much of tapestry’s communication is done online. a ton of social media, online presence, website changes, email, etc. this means i regularly post LOTS of links. some of them can get kind of long, which is, of course, why in the past i have used url shortening services like tinyurl.com and tiny.cc. i decided i wanted tapestry’s name to be in the url and personally have more control over the shortened name of each url without making the address super long. so i just installed yoURLs which make the tapestry website into our own personal url shortening service. now i can shorten url’s with the sptapestry.org address.
for example, thanks to wesley (one of the leadership team members) i have begun posting youversion “scripture events” each week. these scripture events are basically a way that people can easily see each week’s scripture, the power point slides, take notes, etc. this (bible.us/e/ICL) is the link to this week’s (as yet unpublished) scripture event on youversion. it isn’t a very long url but it makes no sense and thus is hard for me to explain to someone without writing it down for them. i could run it through another url shortening service and hope that the custom name i want is available or i could install (which i did) yoURLs on the sptapestry.org domain and know that the custom name i want is available. from now on the link to the youversion scripture event will merely be that sunday’s date. here’s this week’s sptapestry.org/2122012.
come on now, you know that’s awesome.
SIDE NOTE – we’ve actually determined that while youversion events are great, they are also actually not quite in step with our level of participation. youversion events allow individuals to slightly participate with the scripture of the message but they do not allow the church to participate with each other as we go through the scripture during the message. so drew is looking into developing an app for tapestry that will take the good we like of youversion scripture events and add a ton of interactivity for use during our worship gatherings. for example, drew is going to set things up where the scripture event becomes a conversation that you can comment on and then someone else can respond to your comment. youversion allows you to take notes and send me questions but doesn’t really allow for the threads to respond to each other’s responses and bounce reflections off of other people’s thoughts. this is going to be awesome. when he is done people who might not feel comfortable speaking up verbally during our worship gatherings will have yet another way to respond.
again, come on, you know this is awesome.