Josiah

Josiah

Real Name: Josiah Ritchie

Allentown, Pennsylvania (United States)
Tech Missionary

Twitter Status

I'm gonna *bah humbug* at ping for iTunes. This seems silly to me. Why do I want this?

Biography

I'm a missionary and a geek. I desire to inspire the next generation of missionaries by facilitating personal relationships with current missionaries. A significant piece of this puzzle is the technology of communication, but I don't believe that a personal relationship can be built without a solid understanding of the need for face-to-face and hand-to-shoulder interaction. We are beginning to replace the need for physical presence to communicate viseally, but the power of touch in a strong relationship is huge and can not be replaced on the Internet.

For more about the ministry of my wife and I, check out our website's About Us page.

And cause all the cool moderators are doing it, and it's true...

I am a Geek. I love God.

Latest Contributions

  • Topic: How Technology Shapes Faith

    There are a couple guys who would be really neat to hear from on the Geeks & God podcast on the topic of technology and how it shapes faith. It's something I've been obsessing about for awhile as well as a topic that has historically been touched on a ton of times in the podcast.

    Shane Hipps seems to be the one really leading this discussion in the church. He's written a couple books. I've heard "The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture", but his latest is called "Flickering Pixels". He's a Mennonite pastor who was formerly a marketing executive or something.

  • Drupal Sermon Feature

    I've been messing around with the Feature module created by Development Seed for Drupal and have gotten pretty excited about it. As a result, I've released a Drupal Feature called sermon. It does what you might expect, puts together a Sermon feature to add to your drupal website. It includes all sorts of neat little bits that I'll be able to use next time I stand up a Drupal church website. I put up three church sites this year so have had the opportunity to play with this method a good bit. Hopefully it is useful to you also.

  • A Simple Directions Page

    User Rating:
    Average: 4.4 (5 votes)

    Want to create a simple page on your website to provide directions to your church or ministry? It's super simple using the Google Web Elements tool.

    1. Go to the Google Web Elements Map site
    2. Enter a size, you'll probably want the large one.
    3. Enter a location as an address (Ex. 1256 Heretic Rd, Anyware, AK, 55555)
    4. Enter a name that will be displayed in the bubble (Ex. SuperSweetAwesome Church)
    5. Copy the code that appears below the preview
  • Unordered Lists in Tutorials

    Unordered lists in tutorial descriptions aren't properly placed. See my link to the tutorial from Jeff Eaton on photo galleries: http://geeksandgod.com/tutoria....

  • Creating a Drupal Photo Gallery

    User Rating:
    Average: 4.1 (33 votes)

    Jeff Eaton created this great video showing how to bring together some modules for drupal to create an easy to use and work with Photo Gallery for your church secretary. It also doesn't require any custom code and works with modules available in Drupal 6 right now. "Add Photo" is even right where the secretary expects to see it.

    Some things you learn in this video:

    • Configuring Node Reference URL
    • Using Arguments in Views
    • Using CSS Injector for simple style changes
    • Embedding Views in Nodetypes without any code