Check out the blog launched today on http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog. It worth a follow to see what is coming out of the Oval Office. Of particular interest to me is the section that is supposed to list any executive order that the president makes. It will be interesting to watch!
In my previous post, I mentioned about the usefullness of using Outlook 2007 for reading RSS feeds. There are many users who can benefit from an RSS feed, but aren’t ready to deal with another program to manage their feeds. If new items can show up in their inbox, they are happy!
I found a utility that will make this same functionality happen in Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express as well. It is called RSS Popper and can be found at
http://www.paradisoft.com/rsspopper/rsspopper.asp.
I’ve installed it on a couple XP machines and it is working great. A super solution for those who want an occaisional update from a specific site.
NOTE: The default install contains about 15 RSS feeds already set up! Fortunately, the service is turned off by default as well. Be sure to remove those feeds (if you don’t want them) in the options before turning the service on for the first time. Also - be aware that the first time you turn it on, it will pull lots of old entries from each feed. You have to allow it to do that and then delete the old stuff from your Inbox. It does allow you to choose a custom mail folder to drop entries into, however.
Here is a great link from www.howtogeek.com on how to use your Outlook 2007 program as an RSS reader. You can get updates from your favorite blog or news feed straight to Outlook via email! That is a great feature, because there are not to many working services that do that kind of thing.
Visit the link for their instructions here.
While you are setting it up, try some of the Prince of Peace RSS feeds! They are located at:
Sermon Podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/POPLCsermon
News Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/POPLCnews
All POPLC Media: http://www.tumblr.com/poplc/rss
Check out these online deals during the next couple of weeks.
Amazon.com - one free Christmas mp3 download per day (now till Christmas)
Dell’s 12 Days of Deals (Dec. 4-15)
I was recently alerted to www.drop.io as a resource for file sharing. I frequently have problems getting large files and a large quantity of files to people who are outside of our organization. This web site looks like a great resource for doing this. It is publicized as being quick and simple. It definitely was easy for me to set up and get my first folder set up for business. Looks like it has lots of different types of uses to once you get into it - RSS, photo sharing, Twitter and Facebook compatibility, you name it. Give it a try!
Twitter is a great way to communicate. If you have an online community you want to stay in contact with, it is a great way to go. Here is a great blog from ChurchCrunch.com that has lots of resources for learning more about Twitter. Also I recommend the learning videos at commoncraft.com under the “Plain English” series. There is one called “Twitter in Plain English” that is a good place to start.
Twitter for Ministry
I came across a great description recently that shows how to embed an Excel worksheet into PowerPoint to be used in a presentation. This is especially cool if you want to use the graphing features in Excel and then place them in a presentation document. The source of the tutorial is www.howtogeek.com. The actual posting about the instructions can be found at:
http://blogs.howtogeek.com/mysticgeek/2008/11/23/embed-an-excel-worksheet-into-powerpoint-or-word-2007/
The wild shopping day right after Thanksgiving approaches. This looks like a good deal to me: 17″ widescreen flat panel monitor from Dell for $99.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=4009&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
Now that our organization has moved to Office 2007, I have received a number of calls about people deleting entire distribution lists by accident. Because of an odd design, this is actually pretty easy to do. I’ve done it myself even though I supposedly know better.
If you have an active list in Outlook 2007, open it up and click once on the name of the member you want to remove. The trick is what you do next. DO NOT click on the “X Delete”, thinking you will delete the individual name. Instead click on the “REMOVE” button to remove that member.
Distribution List Toolbar
When finished, select ”Save and Close”.
By the way, if you happen to delete the whole list, it will be in your Deleted Items folder. The trick to finding it there is to know the date you created the list. It won’t be on top! It will be filed under the creation date. It will also have a different icon than regular mail items. So it will stick out in Outlook that way.
Google announced last week that it will now host an archive of photographs from Life Magazine. This involves several million photos from the 1750s to present day. Here is the starting point: http://images.google.com/hosted/life.
A search tip that they recommend on this page is to go to Google Images, type in the subject you are searching for and then include “source:life” after the subject word. This will do a search only in the Life collection.