We’re really excited to announce the release of our new eDOT website .  Being a technology ministry, our website gets scrutinzied a little bit more than most peoples’ sites so its nice have a refreshing look and interaction.  For being an information website, I really like our new place.  Our goal is that this will help us recruit more people into working with us both in full time capacities, short term capacities and even as volunteers.  Based on WordPress (just like this site), it includes a blog (which I’ll be one of the writers on) and other changing parts.

This is a bitter sweet project as it’s Laura’s (our web developer) first major project since getting out of German Language school.  And will be her last major eDOT project (at least for a while) as she’s about to have her first baby.  Check out the blog she did about what it took to make this website work.  Not only did she do a lot of custom code for it, but she originally used so many different WordPress plug-ins (add-ons of code that people make specifically to work with WordPress) that the system would crash.  We actually had to scale back how many plugins we were using but it still works wonderfully.

The really cool part of this project was that everything we used was free. WordPress is open-source and so are all the plugins (we did make some donations to some of the plugin writers just becase they saved us some much by already having the code).

So please check it out and feel free to pass the link along to any friends or family that may be interested in using their technical abilities for helping build up the church in Greater Europe.

Above is pictured one of the cheaper gas stations that is in our area (and on a good gas price day since it fluctuates daily, sometimes it seems hourly). At first glance you might think we have it great here in Germany with gas prices (and compared to some places in the world, it is good). However let me explain the prices to those of you in the states.

The first price (the really cheap one) is for Erdgas, which is pretty much only used in certain farm vehicles. The second price there is for diesel (yes, diesel is cheaper than gas in Germany). The bottom three prices are for gas and equate to the levels of “Regular, Plus and Premium” found in the states. So the price of regular gas looks pretty good at 1.349 but you have to remember that that is Euros per liter. So to get that to Dollars per Gallon, we have to multiply the 1.349 by 3.7854118 (the amount of liters in a gallon) and then multiply the result by 1.35 (the current rate of Dollars to Euros) which means gas currently goes for $6.89/gallon for the cheap gas.

That is one of the reasons cars are smaller here and why bicycles and walking are favored in town transportation (and why we bought a diesel)

Are you an RSS freak like me? (RSS – Real Simple Syndication) I look at a ton of different websites and I don’t have to go through my favorites to get to them. I use RSS to read them. I use a RSS Aggrigator to read them all (see my post about using these from a while back to learn more)

One of my recent adds is a new feed from Greater Europe Mission that gives daily prayer requests from all around Europe. To view the daily feed, check it out here or if you just want to get the feed, use http://www.gemission.org/praying/RSSFeed.asp.

Another great thing is to sign up for eDOT’s monthly newsletter – eDOT Connect! It’s delivered monthly to your email box and keeps you up-to-date on what is happening with our ministry eDOT. Click here to sign up or go here to view some past issues of eDOT Connect!

Alex and I had a wonderful time today hiking up the hill behind us to a gazebo and taking a few photos. It was truly beautiful. Above is a panorama view of the city of Kandern (where we live). There’s about 4000 people who live in this town with about another 4000 living in the villages around it. Click on the photo to go to much larger version and I’ve labeled it with where we live and some other places of interest. You can see some of the other photos in the Photo Album

Highlights:
1) Need help loading our crate
2) Max and Erma’s Restaurant night results
3) Departure date
4) Goodbye party
5) Need a car?
6) Prayer Requests

We’re delighted to share some amazing things that God has been doing for us,
in us and through us.

1) Our shipping container is coming to be loaded Thursday, December 21. We
only have 2 free hours to load and then they start charging by the hour so
we need lots of strong backs and prayer for no rain. We need lots of help
here so if you can come from 12:30-4 we would really appreciate it! Please
respond if you think you can make it.

2)On Monday, December 4 a local restaurant donated 20% of the meal prices of
the people who came to support our ministry. We had over $1,528.58 in sales
which gave our ministry a check for $305.72. Although the amount was
significant, our greatest joy was to walk around and have a chance to greet
all those who made that such a special night. Thank you.

3)Hopefully you’ve all heard our departure date – JANUARY 9, 2007. We were
able to find AMAZING tickets to Zurich for about $425 each! Even though
it’s in Switzerland it’s about an hour drive from our place in Germany.
We’ll recoup for a few days at our team leader’s home and then our shipping
container should arrive around January 15. Alex’s kindergarten (2 houses
away) is currently full but they are going to try to squeeze him in – please
pray. We’ll probably start language school in February.

4) Sunday, January 7- 11:30-3pm at Lake Forest you are invited to a goodbye
party. A light lunch will be served right after church or you can “drop in”
before 3. We hope to see most of you from the NC/SC area if you are able.
We’ve sent separate e-invites or you can RSVP to this e-mail by January 1.
Children are welcome. For those of you further away, we know you are with
us in spirit!

