Heal Your Church WebSite

Month: September 2003

  • (stop) Stating the Obvious

    “[Mission statements] should be abolished because every Mission Statement ever written can be summarized in four words — ‘All babies must eat.’” — Vincent Flanders, author of Son of Web Pages that Suck

    In considering a review of the web site for the International Gospel Fellowship of East Hartford, CT, one of the first things I noticed about this ‘brochureware‘ was the ubiquitous mission statement on their front page, followed by a statement of their core beliefs. Now this isn’t bad information to put on a church web site. I would however, suggest that this information be put on a sub page.

    Generally, you’ve got two kinds of visitors to your site. Members who want information, in which case they’re probably already familiar with this information. Second, and of greater importance are seekers. That is people who are new or visiting to the area, or people experiencing some form of a spiritual crisis, emotional emptiness or physical need.

    What I would suggest is providing the obligatory times and places on the front page (perhaps in a toned-down, off-to-the-side-sorta-way), but also something conspicuously placed that reflects your church’s unique personality and purpose. I mean think about it, I’ve never been to an International Gospel Church (IGC), in fact, I didn’t know such an entity existed until today. How does this particular IGC different from the Baptist Church down the street with a similar goal and mission? For matter, how does this church differ from so many others who state a similar mission online?

    That’s why on the Redland front page, I list some of the most recent events and happenings. It not only makes search engines happy, it keeps the page dynamic and it gives a first time visitor some clue as to all the fun stuff we have going on.

    In other words, while there is doctrine-o-plenty to be found at RBC, there are also smiling faces with warm embraces looking forward to your visit.

    See how enticing that last sentence was? Now go, and do likewise.

  • But if I move to Linux, what happens to all my sermons in Word?

    A chief concern about moving to Linux is interoperability with Microsoft Office applications. Several office suites are available for Linux systems, but there hasn’t been a systematic study of how well these suites interoperate with Microsoft Office. We decided to conduct a small pilot experiment to explore how interoperable current Linux office applications are with Microsoft Office. On January 11, 2003, we downloaded 150 files from the Internet: 50 Word (.doc) files, 50 – Hal Varian, ACM Queue, July/August ’03

    Let’s face it. One of the big reasons your church or charity hasn’t moved to a Linux platform is because you’ve got so much invested in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. That’s no accident. Microsoft is merely following the “killer app. model” established some 22 years ago when Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3 made the IBM PC a must-have business machine.

    Put another way, many of us select hardware based upon the requirements of the operating system, which we select based upon the needs of the application software we intend to run. Oh sure, the process usually isn’t that linear, but explains why church administrators find themselves putting-out $300 a seat for Microsoft Office (and then live with the guilt of installing an unlicensed copy on their home PC.)

    Why the blind faith MSFT? Well for one, all the pastor’s sermons are in Word, or in some cases, Word Perfect 5.n. The music minister has a library of praise songs saved in PowerPoint. Then there is the calendar for the sanctuary usage often saved in Outlook or even Excel. Then there is software to keep the books. To track visitors. To produce and distribute the bi-weekly newsletter. All on a Windows platform. So why move to Linux?

    I mean even with an application as solid and flexible as InfoCentral, there is no popping a disk into the computer and mindlessly “NEXT >>” buttons … nor does the average church administrator feel comfortable with keeping such information online even if it is hosted on a well-armored intranet … provided you even have an intranet. Similarly, heaven help you with installing something as codependent GNUCash or as security conscious as eGroupware without someone in your parish who can speak pure geek (and is willing to read 27 pages of documentation).

    On the other hand, most small to mid-sized churches and charities I know have one machine dedicated to accounting (hopefully) behind a locked door – with membership info ported via sneakr-net in the form of delimited ASCII or DBF files. The rest of the computing activity is limited to sermons, letters, newsletters, fliers, slide-shows and some simple list management and/or cost analysis by varying members of the ministerial and administrative staff. For those situations, I would suggesting taking you take a good long look at using OpenOffice, even if for now, it is on a Windows Platform.

    Last month, Hal Varian at U.C. Berkeley, along with his son Christopher, published an article in the ACM Queue entitled MOXIE: Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment. Now for those of you who aren’t nerds, the ACM is a rather prestigious and well respected educational and scientific society. Moreover, being a professional association, the ACM isn’t prone to some of the marketing and advertising forces that pull many technical magazine in one direction or another. So when I see an article that essentially says OpenOffice, and it’s kissing cousin StarOffice can import 97% of existing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, I pay attention.

    I would also burninate two CDs and give one to my church administrator and my youth minister the next time I see him and with absolutely no technical verbiage, explain to him that “the software on this CD can save you $300 per software seat, and is compatible with just about every document you have.” If I see they’re interested, I might also add “it also lets you export your ‘Write’documents to Adobe Postscript and HTML format … and your ‘Draw’ and ‘Impress’ documents to Flash with a couple clicks of a button” … which is another coupla hundred of dollars saved.

