Hello, friends. I hope everyone is surviving the cold days of February. I have a new desktop theme in honour of the Chinese year of the prosperous rabbit. Although they are, truly, bunnies. If you are in need of a little jolt of spring, this could be your ticket — head on over to Microsoft and grab a theme (for Windows 7).
I have been remiss in my blogging duties this winter. I've been up to my you-know-what in alligators. New, exciting projects that I enjoy, but would enjoy more if deadlines didn't a) overlap, and b) get moved up 3 weeks. 
It didn't help that I got a full week behind in October from pneumonia, which is mostly gone after 2 rounds of drugs. But enough kvetching. Let's talk about what's new on the site.
Email Woes
I've set up (mostly) Google Docs and email addresses for church members who are on committees (chairs mostly) but I'm having a bear of a time figuring out how to get Outlook to work with it. So I missed some emails for about a week. If your " This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it " email bounced, try it again. I'm on it now (I think).
Articles of the Week
Regular visitors may have noticed the addition of the "Article of the Week" in the rotating gallery on the front page (the actual name of this charming addition to the website is the "HOTNewsflash module" which is a little racy for a church, so I just call it, generically, a "gallery"). This new spotlight on site content is intended to let people know that we have a wealth of different goodies on the site, and encourage them to read some different stuff that maybe they wouldn't find otherwise.
Eventually I'll put some "how to" articles there (but if you are interested, there is a whole section of how to articles, many of which are how to use this site, under the Help tab in the top tabs on the right).
Greatest Hits
One change as of this morning is that I've turned on the "hits" feature on the site. No, that doesn't mean that top 40 will start playing. It's a hit counter which is global, and records to a more-or-less accurate degree how many people have read the article in question (although it could be argued, that since just OPENING the article counts as a hit, that "reading" is somewhat loosely defined...).
Amazon and other Money Stuff
Another change is the addition of the Amazon Store, which is accessible with a link at the bottom of the site on the left. This is a way for anyone to order through Amazon.ca and a small percentage of their order goes right back to the church (it's 4.6% I think...). It doesn't cost extra to do this, and the church gets a little kickback. Cool.
There is also a Donate button at the bottom of the site, and we are now set up with a PayPal account. They do take a small percent, but the theory is that this is offset by the ease of use factor.
UU TV
The UU TV is getting moved today to the top of the section at the bottom where the login is. Or somewhere else where it can be seen...
Announcements
Again I kvetch (word of the day maybe?)... I'm still seeing announcements for the first time in the weekly announcements sent out by Lee, and I think, gee I wonder if that should be on the website. In some cases I do grab the text and just post it, but I never know if the author intended for this information to be on the web (forever and publicly) so I generally don't. (I was for a time posting the announcements all together this way, but privacy is a real issue so I discontinued.)
If you want your announcement to be on the website, please send it to me directly.
And that's all for now. I'm going to go enjoy my virtual bunnies.
Karin
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