Posts by Nick Jackson

Parish Notices: 4 July 2021

Sharing our Stories

The pandemic, our lives and our faith
Thursday 22 July 2021, 7.30pm
St. Mary’s Church, Whitkirk

All are invited to this opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss with others the impact that the pandemic has had on our lives and the way we worship.

Reporting on our energy usage

We are in the middle of a climate emergency, and making sure that we know how much energy we’re using and what the emissions are is an important part of reducing our impact.

To help with this we’re sharing the headlines from our 2020 energy footprint report.

In 2020 the energy usage of our buildings was responsible for an estimated 18 tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.

Our buildings received an A+ rating for emissions per person-hour, but only an F rating for emissions per square metre. We believe we can do better, and over the next year we’ll be working hard to reduce our emissions and improve our grading.

Become a Property Administrator with the Diocese of Leeds

If helping to manage a portfolio of over 400 residential properties and 80 acres of land is something that interests you, the Diocese of Leeds is looking for a Property Administrator.

Choral Evensong

The service of Evensong is rooted in hundreds of years of worship, and is renowned for its choral music and rich language.

Join us online for this evening’s service live at 6.00 pm, or watch again at any time after.

Continue reading “Parish Notices: 4 July 2021”

Weeknotes: Saturday 3 June

Another week down, and another week of technology here at Whitkirk.

“Is it plugged in?”

Last week, after replacing part of it, we ran into another issue with the president’s microphone pack which meant some people (especially those watching the streaming service) weren’t able to hear as clearly as we would have liked.

Continuing on the theme of wear and tear, the metal contacts inside the microphone pack which connect to the battery had become flattened with years of use. Fortunately this was an easy fix – we bent the contacts back into place, and hopefully we’re now good for another few years.

To help make sure this doesn’t happen in future, we’ve added a check for this problem into our quarterly maintenance schedule.

In case of emergency…

We’ve written up our ‘break glass’ procedure for bringing a streaming service to an abrupt stop if we need to. We hope that we never have to use it, but it’s better to have this kind of thing prepared in advance and part of training for our technicians.

Parish Notices: 27 June 2021

Our East Leeds Foodbank box is back

After a long absence, our donation box for the East Leeds Foodbank returns from this Sunday onwards. If you have any tinned or long-life goods left over from a Brexit or COVID stash that you’re not likely to use, the many users of the foodbank would really appreciate them. If you would like more information on the foodbank, and especially what items they are short of if you’d like to add something into your shopping basket, you can find this on their website.

Be a Festival Angel at Leeds Festival

Leeds Festival is once again returning to Bramham Park in August, and the Festival Angels team are looking for committed Christians to volunteer to help run the prayer cafe and lost property tent, as well as to act as ‘Street Angels’ around the site.

In return for an expected 20 hours of volunteer work between Wednesday 25 and Monday 30 August you’ll get the opportunity to spread the message of Christianity through good works, and a free ticket to the Festival.

If you’d like to sign up and be part of the Festival Angels team, you can find out more and sign up on their website, and if you’re not sure and want to talk to someone about what’s involved then you can email Rev Andy Nicholson with any questions you may have.

Worshipping in person

In line with the Government’s plan for easing lockdown, and based on our own risk assessments, our doors are open for public worship. You must book to attend any of our services in person, and you must follow additional rules around cleaning your hands, covering your face, and maintaining distancing whilst in the church. If you want to attend a service you can either book online, or you can call us on 0113 450 8554.

We will continue streaming all our services, both during this period of limited availability and into the future. You can join us online every Sunday morning at 10.00 am, catch up any time through the week, listen to our services over the phone, or listen using our podcast.

Continue reading “Parish Notices: 27 June 2021”

Weeknotes: Saturday 26 June

Another week has gone by, and here’s what the tech team have been up to.

Replacing a microphone

Those of you listening in on the service last week can’t help but have noticed some sound glitches with the Vicar’s microphone. Technology can suffer from wear and tear the same as anything else, and in the case of the microphones we use for people who lead our services (they’re called lavalier microphones, but you might hear them called “lapel microphones” or “clip-on microphones”) this wear and tear accumulates relatively quickly compared to more static microphones, as they’re put on and taken off.

This wear and tear is what led to the failure of the microphone (or, more specifically, of the cable connecting it to the radio transmitter pack), so we’ve replaced it and made sure we have a spare on hand.

We’ve also added a microphone check to our pre-service checklist, to help us spot this kind of problem before it affects the quality of a service.

Removing some code and improving some privacy

We’ve done a review of how we monitor users behaviour on our website and what we then do with that information, and we’ve decided that we can remove our on-site analytics. That means no trackers, and no cookies.

