Village Missions gave me the opportunity to attend Gospelcom’s annual conference again this year. Today is the second day of the conference, and right now I am sitting in the Westin O’Hare Hotel lobby area using the wireless internet connection to write and post this article.
You may be wondering about the name of the conference. Apparently lots of conferences this year have been shortening the word to "con" so Gospelcom thought it would be cool to name the conference Gospelcon. The conference is for members of the Gospelcom Alliance, which is a group of Christian ministries who host their web sites at Gospelcom (among other things). The conference basically is for web developers and others related to the internet ministry of their group. We have sessions on programming, search engines, and more.
The conference has been great! I’ve been taking a PHP class, taught by a Zend representative. I’ve also attended sessions on Planning and Executing Your Web Site, IT Stewardship, XXX Church, and CWS Roundtable. I also spent some one-on-one time with a contractor talking about optimizing the Village Missions web site for search engines. Tomorrow’s schedule includes Marketing for Search Engines, CSS-Beginning, CSS-Advanced, more PHP, and the fun part: a one-hour session by Christian Comedian Kerri Pomarolli.
Mom and Grandma are on IM, so I’m going to take a break from writing this to chat a while. BRB. Ok, I’m back now.
The food has been great here! Fruit, yogurt, and different breads for breakfast. For lunch today, we had a buffet of baby lettuce, potato salad, sandwiches, and soup. We also had fruit salad and fancy cakes for dessert. In the afternoon during the breaks, they had a freezer full of ice cream bars available, along with pop and water. I tried two different ice cream bars, so hope I don’t get sick. For dinner, we had salad, followed by salmon, veggies, and rice. Dessert was a fancy ice cream dish.
The hotel has been great, too. Wireless internet is awesome, although I don’t get a real good signal from my room. To see more pictures of my experiences here, vist: http://www.farnellfamily.com/pictures/Misc/2005_Gospelcom_Conference
Update (9/28/05)
The Gospelcom 2005 Conference was a great experience again this year. I enjoyed my time there learning more about web development and internet ministry. The food was very good, the hotel was very nice, and the sessions were great. Special thanks to Village Missions for making the investment and sending me to this conference.
Things I learned about:
- PHP programming
- Planning and executing a web site
- IT stewardship
- Community Web System
- Marketing for search engines
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XHTML
- Online learning
It looks like I need to start transitioning from table-based web site layout to XHTML and CSS. This looks like it will be a definite challenge. I’m looking forward to the improved search engine ranking and site accessibility, but I’m not looking forward to the challenges involved with a whole new perspective on web site layout.
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