For the last year, I have been looking, searching, researching, trying out, and tweaking what I thought might have been the one solution to my workflow woes. You see, what I want isn't hard - a simple synching solution for me to be able to compose classes and sermons on my computer (or iPad mini) and have them sync to my two other devices. I had some criteria when I began this mission:

1. It must sync to my iPad mini, because I do all my teaching and preaching from it. Additionally, it must look great and I must be able to format it in a way that I can easily glance at my notes when presenting. 

2. It must be on iOS. A companion Mac app would be helpful, but not essential. iPhone app is also not optional as I do a lot of tweaking on the go. 

3. It must be simple. No crazy layouts or unnecessary button on the app - just...simple. 

So, I narrowed my list down to three applications for my workflow: Evernote, Simplenote, and Plain Text. 

 

Evernote

Evernote seems like it's been around a long time, and that's because it has. It is a service that has never been accused of standing still. Evernote continually pushes new designs, additions, and features to its suite of apps which now include Penultimate and Skitch. 

Pros: Evernote is very well designed. The iPad app is beautiful on a retina iPad mini screen (and on the iPad Air as well). The apps are designed to easily do what you want to do: capture anything and everything. Evernote can capture text, pictures, voice memos, and even has embedded To-Do lists. It allows rich-text editing (bold, italics and such). It syncs fast across all devices, has a Mac and Windows app, and is also cross-platform on Android and Windows Phone as well. 

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The Evernote iPad app is gorgeous. 

Cons: For me, it seems a bit too much. I don't often need to capture photos and voice memos, only text. So I end up completely ignoring those features, mostly because I refuse to pay for a premium account ($5/month or $45/year). I did have a premium account for six months and didn't use the features. While it's a great app for 90% of people, a power user like myself who wants simplicity above all else isn't going to be using it very much. Still a great app though. 

Simplenote

Appropriately named, Simplenote is just what it says it is - simple note syncing across devices. I was just about ready to declare this platform dead when Simplenote relaunched with a new web design and app design as well as an introduction of a dedicated Mac app. I really thought this was going to be my solution. 

Pros: Extremely simple and well designed. Fonts and text look great and a retina MacBook Pro and retina iPad mini. The app is active in development and syncs well with other devices. There is no clutter to deal with in these apps - they simply allow you to compose notes, title them, tag them, export them, and pin them to the top of your list. Composing and writing in these apps (as well as the Mac app) is a joy. 

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Simplenote for Mac. 

Cons: It's almost too simple. Simplenote allows no formatting of any type and does not support Markdown editing, so if you want to style your text at all, you are limited to bullet points, numbering, and capitalizations. This sounded great in theory but I've noticed if I can't bold some text or make section headings bigger in my notes then I frequently lose my place while teaching and preaching because all the text looks the same. Tagging is great, and if tagging is your thing, you're going to love this app. If it's not, stay away, because that's the only amount of organization you get from Simplenote. All you have is a long running list of your notes, in order of what was last edited first. There's the option to 'Pin to Top' which comes in very handy.

I've run into some sync issues (as late as Oct-Nov 2013), but most of those seem to have been ironed out. The apps still crash on me frequently (once to twice a week) - I don't think a day or two goes by that the Mac app hasn't quit for no apparent reason and once the iPad app crashed on me while scrolling and preaching in front of hundreds of people (ack!). The iPhone app has a bad bug where it will crash when trying to sort changes in a note. I know developers are active on this app and I love Simplenote, I just cannot afford to use something that's unreliable. If the apps were stable enough, I might have this as my go-to platform. 

Plain Text

And here we are, talking about the joys of plain text once again. I really don't know why I migrated away from plain text, but it seems that my search has brought me full circle, back to where I started. 

You may read this and discount the plain text preference as an uber-nerd thing, but, in fact, it's really not. It just works. 

Pros: You can use a variety of text editors on all devices and plain text formats, including regular ol' .txt, Markdown, or Multi-Markdown. Markdown allows you to style your text how you want without changing to rich-text format. It uses simple symbols like asterisks to indicate bold and italics and hashtags to indicate headlines. Comes in handy when you get it down. The app I love to use on the iPad is Editorial, and on the Mac it's Byword. You can usually sync these apps to Dropbox and keep them in nested folders, easily categorizing what you need where you need it. Apps like Editorial, Nebulous Notes, and Byword are minimalistic and usually offer inline Markdown support, so you can see your bold and italics and headlines while writing. Best of all, plain text is future proof and my files are not tied to any platform, so I can move them around as I please. 

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Editorial for iPad. 

Cons: No simple "Compose it and forget it" syncing. Syncing is pretty painless, but requires a little bit of file management as well. Syncing isn't instantaneous unless you save your files in the app you're using. So unlike Simplenote and Evernote, you can't just sync and go. Plain text may not appeal to many people because it's not as simple to set up as other services. There's an extra added step when syncing to Dropbox, and you must know where your text repository folder is located. 

