• The Age of the Informavore: A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher is currently featured in Edge, along with responses from thinkers like Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker. “We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.” So much good stuff in there. Related: Is Google Making Us Stupid? 11/06/2009
• Here’s a new Pew report on Social Isolation and New Technology for your perusal. “Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend [of becoming more socially isolated]. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network.” 11/04/2009

Dead simple group texting for ministry with Tatango

A while back I wrote a gushing blog post about a company called Tatango, whose aim is to make it dead simple for anybody to harness the useful technology of mass or group text messaging. Those of us involved in youth ministry are undoubtedly aware that text messaging is an indispensable tool for effective communication with our students, so I wanted to give another push for Tatango and the services they offer. And because I love you so much, at the end of this post you will find a code for 15% off of any plan Tatango offers.

Below is a short tutorial video that covers the basics of Tatango. Since the service has recently gone under a moderate redesign/update, I’m sure that current users will find the video helpful as well:

Let me say a few quick words regarding other youth ministry texting options.

If you’ve bought into Doug Fields’ Simply Youth Ministry Simply Txt, then I laud you for knowing that texting is important, but I promise you that Tatango is a better bang for your buck. Just compare Simply Txt’s $30/mo plan with Tatango’s $20/mo plan. For $10 less per month, you get 280 more group messages, unlimited more contacts, and two keywords (which, as far as I can tell, Simply Txt doesn’t offer).¹

I’m also aware that TXT Signal was all the rage in youth ministry circles for a while, but it simply can’t keep up with the services Tatango offers. A quick comparison of pricing plans for TXT Signal and Tatango will convince you more quickly than I could here.

Anyway, if you’re still on the fence about whether or not Tatango’s group messaging service is a good fit for your ministry, try it out free for 30 days. When your trial is over, the good people from Tatango have offered readers of JakeBouma.com a code good for 15% off any plan (The 15% is continuous, and is good for the lifetime of the plan). Just enter K7D0TRCL when you check out and enjoy the savings!

If you have any questions about Tatango’s services, be sure to check out their Frequently Asked Questions page, follow them on Twitter, and/or leave a comment below.

1. Keywords allow you to choose words that users can text to join the group. For example, I have “EIKON” set up as the high school keyword ↩

• Catalista has released an iPhone app that connects volunteers with opportunities. “Even beyond the mobile access to volunteer opportunity listings, what seems especially compelling about Catalista is the possibility that it could facilitate spontaneous, ad-hoc volunteering, whereby people with a few hours of unscheduled time on their hands can find and participate in local opportunities that they might not have been able to plan for otherwise.” 10/25/2009

Evernote tip: Easier web clipping using Readability

I’ve previously written about how I use Evernote to organize my youth ministry, and my use of the program has only expanded since then. Consequently, I am constantly tweaking the way I use Evernote to make both the program and my time as efficient as possible.

I recently discovered a killer (and super simple) method for using Evernote’s Web Clipper in tandem with arc90’s Readability to import articles/blogs into the program. Here’s how it’s done.

I’ll be using this article from Youth Worker Journal as the example throughout. Here’s what the page looks like in a browser (you can click any of the images below for a full-sized version):

The article that I actually want to save and clip into Evernote is surrounded by tons of noise that I don’t want. If I use the Web Clipper to clip the entire page, here’s what I get:

If I scroll about halfway down the note, I am finally at the start of the text I want to save, but it’s still surrounded by all the noise from the original page:

At this point, some of you might be wondering why I don’t use one of the most useful features of the Web Clipper — text highlighting. One can highlight text and/or images from any page and clip it all into Evernote with ease, which is really handy, but in this case even if I highlight all the text and clip it, there’s still an advertisement stuck in the middle of my note:

Utilizing Readability, there’s no need for highlighting text in the browser and no unnecessary removal of unwanted text or images once the article has been clipped into Evernote. In fact, just two clicks does the trick.

