Latter-day Village Square

Latter-dayVillage.com is the exclusive seller of Grettle Payne’s Scripture Mastery for Everyone products. We just now have updated her Old Testament products in readiness for next years seminary curriculum. Rather than continue printing hard copy books, we are converting all of Grettle’s resources into instant download e-books. The PDF versions are available for download immediately at purchase, and best of all, with no shipping and handling charges:

These PDF versions also give you maximum flexibility; printing whatever pages when you want and as many times as you want. Print single pages and photocopy or print all of your handouts on your printer.

• Scripture Mastery for Everyone, Old Testament Edition
• Old Testament Scripture Mastery Charts
• Old Testament Game Supplement
• Old Testament Activities

We also combined all for of these Old Testament teaching aides into a bundle:

• SM4E Old Testament Bundle

With this combined download you end up with over 300 pages of printable materials for use in teaching and reinforcing the Old Testament Scripture Mastery verses, and in just minutes after you purchase; no waiting and no shipping charges. Best of all, you get the bundle for less than half of the normal book prices!

Debra recently pointed out that our previous blog name of “Village Town Square” was odd; Village and Town being redundant. She would know, she grew up in an Ohio village.  Me, I started life on a wide spot of the road called Montello, NV.  Population was about 100 or so, so it was not large enough to be a village. From there I moved to Manassa, CO; population then about 700.  So Debra is the ‘village’ expert around here.

So our blog is now titled “Latter-day Village Square.” We promise not to make this name change thing a regular monthly habit.  We hope you visit often, sit on one of our benches, feed the birds, and talk with the other locals.  Click the Comment link on any article, login with your LDV ID and let us know what you think.  Once you login, you should not have to do it again.

We found online shoppers like to view products by their standard work reference, esp. seminary teachers.  In one set of product pages you can see all that we offer around a particular set of scriptures.

We just added an Old Testament category in our shopping cart; it contains items relating to next year’s curriculum. We will be adding many more OT items, with an emphasis on digital products to make is easier, quicker and cheaper for you to get high quality teaching resources. We are also hard at work at work on creating new OT resources, including:

• SM stickers
• Felt Maps & Felt Tribal Banners
• OT Art Collections
• OT Scripture Mastery Takes Stage - character-based SM recordings
• OT SM Mormonad-type Posters

If you would like to request a specific Old Testament seminar product that would aid your teaching efforts, visit our Request New Product form.

Developing the Old Testament Annotated Scriptures has been a unique experience — the input alone forced me to read and categorize every single verse! Thankfully we don’t have to teach each one! I did use more powerpoint files under insights that can be imported into your own presentations. Since I know the contents better than anyone, right now, I will try to point out specific aids that might be useful as we approach those lesson blocks. I would love to be as much of a resource as you need so please let me know if you want something added or just can’t find something and I’ll do my best to fulfill your requests.

A special thanks to all those who have requested specific annotations to be added! Hopefully everyone will feel like they “own” the Annotated Scriptures because they will be filled with your own resources.

I just enabled a new theme for the blog that incorporates the LDV look and feel. The LDV look and feel is the brown color scheme with top village images, cascading menus, and boxes for advertisements (where they do appear).

Our site is really made up of numerous components, all tied together by the surrounding LDV environment. Here are just a few of the components we use and how they work for us:

• eCommerce Templates - our shopping cart
• Lore Knowledgebase - Seminary, Primary, and Sampler knowledgebases
• vBulletin3 - our discussion forums and the basis for our image gallery
• Photopost - our image gallery, integrated with vBulletin
• aMember - our membership management system, integrated with vBulletin, Photopost, and WordPress for single site login access.
• WordPress - this blog. All registered members can leave comments on these blog entries, you can login with the same username password that you use for any other site area (see aMember above).
• Omnistar Etools - our support system.
• Mailman - our email list software
• Arelis - links management system

The only rub is that I (Tim) must update all of these areas with new header/footer code when we change menus. However, finding a total solution with all of these different functions (in our price range) is something we have not been able to find.

We hope you enjoy our efforts to present a pleasing and useful interface.

Tim Holder, Webmaster
webmaster@latter-dayvillage.com

Due to the sharp increase in LDS Young Women art collections and other products in our store, we have seen a whole new group of people frequenting our website - Young Women leaders! We’ve decided to add a new free Young Women’s Membership to our subscribers. We’ve always had some great YW resources on the site, in our Free Sampler, but the new YW art collections and stickers etc, have really drawn a lot of attention to the site from Young Women leaders.

The New Young Women’s Membership will give leaders access to all the YW resources on the website, including the Young Women Category in the Free Sampler, the YW images in the Image Gallery, Young Women Forum, Young Women Blog, periodic email updates about new YW products in the store, and our monthly newsletter - The Villager.

