Heal Your Church WebSite

Author: meandean

  • Thou Shalt Not Steal …

    Credit for the title of this article goes to Moses, who penned these Words of God in Deuteronomy 5:19.

    What I just did in the above paragraph was give attribution to the author, something that appearently isn’t being done on college papers. Which may explain why my site was recently visited by Plagiarism.org’s SlySearch Crawler.

    According to the FAQ page on their website, they are not looking when I’m the one doing the cheating, rather, and I quote:

    The information we are collecting from the Internet is used solely for the purposes of helping educational institutions compare their students’ writings against the Internet.

    Boy, sure hope I did that right. Their site also shows how to exclude their ‘bot from crawling your site. Which I will do if I ever find out such a tool was use to provide false testimony. NOTE, I’m not saying it SlySearch/Plagiarism.org does, I’m saying if it ever does.

    Wow this is messy stuff.

  • ‘Rael’ Bloggers Requested

    Of course the good peole at the O’Reilly Network are putting together a book on “Essential Blogging.” You can even be part of the public review process.

    But best of all, you can share you can submit to Rael Dornfest, one of their researchers, one of your tales of blogging woes … just read the guidelines at his homespun blog at raelity bytes.

    And yes, you bet I’m going to give the Blosxom blogger app a spin.

  • Optimal Image Sizes

    One of the big problems I see with so many church websites are bloated graphics. Let me make this point very clear. Reducing the height and width attributes of the <IMG> tag does not, I repeat DOES NOT, physically reduce the physical size of the file. Nor does it reduce the size of the image via “color reduction.” We’re talking the minutes versus seconds difference your users suffer to download a 50kb image of your pastor versus one that’s 1/10th the size but still portrays the same subject.

    In other words, if you’re not optimizing images after you scan or digitally snap them, then they’re probably BANDWIDTH pigs. And we all know what the Bible says about what happens when you feed swine to “perls“.

    Problem is, some of you are either on a nothing budget, or don’t know how to reduce an image size for web publishing. No worries, here are two nice online tools you can use to transform your images down to a more user friendly size:

    No go out there and cut-down some of those sinful bandwidth bandwidths down to size!

    If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. Matthew 5:29

  • GNU utilities for Win32

    Okay, I’ll admit it. This links is really for me, but some of you who are running Windows on your personal computers, and hosting your websites on Linux or some *nix variant, might find the Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities useful.

  • How to cron a MySQLDump

    Once again Rachael C. not only yanks the plank outta my eye, but smacks me upside the head for not scripting my backups on a regular basis. And she’s right to do so.

    Here is a link she recommended in a comment in my “make a ready defense” article The recommended tutorial is appropriately entitled How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron.

    Of course, this steals my thunder as I was, and still am, going to give you some PERL that will enumerate all your databases, then dump them, then compress them into a tidy little file good for downloading and such.

    But until I do, do what this article says, and not what I’m not doing.

  • Search me, O God

    and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts … Psalm 139:23

    Okay, a bit over the top, but it sorta describes how we feel sometimes when we come to a site with alot of information, and have to sift through article after article to find what we want. Having a search tool goes a long way to reduce some of that anxiety.

    So somewhere between breakfast with the family, cutting down a neighbor’s tree, cutting the lawn, getting a haircut and mowing the lawn, I managed a few minutes to install a nice little tool from the people at PerlFectSolutions … in fact a very nice tool …
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  • Does Dean have a New Slogan?

    I was minding my own business when someone I know pointed me to Joshua Claybourn’s Home Page, which had a link to my site and a wonderful quote that describes THIS site as a place “where a computer geek collides with religious zealotry.” The ony thing I could possibly resent from that description is that I didn’t think of it first!

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  • Making a ready defense …

    It’s been a long week, and the last thing we want is all our good efforts to get washed out with the next electrical storm … or wacked with a hack atack.

    Time to backup your work. Here are 2 things I do to

    a) copy my database and

    b) get all my goodies into one, downloadable file …

    Now some of you are asking, hey, why bother, my webhost provides this stuff via my control panel ? Besides, he backups everything every night. Yeah, well guess what, even when that’s true, it’s not always a reliable backup. Trust me on this one … I’ve been there more times than I care to mention.

    I’m going to assume you can and already know how to either telnet or ssh into your host. I’m also going to assume that most of you are Apache bound like I am. If you don’t or can’t, then stop reading right here until you can.

    Okay, are they gone? Now log in to your command prompt. In the root of your site, enter:

    mysqldump -uMYUSERNAME -pMYPASSWORD --opt myDatabaseNAME > dumpfile.sql

    Not sure you’re in the root directory? No problem! I’ve got two commands that will help you get it done. The first gets you there, the second one tells you where you are:

    cd $HOME

    Okay, that creates a file containing ALL of my data for that database. I’ll write an article in a few days how to script together a solution to walk through all your databases.

    Now you’re ready to backup and compress your entire site into one, huge, easy-to-download and restore file using the “tar” command. And remember, you’re still in the root directory of your site:

    tar -zcvf mybackup.tar.gz *

    At this point, FTP your two files to another system (e.g. your PC) … and you’re done for the night … I know I am.