Month: December 2002

Here’s a must read article I found via boyink … title says it all – Gorilla Usability : evolt.org. If you’re currently or about ot develop a church web site, you MUST read this article. Whether you agree with all the techical points or not is less important than asking yourself the following questions:

• Do You Know Your Users?
• What Is Gorilla Usability?
• So, How Do I Start?
• We’ve Got Volunteers. Now What?
• Now Comes The Fun Part
• Almost Ready?
• Get to Work

Yes, there will be a test. Those who fail will pay the consequences in low/no visits and an immediate redesign.

Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines … As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.

Well, I agree with the pricing thingie, but I’m having issues with points #3, #7 and #10. Of the third point, he misses the fact that most of us living and surfing in western cultures read left to right, top to bottom, which the real motivation behind not wanting to scroll right then back to left. That said, I do agree, what’s with the 805px width?

Regarding for issues #7, and #10, of the former, I think he overblows the impact of slanted/poorly scoped FAQs. Usually we just ignore them. For the later point, I dunno. Generallly when I want to see someone’s bio, I click on a link saying “bio” or “about me.”

That said, I can see what Jakob Nielsen getting at, so its not like the list needs a re-write – though it could be extended. For example, one issue he avoided, which I suspect may have to do with his relationship with Macromedia, is the overuse and abuse of Flash. Especially for menus … so much for “open in new window” or “open in new tab” there.

Suppose I should drop Vincent a line and see what he thinks of this year’s top 10 Bozo no-no’s.

MSNBC – WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — Federal regulators are creating new protections for people plagued by unwanted telemarketing calls, establishing a national “do-not-call” list that consumers can use to keep their phones from ringing with sales pitches.

Well all I can say is, it is about stinking time! And I’ll be the first in line to sign up. I cannot stand telemarketers. When I purchase phone services – it is for MY use, not theirs. If they’re willing to pay me to use my line, then we can talk about it. Otherwise, they’re stealing, waking me up from naps, waking up my daughter from her naps, interrupting my dinner and yanking me out of the shower. And for what, to sell me new windows – even though I had them all replaced just 3 years ago? Go away – and take your spammers with you.

Oh, btw, here’s the info you need to receive less commercial advertising mail (that would be U.S. Snail Mail), you can register for The DMA’s Mail Preference Service (MPS), which allows you to “opt out” of national mailing lists.

Now if we could only get the same relief for our email.

I just read an interesting article on ABCNews entitled “PaineWebber Ex-Employee Charged with Fraud” (via slashdot.org). Basically, a systems administrator that:

• a) coded-up a logic-bomb that would be financially disastrous to his former company
• b) purchased put options to benefit from his company’s demise.

Of course this Alcatraz-bound bone-head got caught, but imagine the virtual mess that such an act would leave! No thanks!

So what has this got to do with running/administering a church web site. Everything. How many of us are in situations where one person holds all the keys? That is, the church’s web site is some mystery so you leave it entirely up to the otherwise not-so-social, not so visible geek who sits in the back corner of your church? Who owns your church’s domain names – and will that someone walk away with it one day if someone rubs him/her the wrong-way?

At Redland Baptist, we keep this real simple. Secure information and ownership are distributed and monitored. For example, At my insistence, the Church took ownership of RedlandBaptist.org this past year. I did this because of so many situations we’ve heard of where a talented but dysfunctional geek would get rubbed-wrong and do something embarrassing to a church with their own domain name.

Taking the concept of accountability a bit further, it’s probably good to separate concerns among different people; such as the individual handling the accounting system also doesn’t work on the outward-facing web site. Similarly, sensitive information should be dispensed on a need-to-know basis. In order for someone to take over, they would have to get two of the other individuals involved to play along – provided our wives don’t catch wind of such a scheme. And considering my wife is from Pittsburgh, used to play hockey and is known at work as the “Solaris Queen” or the “Unix goddess” … I prefer to play it straight.

In other words, we don’t put all our security eggs in one basket, and we’re not afraid to do the monitor one another thingie.

I know, I know, this is a church, aren’t we supposed to trust each other? Well we put locks on our doors don’t we? Some of our churches even have alarm systems after a break-in or two. Remember those old home-spun adages, “good fences make good neighbors” and “a lock keeps the honest man honest.” The same measures need to be taken to secure your church web site. They’re simple, they’re relatively painless, they’re far less expensive than recovering from an incursion. Moreover, they inspire trust and confidence better than any wishful thinking.

Got a love note from someone who didn’t appreciate my most web site critique – they said “seems like you are mostly just critisizing, rather than teaching or training, as your banner suggests” … the carnal me wants to reply with a Bronx cheer … but the Christ in me says just move on and return evil with good by posting something really geeky. Especially for those of you with Linux/Apache like web server configurations.

Next time you ssh into your bash and pico a problematic PHP program, add ‘#!/usr/bin/php‘ to the very to of the script and run it from the command line instead of your browser:

The nice thing about this is that you can always redirect your STDOUT into file using a syntax to the effect of:

Of course, like any command line tool, there are plenty of arguments and options for PHP which include:

Okay Kiddies, now it’s time for the bonus round. Those of you who are asking “yo dean, what about STDERR and STDIN …” … for that and more gory details on how to PHP from the command line, here are some links you might find useful:

• Chapter 23. Using PHP from the command line
• ASPN : Appendixes : Using PHP from the command line

Now you don’t have any excuses not to test your code !-)