Once I’ve added the Readability bookmarklet to my bookmark toolbar, I visit the page I want to clip into Evernote, and click the Readability bookmarklet. Doing so results in something like this:

Now, instead of a great article surrounded by distracting noise, there is only the text of the article itself — and without that pesky advertisement. I click the Web Clipper on my browser to clip the resulting page into Evernote and I get the following result:

Voilà! A clutter-free version of the article I want imported into Evernote with just two clicks. I hope you find this helpful; let me know if you do!

Ireland: Days 3 & 4

Hey, folks. Here is the video from days three and four of the trip. Enjoy!

The video is from Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday (Monday) we went to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, where I took this panoramic (on my iPhone!) and then tried to find a leprechaun.

Today we took a bus tour and saw the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher, the Ailwee Caves, and other equally awesome things. Since we’ve been gone for the better part of both days, the videos and pictures will trickle in rather slowly.

Alrighty… I’m off to enjoy the Galway nightlife. Slán!

• Bruce Reyes-Chow is in cahoots with the folks at Apple and their new Worship Market Team. “So here is the deal. Apple has decided that the church worship market might be a great place for Apple’s interface to well… interface. Everything from podcasting to presentation to marketing to church management, they are looking at ways that Apple can be part of the church/worship experience. It sounds like this is mostly applications at this point with some hardware integration.” Sounds awesome. And he’s taking suggestions to bring to Apple, so leave a comment if you have some ideas. 10/27/2008

How I use Evernote to organize my youth ministry

Since switching from PC to Mac, I’ve flirted with several desktop note-taking and organizing programs, including Yojimbo and Journler. In the end I settled on Evernote because, in my opinion, it is by far the most feature-rich of them all.

If you’re totally unfamiliar with Evernote, it might be a good idea to read their Getting Started guide or watch the Overview Video. You’ll be glad you did, because the advice below will save you time and make you better organized in your ministry.

But before we get into the glorious details, here are a few tips to make Evernote work harder for you (and your ministry). First, install one of the Evernote Web Clippers. I use the official Firefox extension, and it’s great.

Second, add your personal Evernote email address as a contact in your phone. After you’ve signed up and logged into your account, your email address is located at the bottom of the page in “Settings”. This is where you can send pix and text messages which Evernote will convert to notes you can access later.¹

Third, set up a new Notebook in Evernote specifically for Youth Ministry. If you’re like me (or anyone else with a pulse), you’ll use Evernote for myriad things outside of your ministry as well (I even had this blog post outlined in Evernote).

Saving devotion ideas and teaching illustrations

If I come across a cool, inspirational, or spiritually edifying story on the internet, I simply use the Evernote clipper to save it for later. For example, a while back I came across a blog post called 18 of The Most Insane Journeys In Recent History, and I clipped it to my “Youth Ministry” notebook. If I’m writing a devotion or message about overcoming trials or something similar, I can refer to this post for some good material. Better yet, I tagged the note with “devo” “trial” and “journey” so I don’t have to remember it at all — I can just type one of those words in the search box or browse through my tags to find what I need. Here’s a screenshot of the entry.

Saving informative ebooks and PDFs

This is similar to the above implimentation, but I wanted to point out one of my favorite features: Evernote can search for text contained within pictures and PDFs. When I come across great ebooks or handouts, I clip them to Evernote for future reference. For example, I have 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups from Insight saved, and if I search “icebreaker”, Evernote quickly reads my mind finds what I was looking for. Here’s a screenshot of the search in action.

Keeping track of signups and payments

As a note-taking tool, Evernote is really handy for jotting things down that don’t legitimate their own Word document. I used it this summer to keep track of my junior high VBS sign-ups and payments. You can add “checkmark bullets” anywhere within a note, so whenever I received a payment, I simply checked off that student’s box. Simple as that. Here’s a screenshot of the checkmark box in use.