I have to give credit where credit is due. One of our most popular collections has been Courtney White’s Lesson Handouts. Courtney is a photographer and she has prepared a set of beautiful photographic handouts that go along with each of the lessons in the YW lesson manual for this year. Her images are beautiful and powerful, and bring home a message to the girls about the lesson topic. She uses a lot of variety in the images and how they are presented, with a variety of quotes from the lessons, as bookmarks, posters, notecards, surveys and so forth, that add impact. She prepares handouts for 12 lessons at at time, so each manual will end up with four quarterly collections.

Elsa Remund answered my request to do a Young Women 2007 Theme Collection that just blew me away. The theme “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts . . . ” did not bring to mind an obvious image, and I tossed some ideas out to her of a young woman standing next to a crystal clear waterfall. Elsa turned that into a young woman whose dress becomes a waterfall - I was thrilled with all her images for this collection. and it has been popular with YW leaders.

Lori Nawyn’s eye catching art is so delightful, and she has prepared a fun Young Women’s Value Collection and fun handouts she calls YW Tagz ‘n Thingz - that have really been a hit with YW leaders. We’ve turned some of her designs into wonderful YW stickers.

I had some wonderful help getting the word out to YW Leaders by the webmasters of a number of YW Websites - my big thanks to Melanie Day of Sugardoodle, Alice Gifford of YWConnection, Vickie Hacking of YWSuggestions, and Becky Sorenson from Becky’s World of SonShine.

Debra

The new Club Collections are online and really neat. Serene Heiner has prepared a really cute Mother’s Day Collection, and Courtney White has designed a beautiful Temple Marriage Collection. I’ve added some really fun special projects to both collections. There is a Mother’s Day Breakfast in Bed set - Gift Jar Set, and a flannel board story, to mention a few. For Courtney’s collection I made a Temple Heart Envelope, Temple Cards, Bridal Shower Cards and gift tags.

It has been really fun to prepare these beautiful collections, and the fonts. I had no idea what was involved in making a font, now I appreciate them all the more now that I see what goes into it. And I use the new fonts for all sorts of things - that’s the really fun part of it.

We have some great artists to work with at Latter-day Village - I am continually surprised and delighted with their skill and creativity!

Debra

Hello!
I am very excited to be able to be a part of this blog and share ideas and insights with all of you. I have truly enjoyed the task of creating the weekly lesson handouts and have been thrilled with the response. Stay tuned as the 3rd quarter handouts will be ready soon!

During Conference, as I was switching through the channels I stumbled upon a great documentary called “Sisterz in Zion.” Maybe you have seen or heard of it, but if not, I wanted to give my opinion, that this is a great program for YW! It shows a group of YW from New York–who truly hold the highest standards all on their own. Many of them are the only LDS in their families and schools, and travel alone through New York’s public transportation to seminary and church. What great examples these YW are to the youth of today! The documentary focuses on a few girls as they are followed “real world” style in their daily life. Then, they have the great opportunity to travel to Utah to BYU to attend a week of EFY. What wonderful and interesting things they encounter! I thoroughly enjoyed this film and suggest it as a YW movie night. You will laugh and cry and it’s a great way to get your girls ready if they too plan to attend EFY this summer. To find out more information you can go to:

www.sisterzinzion.com

It also airs periodically on the satellite station BYU-TV, check here: www.byub.org for listing times.

Cheers!

Courtney White

When is spam filtering too much? When it blocks so much legitimate email that it interferes with normal business operations.

I recently modified our spam (single piece anonymous mail) filtering, eliminating one block list that had become overly aggressive in blocking emails.  Specifically, I dropped the uceprotect.net lists.  Previously we used the fairly aggressive level 2 list from uceprotect (a german group), but found that it blocked emails from large groups of web locations, like sites using GoDaddy for web hosting, or large US ISPs; e.g. cox.net and Verizon.net. So I dropped to the level one list, which was supposed to block only invidual IPs (mail servers).  The spam reaching our inboxes increased slightly, but I still heard from folks who could not send us email. 

The final straw that broke the uceprotect’s back, so to speak, was the day it listed my ISP’s mail server.  Since my ISP will not allow me to use our LDV server to send email (they block all port 25 traffic, forcing all of their customers to send email using their server, a common spam blocking technique), I was in a pickle. After checking several other email servers on the uceprotect site, it was clear they were overly aggressive and becoming more so. 

Now our email servers run without any uceprotect block list checking. Yes, spam email arriving in our inboxes and being rejected by our free email lists is WAY up.  However, more members and vendors can reach us.

Now if someone will just come up with a way to totally eliminate spam . . .