After four months and over 115 hours, the First Baptist Church of Jackson, MN website is now live.

It was definitely challenging for me personally.  I got to do a lot of things that I love to do.  Specifically:

1. The design work — I love it.  I obsess over it.  I can’t stop thinking about logos and other design elements.  I have nearly 70 design & media related RSS feeds that I read in Google Reader.  I’m certainly not the most talented designer, but I know a few good ones who don’t mind me bouncing ideas off of them.
2. Helping out — There’s something about helping out that really drives me.
3. Learning some new things — Techniques and tools for doing websites change so fast, that I have to force myself to not redo every website I’ve ever done every couple of months.  It’s really hard to stay on top of it all, but trying new tools and techniques is always helpful — even if I don’t end up using them.

Some of the cool stuff about this new site:

1. Google Apps for your Domain — I helped them get Google Apps set up for their church.  Doing so provided an iCal feed that can be parsed and displayed on the site in PHP.  Google Apps is an absolutely amazing set of free tools for any kind of organization.  I use it at work, home and church.
2. Feedburner-based podcast — Feedburner allows tracking of iTunes subscriptions and offers many features to pump up visibility of a podcast.
3. Yahoo Grids page framework — It made the table-less page layout and font sizing a snap.  I’m also going to be using this on a project at work.  Saved a lot of headaches for sure.
4. SlideShowPro is one sweet flash slideshow and video component.  It’s worth the money, believe me.
5. Customized Suckerfish drop-down menu.  I needed a good cross-browser compatible CSS and JavaScript drop-down menu and Suckerfish fit the bill.  Turned out real nice, I think.

Welp, Saturday was a milestone in our family.  Rachel agreed to let me migrate all of her e-mail from Juno to Gmail.  It was supposed to be my Valentines present from her.  I bugged her about it to the point that she threatened to retract her “gift.”

Anyway, I registered a new domain and set up a new Google Apps account.  I converted her old e-mails to mbox format with juno5bdb.  Couldn’t get the Google e-mail uploader to work with the e-mails in Thunderbird, so I converted them to eml format with IMAPSize.  That worked good.  I uploaded over 1500 emails from Outlook to Gmail in about an hour.

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Juno -> Remove

Ahhh, progress, sweet progress.

If you are a Google Desktop and Launchy user like me, you’ll know that the Win+Space hotkey doesn’t work in Launchy if Google Desktop is installed — even if the GD hotkeys are “disabled”.

Well, here’s the answer.  You’ll have to hack the registry, but it works good.  Here’s the gist.

1. Exit Google Desktop
2. Add this a “hot_key_flags” DWORD in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\Preferences
3. Set the value to “0″ to disable all hotkeys.
4. I rebooted afterward, but restarting GD may enable it.

If you haven’t seen the Gizmodo series on Lego, you’ve got to check it out.  They’ve broken it up into several pieces.  I did one post about it a while back.  I thought it was just a single post deal, but no, it’s a whole series.

Here are all of the parts:

Exclusive:Inside the Lego Factory

65-foot-high Lego Cathedrals Store 19 Billion Pieces a Year

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lego

750,000 Brick Kennedy Space Center is the Mother of All Lego Models

Lego Airbus a380 is the Biggest Lego Airplane in the World

Galactic Empire Cloning Stormtroopers in Lego Factory