So looking at these three platforms, jumping back and forth between using them for the last year, I realized that there really is no "one solution" for capturing all my thoughts, pictures, and text (long or short). One solution is finding a small, precise suite of apps that fit your purposes. I'll use Editorial and Byword for all my writing (70% of the time), Simplenote for lists and occasional text capture (20% of the time), and Evernote for pics and logs (10% of the time). 

For me at least, one solution ends up being three solutions. 

Have you ever seen a 4K television? They’re amazing. 

If not, go find one. Now. I’ll wait. 

See, told you it was amazing. 

I’m a huge video guy. Before I was into web design and print design, I was into video. I remember filming sequences when I was a kid with my friends destroying toys in our back yard with an 8mm camcorder. I remember the first time I saw a high-def TV. So you may be saying to yourself, what is this 4K? 

4K (stands for 4,000) is the next resolution evolution in video. Not many companies are doing it yet, but by 2018 I think 4K will be huge. 2014 is going to be big for 4K, according to video guru Alex Lindsay. 

When you look at a 4K (sometimes also called UHD or Ultra High Definition), your eyeball sometimes cannot distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. Properly shot 4K footage simply looks amazing on a 4K TV. 

If you go back just 20 years, video resolutions were pretty horrible. Try looking at a standard-definition TV even nowadays and seeing what it was like. And SD today looks much better than SD from the mid-90’s. 

Why? It’s all because of resolution. 

Resolution is what drives what we see. From a retina Macbook screen to an iPhone 5 screen to a 4K TV, we’re looking at resolutions all day long. 

It’s time for a higher resolution for this new year. 

(See what I did there?)

In 2014, bring things into clearer focus. I have three suggestions for some atypical higher resolutions that we can make for the new year. 


I. Focus on what’s important. 

If you were really honest with yourself, what would stay and what would go in your life if you had to trim everything down? What TV shows or movies would you stop watching? What books would you start reading? What relationships would you renew?

Sounds cheesy I know, but every new year (and every new day, in fact) is a perfect excuse to focus more on your relationship with Jesus. How well do you know him? How much do you read and study about him? If we are to be call “Christians”, which means followers of Christ, why aren’t we following him as much as we like following our favorite sports teams, athletes, books, TV shows and movies? Sports and TV shows and movies won’t get you to heaven - Jesus Christ will. Focus on what’s important. 

Colossians 3.2 and Hebrews 12.2 encourage us to focus on Jesus, what’s really important. All other things in our lives are secondary to following and doing the will of our Savior. 


II. Make every pixel in your life display Jesus. 

Those new UHD/4K televisions I was talking about? They allow you to see things with such clarity and focus that your eyeballs can’t distinguish real life from what's on the screen. 

What if we were able to do the same thing with Jesus? What if we were able to live like him in every aspect of our lives, unable to distinguish “church life” from “real life?” What if our “real life” encompassed everything Jesus taught us? What if we were able to live out His message every single day, with no one being able to tell a difference no matter where we were?

You see, to be a true servant of Christ requires that kind of commitment. This only being a Christian on Sundays and Wednesdays doesn’t work. Sure, you may be able to fool a lot of people, in fact, you may be able to fool everyone - but you can't fool God. 

Any screen you look at is made up of pixels. Ever seen an old 8-bit Nintendo game? They didn’t have many pixels to work with, so games didn’t look as good as they could. Fast forward 25 years to the release of the Xbox One last month. A racing game called Forza looks amazing, even on a “regular” HD TV. The cars look like real cars. It’s unbelievable. 

Any video or computer engineer knows that the more pixels they can push, the better clarity of the image. That’s why those retina screens in Apple products look so good, because they cram as many pixels as they can into such small packages to make them clearer and clearer. 

What if every “pixel” or piece of our life reflected the image of Christ? (Matthew 5.16) Every screen you look at is nothing more than a collection of pixels. Every life we look at is nothing more than a collection of choices. Small, itty-bitty choices that make up the whole picture of our lives. What does that look like? And when people look at the “pixels” of your life, does the picture look like Jesus? Or something else?


III. Give people the “Wow!” factor in 2014. 

Some things you just remember, and they stick in your head. Maybe it was the first time you saw a movie you loved. Or maybe you visited a place that stuck with you. Regardless of what it is, it was a “Wow!” moment for you. 

I’m such a nerd. I remember the first time I saw a Macintosh computer. Wow. I remember the first time I saw a high-def television and a 4K television. Wow. I remember the first time I held an iPhone. Double wow. 

Will people look at your life and say, “Wow. They are really living that Christian life!” or won’t they? The true way of Christianity is attractive, and there’s so many people that call themselves Christians that look nothing like what a true Christian should look like, and that turns people off in a big way. 

If you were to go to a movie and accidentally go into the wrong theater, you’d be turned off by that. I came to see The Avengers and ended up seeing some romantic comedy. That’s not what I wanted or intended to see. 

