One of my favorite applications is PortableApps. I have mine on a USB on my key chain at all times. It has all my favorite utilities on it, including Revo Uninstaller, CCleaner, Process Explorer and FileZilla. Just pop the USB into a PC, and all your tools are right there.
And every time you open PortableApps, all your programs are checked for updates, and updated as needed.
You can also log in to your personal accounts in Chrome or Opera, and all your other stuff it there, like your Gmail and Facebook, for example. You can get your email on someone else’s computer without going through the gruesome tasks of opening an incognito/private tab, logging in, and then worrying the rest of the day that you may have forgotten to log out and close the tab.
If you were a brain surgeon, would family members ask “Do you have anything for a headache?” But since you’re in IT, they have no qualms about asking “Why is my hard drive so full?” Here is a little utility to have on your thumb drive so you can quickly diagnose their issue, and get back to that game of horse shoes. It’s called Piechart.exe. It inspects the drive or folder you identify, and shows you a pie chart of what’s taking up space. You can click on each piece of the pie to see what files and folders make up that piece. It’s an easy way to figure out what’s filling up your hard drive, and then delete anything that’s junk. I think it’s quite an old program, and can’t see everything on Windows servers, and it’s getting a bit buggy on Windows 10. But it’s so simple, it is still my Go-To tool.
While working on the website for the church I attend, it occured to us that our new WordPress site might be able to deliver digital signage. We tried it with the Foyer plugin, and although the developer Menno Luitjes was very helpful, we haven’t gotten that right.
For now, we have a Raspberry Pie running MinimalKiosk OS, displaying our church calendar, which comes from the calendar we keep up to date on ACS Church Software. Every night the Pi restarts, and that refreshes the calendar to show new events.
It’s not an elegant solution, but it works, for now, and doesn’t require any extra work from volunteers or staff. It displays the calendar that they do, anyway.
We put in a feature request to ACS to give us a view of the calendar that is more appropriate for digital signage, and they said great idea, they’ll submit it to their team.
This year I took over responsibility for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster’s website. It was on WIX, which meant it was difficult to have concurrent editors and the site was only marginally responsive. We also couldn’t schedule the publishing, so every Monday we needed to add the upcoming service to the website. We rebuilt the site on WordPress using a theme from UUA.org. It went live in August. There is still much to do, but we like the functionality so far.
We can have concurrent editors, the site is responsive, and events and services can be added ahead of time and automatically show up at the correct times. You can have a look at https://www.uuclonline.org/
Some of the plugins we use are WPForms, Simple History, Wordfence, Jetpack and Updraft Plus.
