Odds are, probably not.

I’ve personally enjoyed an occasional ‘Instalanche,’ and once even the dreaded ‘Slashdot effect,’ along with some air time when I first started this blog. I’ve seen first hand the type of volume that can hammer away at a server when this happens?

So what to do?

Well let’s talk about some of the low lying fruit first. I’ll go ahead and use WordPress as an example platform as that covers the majority of HYCW cult members out there other than Mike Boyink, whom has special dispensation for his Expression Engine ways … but I digress …

1. Caching is your friend – meaning if you’re not caching your content, do so now. There are plenty of plug-ins available including Super-Cache which rolls out with version 2.8. There are even 3rd party services if you’re in the big leagues.
2. Optimize them images – I’ve written more than once about image bloat, which basically means for those who are not equipped and knowledgeable PhotoShop practitioners – get IrfanView and resize and optmize your .JPG, .GIF and .PNG images using the application’s default settings.
3. Update your platform – Even though later versions of WordPress and associated plug-ins are likely to contain new features that increase their server footprint, they often include bug fixes and optimizations that help them perform better downstream.

So now that we’ve stated the obvious, let’s talk about a few more intermediate things we can do that’ll help things keep chugging along – provided you remember to make backups:

1. Optimize your database – which is built-into phpMyAdmin that most hosts provide gratis. Otherwise, this can be accomplished at the command line by backing-up and then restoring one’s database – which is a good procedure to know regardless of optimization.
2. Compress your CSS & JavaScript – for those of you who don’t code, there’s alot of repetitive white spaces, commands and operands that can be ‘tokenized’ into smaller symbology. YUI Compressor does a good job with JavaScript. CSS Drive offers one of many competent CSS Compressors out there.
3. Turn-off unnecessary plug-ins, remove unused plugins – especially the former as they inject code and processing cycles into the page delivery process. No need to burden the user with this stuff if it’s not helping the cause.

Okay, now for the advanced stuff , the type of tasks no one likes because for the most part, these steps either require engaging in planning or policy:

1. Email notifications – Consider turning off select groups of email notifications temporarily while the rush is on, for example, new registration notifications. This means knowing what emails you get from your site and what happens to whom when they’re altered.
2. Old Post Comments – Think about using plugins that allow you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. I personally use Extended Comments Options such as those over a year old. This may be tough when dealing with pastors with several years of sermon submissions.
3. Contingency plan -
   • I mentioned this before, but is your data backed-up on a regular basis? Do you know how to restore it?
   • It might help to have an alternate theme that is less graphic and media intensive for use during the rush. You know, one without all the ‘flashination?’
   • Work out an alternate domain with your service provider, and/or a sub-domain with neighboring organization. This could even be a microsite platform temporarily drafted to help with the load.
   • Discuss with your hosting provider other alternatives they might offer.

There are still some other real-hairy things you can do, but I suspect if you’re the type of reader who already knows about employing dual-server gardens for data and application, then I don’t really need to explain such big-league tactics.

The point is, be ready for success.

After all, Easter is just around the corner, and I can guarantee you, even if you don’t get mentioned by an A-blogger, you’re site is going to get hit with first time visitors looking for service times, directions, things for the kids, and what type of pancakes you’re serving at the sunrise service.

It might not hurt to have your analytics goals set up to capture such events either … more on that later.

Despite the all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the tech community about how “closed” or “limited” the iPad is, it is going to sell.

I can’t take credit for the above line, though I wish I had thought of it. Instead, it comes from a comment from ‘Ryan‘ at UX Magazine that continues to read:

Because these users, who represent probably at least 60-70% of the market, don’t give a rip about whether the thing is “open” or “closed” or “made of kumquats” (they couldn’t tell the difference anyway). Does it provide an easy way to see their peeps on Facebook, watch some YouTube clips, and find and play some casual games? Yup. Does it get viruses, stash their files places they can’t find, and need to have the HD defragged or the OS reinstalled every 6 months? Nope.

Despite the unsubstantiated metric of 60%-70% – I think its safe to say that Ryan has nicely summed up the most important aspect of the iPad user experience – it does what the target audience want’s done without engaging in what Steve Krug refers to as ‘rocket surgery.’

Want to Tweet? No problem, just pick from 1 of a number of free or $0.99 apps that’ll have you tweeting about what your cat had for dinner faster than Kim Kardashian can out an air marshal!

Facebook your thing? Go ahead and annoy your high school peeps with constant Farmville & Mafia Wars updates from locations and times you’d otherwise be snoozing through a committee meeting.

