Upstairs Room

BACKUP!!!

I’ve been saying it for years, but have recently started. I should have created a RAID the last upgrade of my PC, I definitely will as soon as I can. My motherboard allows RAID, so why not. Problem is, you have to RAID when installing the OS, so when it’s time to go to Windows 7, I’ll do it. That will take care of my OS/program drive.

The next best thing for now is syncing all my info to an external eSATA drive. I got a great price at Buy.com on a 2GB Fantom drive. Using Allway Sync, I’m syncing all data, FTP server that includes all my websites and some program file settings. This includes photos, music, videos, etc. Allway sync can be set to automatically sync many different ways. It doesn’t really slow the system much since I’m running maximum memory, but using Windows “Scheduled Tasks” I’ve set it to sync at night while I’m sleeping.

With a new season upcoming, I’ve been continually updating campbethel.com. Summer Camp info now online. Register Graphics has done the brochure again this year. Absolutely excellent work.

Camp has decided to start using Paypal for online payments. Using a wordpress plugin for e-commerce. Working well.

Payments for Women’s Retreat, Biker’s Retreat, Summer Camp, soon even the photo CDs and Video DVDs for the summer weeks will be available, along with other media. It’s complicated to make it all work together, but fun and I’m enjoying the challenge.

I finally switched hosting server for journeysinn.com and added a few more photos. This was the last site to be transferred from the old server. Apparently the email wasn’t working correctly for the last few months and I wasn’t aware. It’s fixed now and will stay fixed.

Been a while since I blogged here…

I redesigned campbethel.com for the Christmas season with a Christmas theme… that’s back to the regular design now. We’re finally starting to use Paypal for online payments for retreats, etc. A new e-commerce plug-in is working great for that. created some new pages for the registration forms and payment/shopping cart. Camp Bethel is twittering now, so I added a twitter plug-in that adds their tweets to the Camp blog page. Works pretty cool.

Redesigned 100DollarBillCards.com. Also using the new e-commerce plug-in there.

Transform Us Ministries is picking back up after the holidays. We’ve got our first board meeting Monday Jan. 18th. Looking forward to it. We have a new lead on property. Hope to find out more about that soon.

Need a website design or re-design? CALL ME!!

As if I don’t have enough to do… I really don’t! I’m always looking for more!

Christmas is coming FAST! Lots happening in the next few weeks.

Imagine Christmas. Kings Baptist Church’s Dessert Theater was a HUGE success this year. I was called in as a backup at the last minute because our usual Audio Tech caught the latest bug this week and was down for the count.

Spent a few hours this weekend redesigning the Camp Bethel website with a Christmas theme. Check it out, it won’t be there for long…

Still haven’t heard back from one possible web design client. Just the holidays I hope. Also I was checking back thru some emails and found the phone number for another potential client I was waiting to hear from. I’ve had it for two months and didn’t realize it. Hope it’s not too late to help them out.

Transform Us Ministries is getting SO exciting! We just picked up another couple of Board Members, including our Chairman of the Board. God is awesome and we have an awesome group of people we are working with!

Not much time to blog here lately. The A/V world has exploded with meetings and equipment rentals this month.

I recently met with the new caretaker(s) of Immanuel Baptist Church’s website and it sounds like they are on the go again with updating and maintaining the website after a brief down time. I also took the time to redesign the menu there. The code is ugly, but it works. I took the basic menu layout from another template and FORCED it to work! The results are what I was looking for in the first place and it allows newly added pages to show on the menu without extra editing steps by me.

Another few potential clients are on the beautiful horizon. One is definite, just not ready to move on it yet (technical business issues to resolve first).

Also, the biggie!… Transformation Ministries has made a name-change and the site and logos have been redesigned. BUT, we have finally incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization!! God is wasting no time in moving His ministry right along. Big plans and they are happening fast. We are praying and searching for potential Board members. Also moving forward looking for potential property locations for the first phase of the ministry. Let’s call it a “bed & breakfast type retreat/camping facility”! Oh, there’s so much more to it than that, but it a starting place! See http://transformusministries.org for the latest.

New layout with new shopping cart will launch this week. I’ve revamped it to make it easier on me and the customer.

I’ve used the osCommerce on the site for one year now and it’s good, but there are a few issues I have never resolved, like having it consistently email me a copy of the order. The site has received over 11,250 visits since Aug 11th, 2008.

The new site uses CoffeeCup for the shopping cart. I’ll give it a try for a while.

Camp Bethel’s site will be updated soon to clean it up from the summer. Getting ready for Family Camp. I still haven’t gotten anymore pics or videos from the summer to post there.

Transformation Ministries will be incorporated ASAP and the site will launch officially upon that milestone.

Just got back from a road-trip to California and will post pics on Elaine’s site this week.

Oh, then there’s Elaine’s teaching site. School’s back in session this week and she’ll start posting lesson plans again soon.

Transformation Ministries is now online though not officially launched. Not much content there, but the design is ready to go.

Gotta get Elaine’s site updated with a few more photos and news of the summer.

Camp Bethel Summer Camp is over and hopefully I’ll get some videos online soon. I really planned on keeping them up-to-date weekly, but I had no control over that. And now apparently the videographer/editor is more concerned about getting a YouTube channel setup for the videos than posting them on the website.

Same with the weekly photos. Out of all the weeks, we only got three camp weeks plus the Super Saturday even posted.

Now it’s time to clean up the site and get ready for next year!

2000 Pontiac Montana – after spending lotsa dollars fixing the tranny and needing new tires after our blow-out in Kansas City, I’ve decided we should keep this van and sell the ‘87 Jeep Cherokee. I wouldn’t make any money from it now anyways and we’ll use this as a second (or third, maybe that’s fourth…) vehicle.

The Jeep Cherokee will be listed on Craig’s list soon.

see it here…

CB has added three Day Camp weeks to the summer at the Hickory Hollow property in Bristol.

I didn’t create the latest HH website, but I did modify it a bit today with the Day Camp info.

The CB website required some not-so-minor editing of graphics and Publisher files for pdf’s of registration forms. Also took care of the pdfs with the old unofficial logo by adding the new logo.

Oh, I almost forgot. I added a Live Chat applet on the page also. It’s very neat. I hope it will be useful. It’s from meebo.com. Never heard of it before and I’m not sure how I found it, but it’s pretty cool.

The new logo for Camp Bethel has finally officially been decided upon. Just received word a couple of day ago.

The logo is excellent! Top notch brand marketing in my opinion. It’s bold and colorful. It makes a great statement in the progress of Camp Bethel Ministries.

I spent a few hours tonight adding the logo to the page by rebuilding the header graphics and flash. A few other updates were made with some other graphics also. The new font use in the logo has been incorporated in various site graphics.

I’m glad to see the logo has finally been approved and accepted to use, even if I did use the previous “new” logo on Elaine and Gabe’s summer missionary reminder cards already. The old one still looks sharp and it’s not a big problem. I will make new cards and postcards for them soon with the new official logo.