Collect those pesky receipts

I hate doing receipts — it’s one of my least favorite components of my job. I’m always losing them or forgetting them and getting ticked when the first of the month rolls around. When I’m at brick-and-mortar stores, I just put the receipts in my wallet, but when I buy things for my ministry online, it’s not that easy. Usually, a receipt is emailed to me, and I just save it to Evernote. If it’s a PDF, I drag and drop it into a new note, and if it’s text, I just highlight all and copy/paste.² Here’s an example of a note containing a receipt from my local Apple Store.

Prayer

Prayer isn’t one of my spiritual fortés, but I’ve managed to leverage Evernote to help me. I try to regularly ask students how I can be praying for them, and now I keep a list in Evernote with their names and what they want me to pray about. When I pray, I can focus on a specific student or go down the whole list — you get the point.

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Those are just a few of the ways that I’ve managed to take advantage of Evernote in my youth ministry. I’ve only been using the program for a few months, but I know that the longer I use it, the more indispensable it will become (especially if when I get an iPhone). What are some other creative ways to use Evernote in youth ministry? I’d love to hear your ideas — please leave a comment and let me know!

1. If you have an iPhone, you can just download the Evernote app and bypass this step. ↩
2. If you do this, you probably don’t want to make your “Youth Ministry” notebook a “Public” web notebook — don’t want people snooping around your receipts. ↩

• Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, wrote an article for The Atlantic titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This is a superb article, and I couldn’t help but notice the strong tie-ins with TSK’s “1024 Window”. Related: Nicholas Carr on Marshal McLuhan, Best of 2007 07/07/2008

How to move your iTunes music library from a PC to a Mac without losing metadata (ratings, play counts, album art, etc.)

I spent the better part of yesterday trying to load my iTunes library on my new MacBook Pro. I was bound and determined NOT to lose all of the metadata associated with my music — star ratings, play counts, playlists, album art, etc. Call me superficial, but I just didn’t want to lose all of that information; information that has been compiled for 3,300+ audio files over the last three years.

Anyway, I eventually got it all figured out, but I thought I’d pass along what I learned. The tutorial below will help you if you DON’T let iTunes manage your Music folder (you can check this setting in Preferences → Advanced → General) and you’re moving from a PC to a Mac. If you don’t mind letting iTunes manage your music, there are easier ways to make the transfer.

I followed this tutorial for the most part, but I got hung up towards the end of the process. So I paraphrased and edited that tutorial to help out people like me (and, presumably, you) who want to switch from a PC to a Mac.

1. Transfer all of your music from the PC to the Mac.

Don’t delete anything — you want all of the same files on both the PC and the Mac. There are lots of ways to transfer your files documented elsewhere, so I won’t cover that here.

It will make things easier if you try to replicate the folder structure on your Mac that you had on your PC. For example, on my PC I had a folder located in D:/Music/ and within the “Music folder” were four sub-folders: “Downloads” (D:/Music/Downloads/), “Full Albums”, “Single mp3s”, and “Owned Albums (mp3 backup)”. When I copied the music to my Mac, I kept the same folder structure, within my new music folder: /Users/jakebouma/Music/. More on this later.

2. Check for up-to-date software.

Make sure that both machines are running the most current version of iTunes. Might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important.

3. Find and transfer “iTunes Music Library.xml”

On your PC, locate a file called “iTunes Music Library.xml”. By default in Windows, iTunes will place this file in the “My Music” folder. For example, C:/Documents and Settings/Jake/My Documents/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml. If you’re having trouble finding the file, just perform a search.

Making sure that this file is not deleted, transfer it from your PC to your Mac. You can do this many ways, including using a USB drive; I emailed the file to myself.

4. Open “iTunes Music Library.xml” on the Mac.

Using a text editor like TextWrangler (all screenshots will be of this application), open the iTunes Library.xml that you just transferred to the Mac. You can do this by holding ⌘command and clicking on the file.



