here.
• Gizmo of the Month: Replace the horrid start menu in Windows Vista/7 with an old-school flyout menu … Start Menu 7.
• MegaGizmo of the Month: Loads of free programs from Serif – but don’t use WebPlus!
• Tip of the Month: If you’re using drag’n'drop to copy a file from your computer to a memory stick, make sure the actual file has copied, and not just a shortcut!
• Oh well, here’s a bonus tip: If text on a website is too small to read, hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and either hit the +/- keys on the board or move the wheel on your mouse. Also handy for seeing small pictures in greater detail. To return to normal size, go to View then Zoom on your browser menu.

Sunday 11 March 2012

• Scottish Christian is back online following a four-month break!
• News coverage on the front page is now drawn automatically through RSS from major church and other websites.
• RSS – Really Simple Syndication – makes the output of news-based sites available for off-site use.
• Individuals can view the content without having to visit the original website, using online tools like Google Reader or (free!) desktop programs like Feedreader or RSSOwl …
• … and other people’s news can be presented on your own website. This site for St Mungo’s Episcopal Church in Alexandria carries Daily Prayer plus diocesan and provincial news in its right-hand sidebar, all updated automatically by RSS.
• A similar system is used for our new Twitter Roundup.
• Phew! Now relax while we talk about the latest trend in websites … responsive web design. Increasing numbers of people don’t access websites on PCs or laptops. Instead, they use smartphones or tablets like the iPad. Many websites look awful or are unusable on these new gizmos. Hence responsive web design … a design which responds to the device the user views it on. See examples at DesignModo and TheNextWeb. See how they work by calling one up in your browser then making the browser window smaller. (Scottish Christian was in early … we used ElmaStudio’s Ari theme last year, but dropped it for other technical reasons.)
• Gizmo of the Month is Google Docs Embedding, which enables you to display any document, such as a PDF, in a web page. You can get the code from Google or use a plugin if your site’s built on WordPress.  There’s an example of it in action at the bottom of this page from St Ninian’s, Troon.