jobs

Lest I forget to mention it, flockNote's 'version 3' website has been launched as of Wednesday afternoon! I spent many (if not most) of my waking hours working on the website and hundreds of features contained within, and after a couple days up and running, the website's still going like a champ!

Excellent home page design by Matthew Warner.

The site is built entirely on top of Drupal 7, and over the past three months, I've grown to appreciate Drupal many times more, as I've learned so much more about the deep and thorough APIs—bugs and all—that have developed into an extremely solid, reliable, and capable framework that is Drupal 7.x. Heck, I even dream about Drupal these days!

Expect more writing about the new features and platform that is flockNote v3 in the coming days—the ride's not over yet, though my 10+ hour workdays are, for a time!

Since the announcements seem to be making the rounds today, I figured it would be a good time to post this little bit of news to my blog: I'm leaving my position in the Archdiocese of St. Louis to pursue another opportunity!

Starting May 2, I'll be working with a great new team of Catholics for flockNote, a service/website for Catholic parishes and organizations to help register individuals and send them, well, "Notes!"

I've been working for the Archdiocese of St. Louis for almost three years, first in the Catholic Youth Apostolate, and for the last year as the Director of Web Development, and it's been a wonderful experience. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone in the Curia of the Archdiocese of St. Louis for some great professional development, wonderful memories, and for being in a very wonderful and Catholic workplace (we had Mass in the building almost every day that I was working there!).

During my time with the Archdiocese, I was privileged to help with the following:

• Rebuilding archstl.org, stlouisreview.com, stlyouth.org, reapteam.org, cycstl.net, and many more websites.
• The announcement and installation of a new Archbishop and a new Bishop.
• The elevation of an Archbishop Emeritus to a Cardinal (hello to Archbishop Burke!).
• Catholic STL - a free app for Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
• Two Catholic New Media Celebrations (San Antonio and Boston).

It has been an amazing and life-changing experience working for the Archdiocese... and in my personal life I also went through some huge changes: dating, engagement and marriage, building a cool Catholic news App, starting up LOLSaints.com, collaborating with hundreds of other Catholic developers on Open Source Catholic, and doing other amazing things.

And now, I'm going to be working as the Chief Technology Officer for flockNote. flockNote is a service that is (mainly) for Catholic parishes to help them 'connect with their flock.'

In the past 10 years, the trend for many software solutions and services has been a move 'to the cloud.' The same trend is beginning to appear in Church communications, and flockNote will be at the leading edge of communications tools built for parishes (and other Catholic organizations).

flockNote promises to make communication simple and effective. I'll be involved in some really awesome projects right out of the gate—and I'll be heavily involved in Drupal hacking for the first couple months, at least!

From Seth Godin:

Factories used to be arranged in a straight line. That's because there was one steam engine, and it turned a shaft. All the machines were set up along the shaft, with a belt giving each of them power. The office needed to be right next to this building, so management could monitor what was going on.

Read on...