PaulPrins.net

Some of you may or may not know that I started a software development company in January 2008. It has been a long 18 months so far of development, redevelopment, and working very closely with the amazing people over at Substance Church.

Well this summer is our official launch of our company by making ourselves known to the Church world. Our main presence for the time being is going to be at conferences around the Midwest and hopefully by early 2010 we will be branching out into other regions of the country.

To go to conferences we need a booth to have set up. So far we’ve gotten in some of the physical objects for the booth (2 x 24″ HD dell displays!) but we need to get stuff out to the printers if we’re going to have it back in time. Below are the two big print items for the space in their final forms.

The first is the backdrop for our booth space. It is 10′ wide by 8′ tall. You can imagine there being a two foot wide table running into it on each side. It’ll look really professional.  I can’t actually remember the time I designed something that got sent out to a printer (we’re using EPS-Doublet because I always had a good experience with them from my MidwestSkier days). With that said, I am very pleased how it turned out (logo design by ned wright @ space150).

The latter is a pop-up sign that will sit next to each of the displays inviting people to come and play with the software. I really enjoyed how clean and simple each of them turned out to be. Now to sit down and design our hand outs… (Images after the jump)

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Kind of a geeky post, but I just spent some time trying to figure out what the max number of decimal values a Latitude or Longitude value can have for the sake of storing information in a database.

Here is what I found. Most places I found decimal values for Lat/Long only used up to 8 decimal places (depending on rounding), yet the most I found was 16 values to the right of the decimal place.

For those out there using mySQL and wanting to store these values I’m using the type: decimal(20,16) and while it will be overkill for some values, it should accommodate the extreme circumstances that arise.

It has been a bit of a crazy last two weeks. Aside from moving into a new unit (now on the top floor with a great view, and almost no noise!), I’ve been working my butt off on stuff for nineteen05. It’s so excited to see how far everything has come in the past year. It is almost unbelievable.

I was trying to remember back when I was first integrating the podcast  features and it seems so long ago that I just assume that it was and has always been there. Finally to the last two major pieces of development, as it was laid out in January 2008. The thought of having all the initial development completed is astounding to me.

We can hardly wait to drop this who app on the church community as a whole. The first major introduction is coming in march with Substance Church. I’d say more but I figure making you wait is just as much fun.

Well I must be going. Have to finish putting everything away before my wife gets back from spending time with a friend. Will try to post a new photo of our view soon.

This theme is actually several months old and has been around the block a bit by this point. It is called Cotolance (Coo-toe-lance) and was developed for the company blog of Nineteen05, my web development company. This blog serves as a way for me to share what is coming up on a decade of web development, marketing, management, and community development experience with the Church as a whole. The latter three of these topics are sorely excluded from the seminal educations professional ministers receive during their masters programs (I’m also currently enrolled at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, MN)

The design heavily borrows from the main Nineteen05.com website (which was completed by Ned Wright last spring) The main differences are in the layout of the content section of the design, and the sidebar. While the nineteen05.com site is fairly monochromatic for the moment, I wanted to bring more color into the blog and did that through the header and the date boxes. The design will likely mimic that of the company site as it goes through renovations in the future.

Check out the theme in action

Like the Inductaloot theme, this one is also private. If you are looking for a blog of your own check out Insights For Church and get blogging today! It is hosting the official nineteen05 blog, and hopes to host hundreds of blogs for those involved in ministry in the near future.

I’ve launched a blogging community for the church as a whole over at www.insightsforchurch.com and just finished setting everything up yesterday. In the setup process I created a theme for the main WP site and called it inductaloot. After installing several plug-ins and modifying some scripts it seems to be working the way I want it to. Showing the most recent site-wide posts, have a list of the most active blogs (views/comments/posts) on the right, and also will have a site-wide tag cloud as new posts are added (didn’t work retroactively for the 50ish posts already in there).

This theme is a private theme developed for a multi user install of word press. If you are looking for a free blog and are in the ministry at some level (lay or professional) get one! Head over to Insights For Church and sign up for your free blog today.

Everything is really quite interesting right now. The balance of life, work, and school is quite different then the spring quarter. Just last week I finally got caught up on all my studies by completing an intensive course that met the first two weeks of September.

That course was Global and Contextual Studies that laid a foundation for cross cultural ministry (so both local and non-local missions). Really insightful and helped to further mold my understanding and missional focus. The biggest part of this class that drug on was the research paper, of which I chose to do a study of the city of Paris in France. How to tailor ministry and understand the context that one would be entering into for the purpose of planting a church. Really interesting, but took many hours of research, reading, note taking, and writing.

Since finishing that paper and the final early last week I was able to catch up on some neglected readings for my current course load (Preaching, Hermeneutics, and spiritual foundations). I really am enjoying the current courses. Spiritual foundations seems a bit slow and lethargic (in there as I write this) but my hope is that more practical content is on the horizon.

The biggest struggle has been how to increase the time I spend with my wife, friends, and family without compromising my work commitments and my level of academia. One of the biggest struggle that I had through our time in Minneapolis has been the lack of social involvement. I’ve had a great friend in Matt who has meet with me over coffee almost every week. It was these times that have helped me realize that I need more social outlets.

Being back in school has helped as has setting more time aside to spend with my wife. Still feeling this dynamic out for the best balance to have currently in my life.

Also the dynamic of ministry has been interesting. Jordan and I have been waiting for the next ministry we would be actively involved in since we graduated in December. We are to the point now were we are really excited/anxious to get back into ministering in some way. We shall see what this brings.

So things over at nineteen05 are starting to really get moving. We’re almost to version 0.8 of our software as we’ll be rolling out the bulk of our member management utility in the coming week or two. Over the last week we’ve had two appointments that each have gone really well. Now it’s to followup and just getting everything to play well together.

This leads me to this post. We are needing to move over to a dedicated hosting solution. I have looked at both VPS and Dedicated. We’ve made the decision to go with dedicated for the benefits of having our who unit (which we may run like a vps for our clients) to ensure up-time and that it is only our scripts competing for resources. While this is a more expensive approach, over time we believe that it will be more beneficial for us. I’d really appreciate any feedback from those of you out there who know more about the network administration side of things than I do. (more…)