On a more serious note, I found myself using the compass feature earlier this week while wandering about Piccadilly Circus,  keeping photos of my travel receipts, receiving useful notifications about my plane departures and arrivals, sent a few pictures to mom, and even Skyped with the wife & kid without having a single issue with the operating system, nor needing a single moment of  training on any of said apps.

That my friends is a successful user experience.

Point is, regardless of open or closed operating system, or the costs of starting up an apps development effort, or irritations from ATT’s spotty coverage outside major urban coastal areas … the iPad is going to sell because it makes fun and easy the things its users want to do …

… and does them simply, and well.

Something to think about next time you design a facilities use system for an emerging audience of gamers.

“[the] Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history …

… On Christmas Day customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.”

Now unlike my good friend Vincent Flanders, I’m not ready to tweet:

“RT @VincentFlanders – The bookstore is dead says Seth Godin http://bit.ly/8StlpZ ”

That said, when I look at all the paper my own church consumes on a weekly basis, I have to wonder if we don’t have as a mission initiative keeping the fine folks at Dunder Mifflin employed (let the reader understand).

This all got me to thinking, even though I’m not the type of guy who is going to chain himself to a tree – I do think judicious of resources falls under good stewardship – and that includes both natural resources as well as financial.

Meaning, as we continue to see the emergence of digital media devices, such as the Kindle and/or smart phones, why not consider providing and/or publishing more and more of your organizations information in supported by such devices?

Providing: let’s say you want to study Os Guinness’ “Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity”. The Paperback version is $12.82 not including the cost of shipping. The Kindle price for the same is $9.99. That’s about a 33% difference, again not including the cost of shipping.

Publishing: each Christmas and Easter, I see many churches publish multi-page pamphlets that contain all the bulletins for all the services. These are nice as they provide continuity, but I can also see where they’re going to run the church and/or charity a few bucks – especially as people forget to bring with them their nicely stapled paper pile from the previous week.

Yes, Amazon does get to keep about $0.65 of every dollar, but I do think there is a cost savings and possibly cost recovery even if your organization only charges the minimum $0.99 cents to sell your Advent Season bulletin on the Kindle.

Similarly, what would be the cost of simply pushing out to your organization’s website the average, weekly bulletin out to PDF or HTML for consumption by those in your congregation armed with BlackBerry’s and/or iPhones? Other than setting up the router? Especially since they can then also use the same network to follow-along Scripture readings with the mobile version of the ESV Bible?

Point is, I think it’s time to look around your church and/or charity’s offices and meeting rooms and see just how much paper could be saved by simply publishing the temporal stuff online.

What are your thoughts?

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Which is why I find myself  a little bit confused when stumbled onto the  ‘Jesus Christ Celebriduck Limited Edition Collectible Rubber Duck‘ parodied in the instructional poster below:

Call me old school but as I recall a rubber ducky is, as Ernie of Sesame Street so aptly described in song a “ .. little fella who’s Cute and yellow and chubby …”

Now I know what some of you are thinking “Dean, you dope, the Celebriduck is a collector item thing … of course it doesn’t look like a duck!” …

… kidding aside, I already figured out it’s some niche merchandise marketed who also speak other arcane dialects such as “Beanie Baby” … but that gets to my point!

Using insider jargon-eze is a sure fire way to relegate your website the non-desirable’ SEO’ known as ‘search-engine obscurity.‘

Consider this:  in the U.S. 1 in 3 adults is unchurched. Meaning 1 in 3 adults don’t understand the ‘church-speak‘ that bables-up and out of expensive color brochures, sermon videos and web sites.

So when it comes to the purpose and personality of your organization, speak clearly and say it plain. Tell visitors precisely what THEY seek in terms THEY understand.

Put another way, by avoiding ‘clique chat‘  you’ll not only make your site more usable to individuals trying to find what you have to offer, but you’ll also help avoid spending $5k on a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert.

What usability issue? Well if I’m a user sitting across the room at 11:23, and possibly at 4:55 and 8:05, I might find it hard to see what time it is because of the dark black lines of the artwork create a dark black background for the thin black arms of the clock.

So what has this got to do with my church or charity website? Glad you asked.

What we want to take away from today’s example is the concept that part of a successful user interface isn’t just design that looks good (not that I find the clock artwork all that inspiring) — but also a design facilitates a positive and productive user experience.

This can be measured in ‘conversion rates,’ that is the rate at which the user successfully uses the website (or clock) to accomplish some item of work or information gathering.