    What about the 3% of unreadable documents? Well, after reading the article along with some input from over at SlashDot, I doubt that too many music ministers are using the math or macro features in Word to compose this week’s hymn. Moreover, it seems that Microsoft Office has about the same failure ratio in reading it’s own documents.

    Why the evangelism? It’s about talents. When people give your charity money, they’re hoping that more goes to those in need, than to the needs of the back-end operation. It’s also about accountability and integrity. Even if you continue to use legally licensed copies of MS Word at your office, giving them a compatible office suite on their HOME pc may help your minister stay out of software hell. Deploying OpenOffice, even if it is on existing Windows platform that is currently equipped with an (aging) copy of MS Office, is practical and realistic step in that direction.

    … From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. Luke 12:48b

  • Host File Configuration Fun

    I realize I’ve been a bit ‘preachy’ the past couple of days, so let me make that up to you by offering something very ‘geeky.’

    If you’re like me, you prefer to develop software outside of the production environment. Okay, now to translate that last sentence into English for those of you who are not fluent in ancient geek:

    Those of us who program for a living rarely, if ever, perform any major software surgery on live/active website. Instead, we keep a copy of the website, either in a subdirectory on the same web server, or if you are an ‘uber-nerd,’ on a web server you have running in your house (or in the basement of your church) .

    Running a web server at home (or in the church basement) for development isn’t all that hard, but setting one up is a topic for a later discussion. Today, I want to talk about how to play some domain games to trick your routers and computers so instead of having to address your site like this:

    http://192.168.1.120/index.php

    You can instead address it like this:

    http://foobar/index.php

    Notice, I didn’t enter the URL foobar.com, but just foobar. There a variety reasons for this. First, I really don’t want to spend $8.95 per year to register a test domain for each domain I’m developing. Second, I’m running my Linux/Apache server on an old Pentium II, so excluding the overhead of a DNS daemon gives my tired old machine a bit of a break. Third, unless someone hacks past the Zone-Alarm enhanced firewall on my LinkSys router, there’s a slim-to-none chance that anyone else entering http://foobar/ on their machine is going to see my test site on my intranet.

    To do this, it means modifying a file named “hosts” on both my Windows and Linux systems. Here is how mine is configured (almost, the IPs have been changed to protect the innocent). Here is the how the file c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts is configured on my Windows 2000 box:

    127.0.0.1     localhost
    192.168.1.120     foobar

    Here is how the file /etc/hosts looks on my Linux box (and please note, though I use spaces in this article to delimit the columns, you should use tabs):

    127.0.0.1     foobar     localhost.localdomain     localhost

    There are some drawbacks to this approach. First, my Linux configuration assumes I’m working on only one project. If I wanted to work on multiple projects, I would have to configure the Apache system for multiple virtual domains (a.k.a. virtual hosts), each with it’s own IP. In that case, the /etc/hosts file might look like this:

    127.0.0.1     localhost.localdomain     localhost
    192.168.1.120     foobar
    192.168.1.121     blog4god
    192.168.1.122     healed

    The file c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts would look essentially the same. Which leads me to another drawback, unlike a DNS server that automagically maps these tables for you, you’ll need to keep both hosts files in sync some how – or should I say, rsync (t the reader understand)? Also, if you’re still using Windows 95, 98 or ME, you’ll have to remember that the hosts file is in the c:\windows\host directory, and that Windows XP may be configured so that hosts can be found the directory c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\.

    Another thing you need to remember is that if you haven’t installed some form of web server on your Windows system, then it is more than likely that hosts is actually residing on your system as hosts.sam. This means you need to remove the .sam extension to get things to work.

    For you non-BDS Mac users, I believe (and I could be wrong) the hosts file can be found in either the system or the system/preferences filter, and if not, and someone PLEASE correct me if I’m wrong, you simply open up your text editor and create one with the following entries:

    127.0.0.1     A     localhost
    192.168.1.120     A    foobar

    I know the above sounds like a lot of work, but honestly, it took me all of 10 seconds to get it done at home. Once done, this allows me to work on a localized copy of MovableType, Drupal or any other tool/toy to work out formats and kinks before they go live. That is, once I go through the ‘heck’ of installing MySQL, php, Perl, and any of other libraries and schtuff required to get a particular app. up and running.

    One thing you should note, this approach also works for those of you running an IIS web server at home (on in the church basement) as a development server — and for those of you running a web server on your PC on which you develop — though my preference is always to set it all up an old computer just in case it does get hacked and wacked.

    Disclaimer – as always, before you try stuff like this, backup your files, write down your configurations and remember – your mileage may vary (esp. if your router is different than mine).