Blog entries - September 2007

Looking At Parish Life - Online Photo Gallery Software

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:57:04 +0100

Images are important. Orthodox Christians know that better than any other Christian community, which is why we struggle to keep our churches adorned appropriately. Many of our icons, of course, depict scenes from the life of the Church. Great events in the Christian past are rendered in

gold leaf and hung for all to see and venerate. We understand how important it is to visually chronicle our past as a community, and to honor that past.

But a curious thing happRead More...

Religious Teens and Happiness

Jason Barker — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:14:12 +0100

A survey released several weeks ago by the Associate Press and MTV claims that religion tends to make teens happier

. According to the survey, eighty percent of teens who claim to be religious also claim to be happy (compared with sixty percent who say that faith is not important to them). This is also significant because forty-four percent of respondents said that faith is very important to them, and twenty-one percent said faith is somewhatRead More...

A Year in Web 2.0 - A Parish Webmaster Looks Back

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:35:03 +0100

I took over my first parish Website in 2000, when I was still a catechumen. Back then I was working primarily in the mainframe space, and the Web was both new and somewhat scary. I got an extra copy of Frontpage 2000 at the office, and started putting icons and gold coloring on pages of my own for Holy Trinity in Maitland, Florida.

I stuck with static HTML development through early 2006. By then I was building Websites for customers, in addition to working on my parishRead More...

An OCN Blog Manifesto

Seraphim Dankaert — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:18:14 +0100

Greetings and welcome to our blogging experiment! We hope this part of the site will become an active forum for the discussion of all things related to spreading the Gospel through modern media.

The Orthodox Church has been blessed with the truth faith, but, as St. Paul once asked the Romans, how can people hear about the truth unless someone tells them? Very few people even know of the Church's existence, and our own faithful don't have access to Orthodox spiritual andRead More...

Social Network Fundraising

Seraphim Dankaert — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:40:04 +0100

I've been exploring various ways to use Internet-based social networks for fundraising. OCN has many supporters who use the Internet for many different things (e.g. message boards, Facebook, MySpace, OrthodoXCircle) and these supporters can plug into their existing online networks to spread the word about OCN.Â
One means of doing that comes from ChipIn, makers of a snazzy little widget that is easy to put on personal Web sites and share with friends. Anyone who wishes can click on the Read More...

We're live!

Seraphim Dankaert — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:46:36 +0100

Greetings and welcome to the OCN Blog! This is YOUR part of the site, where we encourage you to comment, ask questions and discuss how best to reach people for Christ using modern media.