This means we need to avoid design elements get in the way of a web page’s core functionality, otherwise we’re left with the antithesis of conversion – the user abandons the product – often quantified as the ‘bounce rate.‘

To help avoid this common pitfall, I offer this “fast five” lists of things to remember when designing a webpage:

1. You are not your user;
2. solve their problems, don’t burden them yours;
3. don’t assume all any of your users are idiots;
4. engage in user testing – where non-geeks attempt simple, common tasks; and
5. when a problem and/or encumbrance by a user is reported – do what it takes to provide the user a clear path to operational/work-flow success.

On that last point, think Amazon.com, the premier example of conversion goals in action. When they hear of something that gets in the user’s way – even if it sounds stupid – they fix their site to accommodate the customer.

I’d recommend doing the same, perhaps starting with some good-old-fashioned hallway testing and moving out from there.

And while the product parodied above is applied a slightly different meaning of “fail” the point is hardware failures, power outages, software bugs, stolen computers, cross site scripted SQL injections, and/or zombie induced denial of service attacks can all turn your church and/or charity website into a tub of techno-mush quicker than you can recurse a binary tree.

The only real defense against such failures is to plan for them – anticipating them in three ways:

• backing up your data
• moving your backed-up data off site
• having and practicing how to restore backed-up data

Here’s a very simple snippet from an oldie but goldie article entitled “How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron:“

#!/bin/sh
# backup data
mysqldump -uroot -ppwd --opt db1 > /sqldata/db1.sql
mysqldump -uroot -ppwd --opt db2 > /sqldata/db2.sql
# zip up data
cd /sqldata/ 
tar -zcvf sqldata.tgz *.sql
# email data off-site
cd /scripts/
perl emailsql.cgi

The article also displays a script on how to email the data off site, not a bad deal if your data is small – such backups being just as simple to restore with this dynamic command line duo of directives:

tar -zxvf sqldata.tgz
mysql -uroot -ppwd db1 < db1.sql

Things get trickier when you have tons of data, in which it may play into one’s restoration plan better to backup and restore a database by individual tables. Here is a set of articles that describes how to do this that includes some script examples you can modify to suite your needs:

• MySQL: How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files?
• MySQL: How do I import individual table dump files in to MySQL using shell script?

Either way, then it is just a manner of putting the shell script on a timer, or in the vernacular of crontab:

1 3 * * * /usr/home/mysite.com/prvt/tbak.sh > /usr/home/logs/tbak.log

If either of these shell script, bash-based approach seems to complex then perhaps one of the control panel, web-based method offered by UpStartBlogger’s post “8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others)” will do the trick.

Here are some other related articles that might help, the last two include automagic date stamping of the backup files:

• MDLog:/sysadmin – Backup your MySQL databases automatically with AutoMySQLBackup
• Automatic MySql Backup Script – Dagon Design
• Justin-Cook – Automatic cPanel backup (domain & MySQL) with cron & PHP
• Simple MySQL Backup – Holy Smoly
• DreamHost Forum – Crontab/backup

The bottom line is this: just Peter implores us to make a ready defense in 1 Peter 3:15, so I’m asking you always be ready to make a defense to anything that endangers the data that is on your system so you’re not found tearfully dissheveled cowering in a corner meek and fearful, mumbling something about how you should have planned for such failures.

You’ll be glad you did – probably at the most inopportune time possible.

Unlike the 5.5″ The Kneeling Santa Claus Musical Christmas Water Globe parodies above, there are some real threats to your website that are an unfortunate aspect of the “World Wide” nature of the Web.

Specifically, I’m talking about the army of professional hackers employed in far flung regions such as China, Nigeria and of course what is now the former U.S.S.R.

For that, I recommend a modification to your  .htaccess file such as:

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
deny from 218.25.161
allow from all
</LIMIT>

If you look close, I’m only using 3 levels of the IP address to 218.25.161.0 through 218.25.161.255.

And where does one get a block of  IPs to block? Glad you asked …

Pre-fabricated blacklists to block IP addresses of entire countries:

• WizCraft – Server .htaccess Blocklists for exploited servers (e.g. Russia and China)
• Block a country.com – block by ip address, block access by country

A bit more on .htaccess and mod_access:

• Apache Project: Module mod_access (v. 1.3) – allow
• ClockWatchers.com – .htaccess Tutorial how to block an IP address

Just remember to keep good backups of whatever files you’re working on – and try not to lock yourself out while experimenting with changes!

So how do we avoid the type of ‘accidental-message-myopia‘ that produces a design that includes a not-so Middle-East,  blond haired (and possibly blue-eyed)  baby Jesus?  Two words “Hallway Testing.”

