John & Jayne Stark Family

I don’t think many people have ever seen or read the Republican Platform of Iowa. When I first saw it several months ago at our Polk County Convention I couldn’t believe how conservative the platform actually was. There is a lot to this platform and tomorrow at the 2008 Iowa GOP State Convention it may be modified. I’m going to look for the Democrat Platform of Iowa sometime to compare the two. Update: Democrat Draft Platform

With trust in God, and in fidelity to generations past and generations to come, we respectfully submit this platform to the State Convention.

Preamble

As Republicans we continue to uphold the principles of individual responsibility and liberty, adherence to traditional moral standards, a strong national defense, a free enterprise system, and respect for the sanctity of human life. We believe in retaining the original intent of our Founding Fathers as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We believe high moral character is a necessity of public servants. The highest standard of character should be embodied in both private and public life. We encourage the proliferation of these principles and their passage to future generations. Read more »

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For almost a year I’ve been working with a team to update our church website. The biggest update we made was the move from static html pages to a full blow custom content management system built with Expression Engine. Needless to say, I’m REALLY excited about the site going live last weekend.

We still have some debugging to complete to call this version finished; however, I’m really happy with our EE designers at EjaeDesign in New York. They took our really rough ideas and made them come to life. This being our first website built upon a content management system took a lot of back and forth communications to get on the same page. It was worth the effort.

In addition to Expression Engine, we utilized several other tools in putting the website together.

• Lighthouse | Simple hosted Issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management software.
• Jumpchart | an online interactive sitemap creator
• ConceptShare | Online Design Collaboration Made Easy
• Project Management Extranet | Where we communicated milestones and exchanged information
• SlideShowPro | a Flash photo gallery and slideshow component for the homepage
• Wimpy Player | Streaming MP3 Audio and Streaming Video Players
• del.icio.us | links to many church websites we researched
• FeedBurner | media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds
• Scribd | a way to easily put your documents online
• Adobe Creative Suite | Photo Editing and Optimization

We chose Expression Engine for our content management system due several reasons. The biggest was longevity and flexibility. EE does a wonderful job separating your content from the design (we can easily change our design in the future) and it is really affordable to use. I highly recommend the product and hiring an EE expert like EjaeDesign to get you started. While we could have programmed and designed the entire site ourselves in-house, EjaeDesign’s experience building EE sites allowed us to focus on the content and functionality instead of the nuts and bolts of template and CSS coding.

You can read more about our updated website on the “About Site” page at www.FirstFederated.org.

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With a little help from CST (our IT support) and Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.0 we’ve are well on our way to setting up our 19 new computers. The 800+ page implementation guide for Ghost made the project seem more complicated that it really was.

Now that we’ve successfully created our master image, ran a trial clone, ran a multicast session to clone three additional computers, and did a simple name change and joining to our domain those new computers are all ready for their new homes. I’m looking forward to learning how to use this tool better in the future. It will make the rebuilding and deployment of the computers easier.

The next step is to make an image of the out of the box configuration from HP to have on hand. After that we can clone the remaining machines so they all are identical to one another.

I’m sure there are many ways to configure and push computer configurations out to new clients. For me, Symantec’s Ghost Solution has made the process easier. It may be a costly solution to implement for most businesses but with charity licensing the option is very affordable for non-profits.

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Today I got an email from Tim’s assistant letting me know I was chosen today. It was a pretty exciting moment for me.

Tim has been working on this book now for several months and it was been interesting reading his progress on his blog. I’m amazed at his ability to write a book, goto to India, and somehow do everything else he must have on his plate at Granger Community Church.

I eagerly await the arrival of the manuscript tomorrow at work. I won’t be able to share anything specific about the book or share it with anyone until it is officially released, but I will put together a review about my initial overall impressions when I’ve completed the work.

Thanks Tim for this wonderful opportunity to provide you input on your latest book. I hope whatever feedback I give you will be helpful. For me it is a great opportunity to give a little back to the one whose given me so much through your other books and blog.

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