As Far As I Can Tell

Dell Breaks Price Points on Touch Screens

I've always thought touch screen LCDs were overpriced.  Today a fellow church IT Director pointed out that Dell released a new Dell branded touchscreen that is much cheaper than it's ELO counter part.  Prices for the 15" start at $479.  Wonder what our Dell rep can do for us...? Get the details!

New Look for Amazon?

Clicked over to Amazon and wow, a new look.  Amazon has had a consistant look for as long as I can remember.  The new look is not a radical change, but a welcomed upgrade.  I haven't dived in too much to check for new features, but my first reaction is positive.  Check it out...

Must Read!

A few weeks ago I finished "Why Men Hate Going to Church" by David Murrow and all I can say is READ IT!  CCV has targeted men between the ages of 25-45 since it opened it's doors 22 years ago.  Our senior pastor drills this thinking into all we do.  This book brings into focus his thinking and gives real world examples of the types of changes that are needed if we want to impact our society for Jesus.  Don't think about it, just get it.

U2 Giveaway Deconstructed

CCV wrapped up it's U2 Ticket Giveaway this week.  The promotion had 844 participants with 6162 entries (each partcipant could register up to once a day).  After surveying the partcipants CCV found that roughly 20% were unchurched.  For the full details on the results see the full U2 Giveaway Deconstructed link.

Google Lowers Price for Search Appliances

Google announced a drop the prices of their search appliances today.  Their Google Mini is now $2995 for indexing 100,000 documents (down from $4995).  One more drop and we might be able to get one! Actually if we ever out grow our 5,000 document limit on Coveo (free) the Mini might be the the way to go.

Web Search

A few months ago I found myself looking for a replacement to our web search engine.  We had been using Alkaline, a free search engine but had been having some problems with it.  While we were moving our web server internal I thought it would be a great opportunity to find something new.  After looking at several I found Coveo Enterprise Search.  While I had not heard of them (I used to select and manage the external search engines for Honeywell in my previous career) after researching and demoing the product I was very impressed.  Coveo had all of the features I was looking for and best of all was free for indexes less that 5,000 documents.  While it does provide a COM interface that I could use from ASP.Net the out of the box interface is so flexible I found it was not needed.  We've been live on Coveo now for three months and are very happy.  It's pretty much a set it and forget it package.

As a side note we provide a blended search capability on our site.  When a user enters keywords we first check a keyword list.  If a keyword is found we take the user directly to the page that matches that keyword (i.e. the keyword 'men' will take you to the Men's Ministry page).  If no keyword is found we then send the input to the search engine for a full text index search.  Check it out...

Photoshop CS2

  If rumors are correct tomorrow Adobe should be announcing Photoshop CS2!  Photoshop is by far my favorite program.  While others play video games as a release I prefer Photoshop any day.  A friend of mine got to see some of the new features in action at Photoshop world (did go this year so I could save for the HOW Design Connference).  Anyways, can't wait for the upgrade! 

More info

Dealing with Bad E-mail Addresses

Advance Intellect, developer of the recognized aspNetEmail .Net component, recently released a new component to they're email suite, List Nanny .Net.  While the name is pretty lame the functionality is pretty cool.  It can determine if an e-mail is a hard bounce (i.e. an e-mail that has bounced back due to a wrong address), an out of the office notification, a spam notification, or several other types.

So what makes this interesting? Well by integrating List Nanny .Net with their aspnetPOP3 component you can develop a simple app that retrieves all of the mail out of a specified account, looks for bounced mail, then does some processing based on the bad address (it returns that too).  We're in the process of integrating this functionality into our custom membership system.  Whenever an e-mail bounces back we'll mark the address as 'invalid'.  This will allow us to follow-up with the individual with a postcard that asks them to update their address on-line.

With the size of our church e-mail becomes the number one way we can communicate with our members.  Yet e-mail addresses change so frequently (especially among youth).  With this quick solution we can remain on top of changes quickly.

If it sounds like a lot of work it's really not that bad.  My initial sample app is only 50 lines of code and took no more that 2 hours to write.  Definitely worth the effort.