The new www.lifechurch.tv site has left the lab and is now alive.

One thing is true, a web site is NEVER done! There are still a lot of little things that will be updated and tweaked over the next few days!

Thanks to the team who worked countless hours to make this happen in just under 60 days! Thanks to all the vendors and freelance designers who helped with this project…you all rocked.

Onto the new Internet Campus. We plan on launching that within 45 days! This project will give you all a much better idea of what will be coming out of the digerati lab. I will be sharing more about that project as we move forward.

Bobby and I will be in Vegas at NAB next week. If you want to meet up or connect for coffee or something shoot me an email, or call me on my cell, 405-471-1314.

It is crunch time…. down to the wire to launch the new site on Monday.

I can not even begin to tell you how many balls are in the air on this project. Check this out:
/ Designer & styler out of state
/ Local outsourced graphic guy
/ Local outsourced .Net development group (we don’t have any .Net developers on staff)
/ Local outsourced CMS developers (a ton of custom CMS code to unwrap!)
/ Staff web site administrator building 700+ pages like there is no tomorrow
/ Staff web developer pulling it all together
/ 1 digerati amped up on caffeine and sugar listening to stress relieving music (more to come on that later)

Oh yea, did I forget to mention that business as usual with videos, web registration pages and other typical stuff that has to get done. Boy, how nice would it be to shut down shop for a while to get the new stuff out the door….

And finally, the last kick in the pants… LifeChurch.tv version 2.0 is being white boarded out right now to launch by the end of the year and replace everything that goes live on Monday. Hey, thats just the way I role!

There has been a lack of activity and posting on the blog, and for that I am sorry. The past few weeks have been over the top nuts. Trying to get Second Life out of the “lab” and into production, as well as 4 other rather large projects going.

This week we are putting the final finishing touches on our new LifeChurch.tv web site. Now this is a crazy story that I really don’t have the time to go into, but the LifeChurch.tv web site became my baby a month or so after I came on the team. I am very excited about working on this project and excited about getting it out of the “lab”. My biggest problem with the site, old and new is the content management system it is built on. Not that it is bad, it’s not…it is actually a very good CMS, the problem is there are really no content management systems that can handle 11 campuses, and many more coming! So, there are tons of limitations but we are dealing with them. As I told the leadership team here at Life, “we are tearing down the building, but we are forced to use the current foundation!” Why? Because we only had 60 days to completely redesign, renavigate, redo a lot of images and copy, and launch! Not much time…the team I am a part of totally rocks!

Anyway, here is a sneak peak at what you will see in a week or so. Enjoy.

Easter services in Second Life happened. Kinda. Before I get into the story and details let be give a HUGE shout out and praise to the entire team, staff and volunteers alike. For the guys that got very little sleep, to the volunteers that saw and heard some things that I am sure you were not expecting…thank you! You guys all rock!

Ok, here we go, the Second Life services happened, but they did have a few “hitches” in them. I can now look back and say “the funny thing”, ok, no, I really can not say that…it really was not funny at all to be honest. We had a full server failure at the most critical point. About 10 minutes into Craigs message during the first experience the Darwin Streaming server LOCKED UP. Complete server failure and hard lock. CRAP! Now, there is a huge long story here that I will not go into the details, but bottom line…server was down with no backup, and we did not get it up and semi functioning until 1:11 CDT, 11:11 SLT (11 min after our start time for the final service). It was total and complete chaos, phone calls, text messages, IM’s in Second Life and near heart failure for me. Finally, we fed the stream into Second Life and prayed like there was no tomorrow. Just typing these words make my heart rate go up.

And it worked like a charm! Praise Jesus, Darwin Streaming Server worked. (Side bar) Maybe its the name Darwin. That might of added to the spiritual warfare that was going on. I just thought about that, maybe we will change the name to Creation Streaming Server, or Alpha Omega Server.

So, a ton of learning for sure on our first weekend. Many technical learnings, but really for me much more ministry learnings. The audience was VERY diverse…just look at the pictures. Some devoted Satan worshipers, many Jesus fans, and some Second Life celebrities. One of the awesome things to me was seeing and hearing many of the Avatars that were not Jesus fans, and seeing them engaged into the Experience for an entire hour and a half (30 min pre-roll, 1 hour worship and message).

Anyway, this week we will have a lot of action plans to execute on both the technical side and ministry side. After seeing what I saw this weekend, I am more excited about the opportunity in Second Life than I have ever been. This community needs Jesus and I am excited to be a part of it.

How was your Easter weekend?