The Wikipedia describes hallway testing as:

Hallway testing (or hallway usability testing) is a specific methodology of software usability testing. Rather than using an in-house, trained group of testers, just five to six random people, indicative of a cross-section of end users, are brought in to test the software (be it an application, web site, etc.); the name of the technique refers to the fact that the testers should be random people who pass by in the hallway. The theory, as adopted from Jakob Nielsen’s research, is that 95% of usability problems can be discovered using this technique.

In short, hallway testing is the simple act of accosting … I mean drafting … I mean enlisting 5 or 6 random individuals to inspect your designs to insure among other things, you’re not overlooking some detail great or small that accidentally sends the wrong message.

I know it’s an extra step in the web design process, but when one considers alternatives as the above parody poster depiction, it’s probably worth it.

Okay, so in my best Andy Rooney imitation:

Why is it we can put a man on the moon, yet somehow we still don’t have a “magical gadget” that with the press of a button, will set ALL of our clocks to daylight saving time.

I’m talking about the remote that will not only set my BetaMax … I mean VCR … I mean TIVO… and the watch, and my microwave oven and even the clock in my car parked outside!

Did I just hear an amen?! Yeah, I thought so … and well we should. After all, here’s a list of the clocks I had to reset manually – each employing its own rand of a ‘uniquely creative’ set of time-setting interface operations:

• the stove
• the microwave oven
• the upstairs weather warning clock/radio
• the downstairs weather warning clock/radio
• the clock on my portable flashlight/weather warning clock radio
• my digital camera
• my digital movie camera
• my wife’s digital camera
• my daughter’s digital camera
• my pickem-up truck
• my wife’s car
• a small number of my daughter’s toys

I think that’s it … well not including the batteries on all 6 or 7 smoke alarms.

So what usability can we take away from all this minute-setting of madness? How about doing away with what Frank da Cruz referred to in my networking class back in 1986 as “a wide variety of standards.”

Think about it, the method for setting the time on each of the above devices varied, some greatly from the others, some not-so-much. Either way, if you’re not going to give me a “magical gadget” then at least give me a consistent interface to all the above!

And I think the same applies to our software. From page to page of our programs, are we asking our users to do similar things employing “a wide variety of standards?” If so, imagine the learning curves and barriers to conversion we place in front of them.

My point? Go through your entire site and figure out what’s the same and almost-the-same. Then pick a convenient way to do it – and stick with it – even if some better jQuery gizmo comes out next week.

Your users will thank you.

Specifically, coders are now worried that Yahoo!’s surrender of their search engine to Microsoft also means abdication of BOSS – Yahoo!’s open ‘Build your Own Search Service’ web service.

If it turns out that the end of Yahoo as a search engine means the end of BOSS, then those developers who didn’t adhere to Spolky’s advice in chapter 35 of “Joel on Software” may be in for a rude awakening. In other words, those who built core business functionality directly into Yahoo!’s third party API may now find themselves scrambling to implement an alternative.

Even those developers who employed BOSS to provide non-core business functionality in their solutions may find themselves in for some sleepless nights if they directly integrated the API in to their code.

So what’s the lesson learned here?

Well in a world of Web 2.0, it’s unreasonable and potentially uncompetitive to completely exclude the wealth of external data sources now available via streams such as SOAP, RSS and REST.

That said, here is a semi-definitive list of actions we we can developers can take to mitigate the risk such integrations introduce.

1. “If it’s a core business function – do it yourself, no matter what.” This come straight out of Spolsky who enumerates a host of issues that can beset businesses who ignore this tenet; to which I’ll add that telling clients it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get to a needed feature quickly makes that paying client think perhaps they need to cut out the middle man.
2. Carefully choose which functionality of a 3rd party API to integrate. If it can’t be readily obtained from competing third parties then you may find yourself having to re-invent that wheel in one night – or worse – being held hostage by said vendor when they change their terms of service.
3. Always build a wrapper methods to 3rd party APIs. This way if and when the time comes to switch to an alternative API offering similar functionality, all you need change is the wrapper to the service, and not the hundreds of calls within your application to the service.

I’m sure there are other actions we can take, which is your queue to provide feedback for any other techniques and/or approaches to not getting BOSS’d around by your 3rd party API! Don’t be shy.

I’m also wondering just how many of us got caught a bit code-short when Zondervan announced its purchase of BibleGateway.com? Any stories out there?

Meanwhile, here are some additional links related to the topic above for your reading pleasure:

• Business Week: Yahoo Gives In to Microsoft, Gives Up on Search
• Wall Street Journal: MicroHoo and the Problem of Integration
• Venture Beat: Questions not answered on Microsoft / Yahoo deal
• PC World: Future Uncertain for Yahoo Developer Programs
• Yahoo! Search BOSS home page
• Amazon.com: Joel on Software