The next step is where retaining the basic file structure from PC to Mac (Step 1) comes in handy. This file, iTunes Music Library.xml, contains ALL of the metadata associated with the music in your iTunes library (ratings, play counts, album art, etc.), including where it is located on your hard drive. All you need to do is change the file locations in this file to reflect their new location on the Mac to keep all of this vital metadata intact.

Rather than editing this file by hand, which would take hours and hours, you’re going to use the “Find” and “Replace All” function.

5. Find and replace.

First, you need to find the “Location” line of a file. This is the line that tells iTunes where to find the file with which it associates the metadata. In Step 1, I mentioned that one of my folders was called “Owned Albums (mp3 backup)”. iTunes recognizes this file as located at file://localhost/D:/Owned%20Albums%20(mp3%20backup). The %20s denote the use of spaces.



Because all of the files in “Owned Albums (mp3 backup)” on my PC now reside in a similar folder called “Owned Albums (mp3 backup)” on my Mac, all i have to do is change the beginning of the file locations.

Highlight the beginning of the file location, and copy it (⌘command + C). In TextWrangler, click Search → Find or press ⌘command + F to open the “Find & Replace” pane. In the top “Search For” box, paste the text you highlighted (⌘command + V). In the bottom “Replace With” box, enter the beginning of the file location on your Mac. (To find the location of a file on your mac, just ⌘command + click the file, and choose “Get Info”. The location is the line that says “Where”.) Make sure that you add file://localhost/ before the location of the Mac file in the “Replace With” box, or iTunes won’t be able to find your files. Here’s what it should look like (click the image for larger file):



Make sure the “Start at Top” box is checked, and then click the “Replace All” button on the right side.



Voilà! Repeat this as necessary for the number of folders you have. Save this file.

6. Copy and replace “iTunes Music Library.xml”.

Make sure that iTunes is closed and locate the iTunes folder on your Mac. Mine is in Users/jakebouma/Music/iTunes. If you have never opened iTunes on your Mac, there won’t be any files here. If you have, there will be two files: iTunes Music Library.xml (not the one you just edited) and iTunes Library.



Copy and replace the iTunes Music Library.xml in this folder with the iTunes Music Library.xml that you just edited in Step 5. Do not open iTunes yet.

7. Manually corrupt the “iTunes Library” file.

Use a text editor such as TextWrangler to open the iTunes Library file (not the .xml file — see the image in Step 6). Select all of the text (⌘command + A) and delete it. The file should now be blank, with zero characters in it; save it (⌘command + S). iTunes Library’s filesize should now be zero KB (This is important, because some text editors — e.g. UltraEdit — may append invisible characters to the beginning of the file).

If this file is corrupted, which is what the above paragraph details, iTunes will default to iTunes Music Library.xml for all of its information. iTunes will automatically rebuild this file itself, so it’s okay to corrupt it for now.

8. Open iTunes and let it do its thing.

A prompt with a progress bar will come up — iTunes is rebuilding your library. Depending on how powerful your computer is and the size of your music library, this may take a while. When this ends, iTunes will come up with a message saying that the library file was corrupted/damaged and it tried to rebuild things for you. Press “OK” and iTunes will finally launch.

9. Tidy up.

After you’ve made sure that all of your metadata is intact and the files play correctly, you’ll probably want to tidy things up a bit now, such as reformatting your columns in the library and all the playlists and setting the Preferences as you’d like them.

I don’t subscribe to a whole lot of podcasts, so I just went to the iTunes Store and re-subscribed to them all. If you want to keep past episodes, follow the instructions here.

That’s it! You’re done!

10. Reformat your iPod (optional).

If you have an iPod and it was set up on your PC, the iTunes on your Mac will say “Only Macintosh-formatted iPods can be updated” when you plug in your iPod. Your iPod will still sync properly with this message, it just won’t download any new iPod software that Apple releases. To fix this, click “Restore” and iTunes will automatically reformat your iPod for your Mac and re-sync all of your music.

Phwew! Please leave comments if you have any questions or if something was unclear. I wrote this to save people the headache I went through.

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