Discover how to leverage technology in your church

Within any culture there’s a certain orthodox set of ideas that aren’t allowed to be challenged or compromised except at great peril.  Some of those are held in common across most, if not all, cultures, such as the idea that killing without justification is wrong.  Others of them are unique to a particular culture, place and time.  In ancient Rome, for example, one of the guiding principles was that of polytheism.  It was perfectly acceptable for someone to worship whatever god they chose to follow, as long as they didn’t make any claims to be the only god.  Obviously Judaism and early Christianity ran afoul of this principle, and as a result they found themselves on the margins of Roman society pretty quickly. 

In the western world today, we also have a set of guiding principles. 

Part two of a two-part series on Incremental Change vs. Transformational Change by Rev. Bill Johnson.

Part one of a two-part series on Incremental Change vs. Transformational Change by Rev. Bill Johnson.

An author I once read (and have now forgotten the name of) shared a story about incremental change. Take a photo. It’s a good photo, and probably one you’ll look back at often, but it’s just a photo. Take a second photo of the same subject moments later. Now, switch back and forth between the two photos. You will see that a few things have changed, and the experience will begin to feel a bit like one of those “Spot the Difference” puzzles you find in the Sunday newspapers. It’s a change, but it’s really just a notch forward. Two pictures aren’t really all that much different than one picture. This is incremental change.

I’m not sure anyone likes passwords.  They’re clumsy, hard to remember and increasingly easy to crack. There are a few things you can do, however, to make your passwords easier to remember and more secure.

There was some big news last month, and it had nothing to do with the US presidential election or the Olympics. Because of this, it largely went unnoticed by major media channels, but it’s something we should all be aware of.

Perhaps no game has been more anticipated (and more divisive) in the gaming community than the recent release of No Man’s Sky. Hyped as a nearly infinite universe, it enabled players to explore the breadth of its over 18 quintillion stars, each with its own planets, moons, plants, animals, and ecosystems. The player is cast in the role of a survivor of a starship crash and must repair his or her ship and make a way boldly forth into the unknown. 

As we find ourselves in the middle of an election season, you don’t have to go very far to find people expressing their opinions on a variety of topics.  This has always been true, of course, but in the last several decades a new forum has arisen, allowing people to have unprecedented reach as they express themselves about things they’re passionate about, and they don’t always agree.

For many web developers who are moving beyond the basic link and page behavior, the next step is to learn JavaScript, a powerful programming language that runs in your user’s browser to enable your website to change its behavior in response to the user. (While some newer frameworks are making use of server side JavaScript, today’s focus will be on the more traditional client side usage.) 

While JavaScript in its original form is pretty powerful, there are some common frameworks that you can add to get yourself up and running with very minimal programming experience. One of the most common of these is jQuery.

One of the staples of science fiction literature has long been the cyborg.  Part man, part machine, the cyborg often serves as man’s triumph over the limitations of the physical body.  From Luke Skywalker’s robotic hand to the more malevolent “upgrades” of Dr. Who’s Cybermen, the fascination and fear of cybernetics has inspired authors to wonder what it means to replace our bodies. 

One of the hardest things for a web designer to do, especially one who’s just getting started, is to design a website that looks and functions well on a variety of screen sizes. 

Sites today not only have to deal with the old standard 1024x768, but they also need to adapt to resolutions as low as your smaller smartphones (320x480) and as high as your 4k monitors (3840x2160).  Not only do you need to be resolution aware, but you also need to ensure your site functions across a variety of operating systems, browsers and versions.