People look at Christians and expect to see something great. And when we’re hypocrites and we don’t live out Christ (or at least try our best to), people are turned off by that. 

We do not seek the praise of men, but we are to be a sweet smelling aroma to those who are lost (2 Corinthians 2:15ff). Our job is to make disciples. And to do that, Christianity must look appealing. It must look like the better way of life that we know it is. People need to look at us and say “Wow, what a servant.” If they don’t, they won’t see Christ as He truly should be. 

Again, I know I reached on some of those illustrations, but I hope I conveyed to you the idea to not have the typical New Year’s resolutions this year, but to have higher ones this year. 

Make 2014 all about Christ and see how far He will take you. 

I am a bit tired of the constant chorus from evangelicals talking about how we have wavered from being a “Christian nation” and that we need to get the nation back to “founding principles.” Look, we need to lead people to Jesus and to be participants of the kingdom regardless of national affinities.

I would have wrote out my thoughts on this as well, only Robbie said it better. 

How my site appears in Google search rankings after having my domain for just over a year. 

For bloggers, ministers, youth ministers, and others involved in church internet ministries, you may not think very much about optimizing your app, website or blog with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). How do you become #1 in Google Search? While I don't understand completely all the ins and outs of SEO, there are some very easy and free things you can do to drastically improve your search rankings on Google or any other engine. But first, we need to understand how SEO works. 

If you don't understand the complex code and "crawling" that Google does to index every internet site on the web, you're not alone. According to some, Google's search algorithms can change on a daily basis. They are constantly tweaking and improving their first product. (Some of you may just remember when Google was only a search engine.)

There are a wide variety of factors that make your site better and easier for search engines to index. The three most influential are time, changes, and metadata. 

Time

One thing you may not know is that time is a very important factor in SEO. How long has your domain (your .com) been active? Months? Years? This affects search index. What about how long you've had certain keywords or metadata for the search engines to "crawl" your site? That also affects the indexing. Know this: indexing your site takes time, sometimes up to 90 days or more. So if you have a big blog or project you want to get off the ground, give it at least 3 months to show up in Google results. You can also research what your blog or site will be called and be sure not to name it something that is really popular. I would recommend Googling every possible name for your new site or blog until you find one that will be easily found on a search engine from anywhere in the world. "Chad Landman" is a fairly uncommon name and works well for me to call my blog that. If your name is John Smith, that might not work. 

Changes

How often does your site change? Is it a blog format where it is ever-changing, or a static page that usually doesn't change? Something you may not also know is that changing the *look* of your site usually does not affect indexing. Pictures are indexed by search engines, but any text on them is not (this is changing every day, however). Text is huge for indexing, which is why blogs have become so popular. At the same time, *too many* changes can affect your index ranking as well. 

Metadata

Metadata is just a fancy word for the information contained in your site headers. What that means is that any site, whether you use Squarespace, Wordpress, or straight HTML has header tags in the code of every page. Here's an example:

<head>
  <meta name="description" content="ChadL.co :: Chad Landman">
<meta name="keywords" content="Chad, Landman, Chad Landman, Youth Ministry, Ministry, Christianity, Tech, Apple, iOS, Star Trek">
<meta name="author" content="Chad Landman">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>

Now, you could pay to have your name first in Google, but I wouldn't recommend that for two reasons: 1) it's expensive and sometimes based upon how many clicks you get, and if you get a lot of clicks, you have to fork over a lot. 2) Studies have shown that paid-for "Sponsored Links" are skipped right over by about 9 out of 10 users. Why? I don't know. Many people think they're advertisements, partially because they are. Google says that you'll be seeing less and less of these ads as a result.

An example of a "paid" advertisement in Google Search results. 

Now, if I had an HTML site, I would manually put this information into my header code. But since I'm on a platform like Squarespace, they do it for me. I had to fill out some title and description stuff, as well as every blog post I write has some keywords attached to it, but other than that, I don't have to do anything. 

If you use Wordpress, I would recommend the excellent All-in-One SEO Plugin. 

One last thing to note is that the way search is done on the backend is constantly changing for everyone. Google will change its algorithms, Yahoo will change this, Apple will change that, and so on. SEO is something that needs to be monitored and maintained, not set and forgotten about. 

Whatever platform you use, make sure you have a Title, Description, and keywords attached to your site. You could start seeing results pretty soon with good metadata on your site or blog. 

Chris Clevenger has an excellent post on his blog that you should check out about Elders in the church and what they do. This is especially important, not only for ministers and youth ministers (where Elders would technically be our bosses at work), but very important for the church member as well:

The elders of the church have a great amount of responsibility. Their work is multifaceted and is often extremely difficult. The hours which they invest in the service of God often go unnoticed and under appreciated. Many Christians recognize their elders, but fewer know exactly what they do. The primary work of elders is not accomplished in secret, back-room meetings; their leadership should be evident.

Be sure to go check out Chris' post. And his nicely redesigned blog.

What Do Elders Do? [via Chris Clevenger]