The result is faster loading times (the code we used for analytics was one of the biggest bits of the site), and better privacy for visitors.

Community Centre wifi improvements

We’ve rearranged some of the wifi access points in our Community Centre to give us better coverage, and more importantly we’ve swapped from a wireless mesh network to using some of the internal wiring which we added during our refurbishment.

Using the wired network increases speed and robustness of the system, and we’ll be running some tests to see if we can make our guest wifi available to more people.

Nicer sharing on social media

We’ve added some new code to our webpages which gives social media (like Facebook and Twitter) an instruction to use a specific image and description for each of our pages. This means our lovely header images (we talked about these a bit before) are now used if you share our content, rather than a service having a stab and getting it wrong.

Parish Notices: 20 June 2021

An update on Christian Aid Week

This year – as with last – the ongoing pandemic meant we couldn’t run our usual doorstep collections for Christian Aid. Instead, we set up our own St Mary’s e-envelope for Christian Aid, which allowed people to donate securely online. Through generous donations, this raised a total of £780. Alongside this, Christian Aid envelopes were made available in the church. Despite only limited numbers being able to attend services in person, these envelopes raised an additional £561.

In total, after adding Gift Aid, a stunning £1,341 was raised by the parish of St Mary’s.

It looks unlikely that doorstep collections will return in the future years. Online donations remove the need to handle cash or cheques and simplify the process of counting contributions. However, we will continue to make paper envelopes available in the church for those who prefer to continue giving in this way.

Many thanks to all who donated to Christian Aid, either through us here at St Mary’s or elsewhere. Your gifts are helping to build a safer, healthier, and fairer world for all.

Worshipping in person

In line with the Government’s plan for easing lockdown, and based on our own risk assessments, our doors are open for public worship. You must book to attend any of our services in person, and you must follow additional rules around cleaning your hands, covering your face, and maintaining distancing whilst in the church. If you want to attend a service you can either book online, or you can call us on 0113 450 8554.

We will continue streaming all our services, both during this period of limited availability and into the future. You can join us online every Sunday morning at 10.00 am, catch up any time through the week, listen to our services over the phone, or listen using our podcast.

Continue reading “Parish Notices: 20 June 2021”

Weeknotes: Saturday 19 June

It’s been a pretty quiet couple of weeks for the tech team as we settle into the long period of Ordinary Time between Trinity Sunday and All Saint’s Day, so we’ve used it to catch our breath, tidy up some loose ends and start planning for the future.

And then there were two

We now have two technicians capable of streaming services, giving our technical lead their first Sunday off in over a year. Over the summer we aim to get this number even higher so that we can rota our team in the same way that we rota readers and server.

Never skip documentation

We’ve improved a whole bunch of our documentation and checklists, making things more reliable and increasing our bus factor.

A place for everything

Our Community Centre Management Team generate a lot of documentation and paperwork as part of keeping our Community Centre up and running. We’ve helped them move this into a new online document store, meaning it’s better protected against disaster and more accessible for people who need it.

Boosting the signal

As we plan to reopen the bar in the Community Centre we’ve been doing some work to make sure we can support cashless payments more reliably and make them faster. To do this we’ve started putting together a solid proposal to revamp some of our network equipment.

Parish Notices: 13 June 2021

Worshipping in person

In line with the Government’s plan for easing lockdown, and based on our own risk assessments, our doors are open for public worship. You must book to attend any of our services in person, and you must follow additional rules around cleaning your hands, covering your face, and maintaining distancing whilst in the church. If you want to attend a service you can either book online, or you can call us on 0113 450 8554.

We will continue streaming all our services, both during this period of limited availability and into the future. You can join us online every Sunday morning at 10.00 am, catch up any time through the week, listen to our services over the phone, or listen using our podcast.

Continue reading “Parish Notices: 13 June 2021”

Parish Notices: 6 June 2021

Choral Evensong

The service of Evensong is rooted in hundreds of years of worship, and is renowned for its choral music and rich language.

You can join us online for this evening’s service live at 6.00 pm – or watch again at any time – on our YouTube channel.

Worshipping in person

In line with the Government’s plan for easing lockdown, and based on our own risk assessments, our doors are open for public worship. You must book to attend any of our services in person, and you must follow additional rules around cleaning your hands, covering your face, and maintaining distancing whilst in the church. If you want to attend a service you can either book online, or you can call us on 0113 450 8554.

We will continue streaming all our services, both during this period of limited availability and into the future. You can join us online every Sunday morning at 10.00 am, catch up any time through the week, listen to our services over the phone, or listen using our podcast.

Continue reading “Parish Notices: 6 June 2021”