A week or two ago I talked some with Aaron Ogle and we decided to try our hand at things again. After a couple tries of trying to create a logo, I gave up and told him that we needed to find an Apostolic graphic artist. He agreed and I started looking, and it was God that I found one (and a very good one at that). Apostolicbook now has it’s very own graphic designer. What does this mean for us and for everyone else? The world!! Or at least it seems like that.

Last night we had a so called “business meeting” that lasted from around 8 till 11 (my time). You’re thinking “Wow that’s a long time!” and you are correct, but we needed that. I think we all went away from it feeling very accomplished. We got several things much needed out of the way. Of those things, the main one I’m happy about is our logo! It’s very sweet looking and most defintally will be recoginzable any where. I won’t give any details of what it looks like (and won’t post pictures of it), as it’s not time for that. Cause like the Bible says, there’s a time and place for everything!

We did a lot of other things about Apostolicbook last night, and they are all very important too. The last thing I’m going to say is this… Be sure to start checking our Twitter, Status blog, and our homepage for updates! Cause who knows, sometime soon we might reveal a little here and there!

This is all for now! Hopefully you can tell I’m ready to start doing stuff on Apostolicbook!!! God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

This new design that we have in our mind is very different and I don’t think I have seen anything like it on any other social networking website. We’re not completely sure that the design that we have right now is going to be the final one, but it is a concept of something which is more than nothing! Haha – I wish I could post some pictures of the design that we are thinking of, but the colors don’t really match. It’s a horrible reason why not to post them, but i’m just not going to post them. I will say that we are implenting as much effects as we can without making the website slow so that the users will enjoy using AposolicBook.

If you have any suggestions for us or would like to give us some input, please feel free to let us know!! After we start getting the whole website up and going, we will probably be looking for some people to Alpha Test (not Beta since Alpha comes first) for us. During the Alpha Test we will require the users to give us input and take surveys either every week or every other week, and we will also require users to inform us whenever they run into an error or bug. That way we can see how users like it and improve the website based on their feedback.

Hopefully I will get to post another AposolicBook entry sometime soon and not in another three months. Lol – I’m hoping that by three months from now we will already be in Alpha Testing phase. If we’re not that far into the development of ApostolicBook, then I’m hoping to at least have a majority of the pre-Alpha Testing done. So, pray for us that we have enough time and creativity to do this! Thanks.

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

Then there’s awesome church!!! I love my church (Truth Tabernacle) and love being an Apostolic young person! I wouldn’t and won’t trade it for anything this world has to offer!! As most of my readers know I am my church’s lead sound man. What does that mean? It means a lot of different things, but I’ll summarize it for you.. We have a very nice sound system and a very nice mixer, there are areas of it that we could improve on but you have to have money for that. We also have a very nice piece of equipment that let’s us record professionally. This was a somewhat expensive too, but it wasn’t too bad. In fact here in the next couple of months we (the other sound man and I) are thinking about adding onto this so that we can have all the drum mica recorded separately and not remixes like we are doing now. We make preaching CDs and we record all the special singing so that we can make a special singing CD and sell. We’ve made one in the past, but it was all remixed and so we couldn’t really make it sound better and more professional. (As a side note, if anyone wants to buy the first special singing CD please let me know.) Back in the sound booth during worship service we control the projector that displays the lyrics to the songs that are being sung. We also display the first scripture that the preacher reads. I personally am not a fan of this because some people no longer bring their Bibles, but that’s why we only do one scripture so that if someone really wants to follow the scriptures that the preacher is reading they will bring their Bible.

I’ve learned a couple things since I’ve made a blog post. One of those things is the fact that if you give God your tithes and then more than just the 10% that he requires, He will bless you. I’ve experienced that first hand. Ever since I got my job I’ve been getting paid every other week (I think that’s how it is) and so I get to pay my tithes to the Lord. Well the other week I was going to put the money into the offering and realized that I had money the a spot where I usually keep the money for tithes. I was confused by this cause I was pretty sure I had paid tithes last time.. Well just to be sure that I did pay it I put it in the offering. That week I got some side jobs to do that are earning me some extra money! It’s a total blessing from the Lord!!!

