Heal Your Church WebSite

Month: June 2002

  • Usability Testing

    For today’s 1st cup-o-coffee reading, I am STRONGLY suggesting you read the following article – one which describes in detail about something we as a Body could bit more of. What am I saying? The target article explains something most church web sites could use in vast quantities:
    Designer & Developer – Usability Testing.

    If you are serious about your website being most things to most browsers, then you need to talk a long look at this article – and usability testing. By doing so, you compel you and that crack core of church web servants (usually me, myself and I) too THINK first about what you’re going to say, to whom you are addressing it, and how to best serve it up.

    Usability means running each gizmo and bleeding edge technology through the crucible of the “hey, do I really need this or am I showing off ?” test. Usability means not overlooking the fact that the client side of the Internet is comprised out of a wide variety of standards.

    Nothing is worse than taking your compelling content and hiding under a bowl or a bed. What’s that? You don’t have compelling content? Hmmm .. musn’t have too many visitors then either.

    Test everything. Hold on to the good – 1 Thessalonians 5:21

    BTW, credit to Vincent’s News of Interest Page for finding this one.

  • Global replace using find & xarg

    I’m part of an lively Yahoo group run by Tony Whittaker called ChurchSite-Chat.
    There, I learned about Rachel Cunliffe who runs a very cool bbs that offers Church Website Critiques. And from both sites, I’ve learned just how big of a plank I have to yank out of my own eye before I can go about piling heavy burdens burdens upon the shoulders of other church web servants.

    One of the problems pointed out to me were some broken links on my own church’s page, RedlandBaptist.org. I originally built this site using DreamWeaver 3, and being the code-monkey type of guy I am, relied heavily on server-side includes (SSI) to reduce my work. As I’ve stated in an earlier article, SSI’s can save you beaucoup time because you can write a file once, and include it often. Similarly, using DreamWeaver, you can create stock templates so all your pages look and feel the same.

    There’s only one big fat caveat with this approach …
    (more…)

  • Criteria – 88 Theses

    When this site opened, I promised everyone that I would critique sites both good and bad, using the former as examples to follow, the later as examples to avoid – and perhaps to gently instruct the errant web servant of that site back into the fold of good web design.

    Obviously, I’ve been putting this off, in small part due to the crash, in greater part because I had not listed my criteria. Judging without a standard is about as bad as designing a site without a plan. And we all know what God says about judging others …

    So here are the standards by which I myself am willing to live up to (on my church websites) … I hope you are too:
    (more…)

  • You SED What ?

    After last weekend’s disaster, I decided to “practice” a recovery of a huge mysql database of my friends phpBB.

    Good thing too. I found a potential problem that could have made an emergency repair a real pain. The fix is easy, when you have the luxury of time to look.

    Here’s what I did …

    I programmed my friend’s production site to automagically made backup in the wee hours via crontab, which in turn invoked mysqldump with the ‘–opt’ option. The output file was compressed using our buddy tar using the -zcvf options.

    About 10 hours later, when the rest of us were awake, using SSH, I logged into another system on a different server that had a mirror of my friends phpBB. I FTP’d the backup. Decompressed using tar -zxvf .

    At this point, I was ready to restore the data file. Because I mysqldump’d with the –opt option, it meant that the dump file contained the backup data in SQL languge format. This included deleting tables, then re-creating them, then populating them. The command to restore is simple enough:

    mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DATABASE
    Usually, from there it’s VIOLA, we’re done. Not so today. Which is why I’m imploring you to rehearse and practice your restorations from time to time.

    Appearently, the MySQL configuration at my friends production site, isn’t exactly the same as it is on the mirror site. Because I had the luxury of time, I was able to poke around until I figured out what had happened.

    In this case, ‘C’ like comments were followed with a semi-colon. Which meant MySQL was being instructed to execute a query. Only because the semi-colon was preceede with a comment, there was no query. Boom … an error was raised and the restore failed.

    Once I figured out what the problem was, I had to find a way of quickly and easily remedying the situation. Not such an easy task for 4mb of ASCII data ! But since we’re on a linux/unix based system, we do have some powerful text processing tools … in this case, the weapon of choice was SED which is short for ‘stream editor‘.

    Using the following command, I ran a search and replace on the entire file in under 2 seconds:

    sed ‘s/ \*\/;/\*\//’ ORIGDUMP.sql > NEWDUMP.sql

    With that accomplished, I was able to run the mysql command as exampled earlier:

    mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DATABASE As my voice teacher in undergrad used to tell me “practice doesn’t make perfect, rather perfect practice makes perfect.”

    “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me–put it into practice” – Philippians 4:9