ldsWebguy

Social media sharing tools have been added to the story pages of the Newsroom Web site of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, allowing visitors to easily share Newsroom content on other sites like Digg, Delic.io.us, Facebook, Reddit, Newsvine, Google Bookmarks, and StumbleUpon.

The Digg icon now appearing on Newsroom pages allows visitors to add specific stories to their Digg account, a type of filing system of Internet stories that the user is interested in. People searching for information on that subject will see that three or 3,000 people, for example, have previously “dug” the story, helping them decide if it has been useful to others before them.

The Facebook link lets users add a particular story to their own account, allowing visitors to their own site to see what they have been reading lately.

There is also an e-mail subscription box (bottom of the left-hand menu) where you can sign up to receive e-mail updates whenever content is posted on the site.

The Church’s Newsroom site just posted an article about how members are expressing their feelings and beliefs by posting blogs and videos online.

DVDs, CDs, and Audiocassettes of the April 2008 General Conference in English are now available at Church distribution centers. A multilanguage DVD is being prepared and will be available in a few weeks.

Of course, you can also listen and watch online in many language in the general conference section of the online Gospel Library (generalconference.lds.org).

Below are links to several nice videos by an organization called Interview with Jesus. They are good examples of inspiration and creativity in delivering simple, effective messages.

Could you create videos like this? In what contexts? On what subjects? For what audiences? In what venues?

Check out the article in this week’s Church News about young adult use of technology. It talks about their heavy use of cell phones, texting, and social networks.

In their survey of 80 young single adults, “some reported sending more than 2,000 text messages a month.” They didn’t survey my 18-year-old. She sent 7,300 last month!

Tim Malone has written a post on how to promote your blog. He recounts his experience and success in developing and promoting his LDS-oriented blog over the last eight months. In the essay he shares ideas that have worked for him, including linking, commenting, using aggregators, and writing good content and good headlines.

Joel Dehlin, the Chief Information Officer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to join me in writing posts for this blog. So if you see posts by him, don’t worry, he hasn’t hacked in. Hence, I’ve temporarily renamed this blog ldsWebguys.

Before long, we’ll rebrand the blog was we expand it to share technology ideas with LDS parents and youth. Get ready for better things to come!

Question from a Liahona subscriber: “It is wonderful to have the ‘News of the Church’ section in the Liahona. Is there a way to also get the information online?”

Answer: The “News of the Church” is available online on many country Web sites. Often, the articles posted on these Web sites are more detailed than those printed in the Liahona. To access this feature from LDS.org, go to the category “About the Church” and select “Country Sites” from the fly-out menu. On the page that appears, select the desired country and language, which will open a new window with the desired country site. In the left-hand menu, select “Local Church News.”

We have posted online additional photos from general conference. There is a link to them on the Ensign home page, where you’ll also find a link to experiences from people who attended conference.

PDF versions (showing the full graphic layout) of the manual Preach My Gospel are now available online in the LDS.org Gospel Library in the following languages:

Albanian, Armenian, Bislama, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Kiribati, Laotian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tongan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Because of the complex layout of the Preach My Gospel manual, we have not yet placed the XML text online, pending an upgrade to a newer XML schema. Therefore, you must access this manual temporarily on a special English page or on the individual language pages.

Normally, you can access PDF versions of many items in the Gospel Library in two ways:

1. Visit the Gospel Library > Additional Media Formats > PDF index page.
2. When viewing an item, click View on the format bar above the text, either at the chapter/article level (to see a PDF of just that chapter/article) or on the table of contents (to see a PDF of the entire item).