I’ve recently been getting some thoughts for articles. The thing is though that I’ve yet to have enough time to actually sit down and collect my thoughts together and write a good article. I want to do this so bad!! I’ll have to make some time to sit down and write an article. One that I really want to sit down and write badly is “What Will It Take – Part II”. I’ve got some other thoughts running through my head, but I won’t want to share them with you cause you might steal them. Lol :p

That’s it for right now.. I’ve got to start studying for a practice A+ test I’m taking tomorrow morning before I head out for a youth service that I’m going to in Guy, Arkansas.

God Bless,
Bradley

One thing that we tried to talk about was the primary colors for our first draft of the layout, but the colors we picked somewhat match but not completely for some reason. All the other colors fit, except for the blue unless it does and I’m not smart enough to realize it.

I’ve started to work on the layout and the design, layout being the coding and design being the thing you do I’m doing in Photoshop. I’m having some trouble getting it to look the way I want to look, but its’ probably some simple thing I’m leaving out or forgot to put in. Hopefully I’ll get it fixed sometime soon or else I’ll be pretty disappointed in myself.

I would give you all a link to view what I’ve done so far, but I don’t want to share it with you since there’s nothing to really see since it’s not looking the way I want it to. I will hopefully post updates to here about it, but if I don’t then that probably means I haven’t gotten very far haha

God Bless
Bradley Hilton

First off, I got the idea to create a social networking site just for Apostolic young people around a year ago this month. I searched around a while for a script that made it easy to set up a social networking site that looked good and was easy for people to navigate around. Another thing that I wanted, was a script that took a person’s age and if they were under a certain age it wouldn’t let them join. After searching for a while, I finally found a pretty good script that did almost everything I wanted it to do, except I couldn’t figure out how to not allow people to join if they were younger than the certain age.

I found that script about four or five months after my first thoughts of a social networking site for Apostolic youth only. I had originally called the site “Apostolic Youth Connected” (a.k.a. AYC). Well, since I couldn’t restrict people who put in a date that stated they were under the certain age, I decided to stop messing around with the script for a while (it was also the end of my sophomore year and finals were taking place). So, since that didn’t work out and my school studies were requiring too much of my time, I decided to stop working on it for the time being. But before I stopped me and Aaron had already bought a domain name and set up a Twitter account, we also had decided to change the name to “ApostolicBook”.

Summer came and so did some major decisions. Aaron and I decided that since we had spend the money on the domain, we would try to get this going again, but this time we decided that we would build our own script up from nothing but our ideas and knowledge. It was decided that Aaron would do the main PHP, MySQL, and other server coding, while I would help him with that a little but mainly do the main CSS and styling of the website. As the summer went on we really didn’t get much finished, expect Aaron got some things here and there on the back-end done.

Recently there has been some major work being done on ApostolicBook. On September 29^th, 2009 Aaron and I talked about what we wanted to do and how we want things done. After much talk and some research we decided that we would have a document online that was shared between the two of us (if you’re wondering, it is stored on Google Docs). We then set a couple of dates to get things done by a certain time because I knew we probably wouldn’t get stuff done if we didn’t set dates.

The first two dates we set was on October 6^th and October 13^th. On October 6^th we set that we would have the Initial Design Document completed, which included the basic features, first version of our color scheme made up, and the first sketch of the user profile layout. For October 13^th, we have set that we will have the “First layout draft complete”. This includes a first draft of every page that we have come up with right now in our Initial Design Document.

The first draft of the color scheme has been chosen and the picture to the left are a few of the colors chosen. I’ve only included a few of the colors, cause if I did show you all of them, what would be the point of having a first launch date? Ha-ha

As ApostolicBook is under development, is there something that you as a user would like to see? If so, then please speak up and leave a comment on here or send us a direct message on Twitter.

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton