Living Open Source

When you buy a new PC, you always forget to include another £200-£300 for a version of Microsoft Office, which these days doubles the price of a new PC. Church people irritatingly call those projector things “PowerPoint”, brainwashed with the Microsoft way and willingly hand over bundles of cash for Office. But there is another [...]

The Adobe Reader PDF format has become the de facto standard for electronic document distribution and publication. Everybody has Adobe installed, even if they didn’t realise what it was or where it came from. So if you want to publish your cell or home group notes on the web, PDF has to be the obvious [...]

Continuing my list of freebie software for churches, this one is a little obvious to anyone who has visited my blog before. WordPress is the software which drives this blog and is also used to run our church website. There are now a growing number of WordPress-Driven Churches all using WordPress to run their website.
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There are literally hundreds of song projection programs designed to project song lyrics and control your data projection in church. Most of them are actually pretty poor, with terrible user interfaces and what is more - they cost the earth. At one point I began writing my own, a project still lying incomplete, but then [...]

Talking to a few colleagues the other day made me realise that not everybody is aware of the huge potential of Open Source Software, particularly for church use. So I thought I’d create a regular feature here to highlight some of the Open Source tools that I have come across that might be of use [...]