5) Our car is for sale. 1995 Toyota Camry LE Sedan – 127K miles – $3,500

As you can imagine this is a time of delight and a bit of stress :0! Please
pray for our family, for our marriage, for our stuff and for our nerves -
especially that we can get everything boxed up before next Thursday.
Another BIG prayer request is that the Euro/Dollar conversion is at the all
time high again which will really hurt us as we will lose .25 cents on every
dollar just in conversion. Please pray for the dollar to strengthen against
the Euro, and for the last bit of our support to be provided.

Your friends,

Courtney and Krista Roes
www.RoesGarden.com

Donations to Greater Europe Mission, PO Box 1669 Monument, CO 80132-1669
Account #38200 or online at
https://www.gemission.org/supporting/givingcard.asp

If you need the Max & Erma’s coupon, click on the picture of it to down load a pdf version. Remember, its only good for today for lunch, dinner or take-out at the Exit 25 Max & Erma’s.

Thanks!!!

Muellheim is where the Greater Europe Mission European Headquarters is and where our eDOT Teams offices are. Kandern is where Black Forest Academy is where Alex will go to school once he is in first grade. Until then, he will attend true Kindergarten (Kindergarten is a product of Germany and Kinder means child while Garten is garden) in one of the local schools.

As you can see, where we are in Germany is great for our ministry as it is in the middle of Europe allowing easy travel to anywhere our ministry takes us.

Please continue to pray for the following:

• Praise God that our house sold and that God has removed all obstacles to our move except our monthly support which He is working on on a daily basis — We currently have commitments for 70% of our monthly needs and almost 100% of our moving expenses
• Pray that more people and churches would want to be a part of this ministry using Technology to reach and train people for God.
• Pray for family, friends and us as we start the good bye process. We have many deep and meaningful relationships that we know are going to change due to being long distance.

God bless!!!

From Yahoo.com –> Tailor made for you – RSS

Did you ever wonder why I have all those button across the bottom on the website? What is that orange “XML” or “RSS” box on all these websites anyway?

RSS stands for Real Simple (or Standard) Syndication. That means that the content from those websites is put into a special format that can be imported into other websites or things call RSS Aggregators.

This technology allows you to monitor the content of a multitude of websites all on a single page. This is such a growing technology, that the next version of Windows (“Vista”) is going to have RSS reading capabilities built into it.

Personally, I use “My Yahoo” as my RSS Aggregator. That means on a single page, I can see the headlines from my favorite bloggers (Write some more djchuang!!), the latest photos uploaded from Ken Liu, what is shipping next from our Netflix queue, and the sermons from my home church, Lake Forest, and our sister church Warehouse 242. Anytime I see a headline that I am interested in, I just click on it and it takes me right to that post on the website.

So if you are a person that goes web surfing and finds a site that you really like – instead of adding it to your “favorites”, add the RSS or XML feed to your Aggregator so you not only know about the website, but can see instantly if there are any new articles that are worth reading/hearing/or viewing.

Read the article from Yahoo to learn even more about this way of experiencing the web.

• eDOT’s Project Equip, which is about raising money for and installing 50 eLearning Centers in the next 3 years, had some great year end gift given towards it bringing our total of funds raised to cover 36 eLearning Centers. We now need funding for only 14 more eLearning Centers to reach our goal. Starting in April, we hope to see an eLearning Center be installed every month and we hope that half of these be installed using church groups from North America. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in sending a team.
• There have been some great developments happening in the Ukraine recently. Team members Larry Peck, John Shaffer, and Rich Bonham are traveling to the Ukraine to finalize plans for Bible Mission International to oversee all of the eLearning Centers there once they have been implemented.
• Team Member Carolyn Bailey was in Kiev set up a new eLearning Center and hub server adding to our overall numbers
• Larry Peck and John Shaffer will be teaching a seminar on how to facilitate a distance learning course at the Kremenchuk Bible College. The school will be launching their first distance learning course in March and they are very excited about reaching Russian speaking areas outside of the Ukraine.
• Before when when a team from North America came to install an eLearning Center, GEM’s EuroTeam provided the project managers for doing the teaching of the computer courses. Due to a shortage of EuroTeam project managers and the increase in the amount of teams eDOT is bringing over, eDOT has decided to provide their own project managers. Another reason we need to finish raising our support as this will be a function that Courtney will be doing.
• We have many new faces coming on board to GEM:
1. Tony & Charity Hetrick, Courtney & Krista Roes, Sue Hoxie, and Jan Rodger – all planning on coming to Germany
2. Andrew & Jody Hawes – planning on going to Ukraine
3. Leroy & Patti Hite – planning on serving from the States
4. In addition, John Charlier is going to attend GEM’s Candidate Orientation with the intent to go to the Ukraine
5. Andrew & Shelly Mohr have just recently arrived in Germany as eDOT’s first “tentmakers” which means that Andrew has a full time job with a German firm in Freiburg (just north of eDOT’s headquarters in Mullheim) and then uses his spare time to work with eDOT.