Category: Proverbs 13:13

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’ve always loved Monty Python. I recall back in the early 70’s my brothers and I sitting in the basement snickering as the local PBS station would air the hilarious ‘Flying Circus.’ What was equally amusing was the time my father came down stairs to see what all the laughter was about, watched a show with us for about five minutes, then left shaking his head and wondering what all the cackling was about.

Then came the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Oh my stinking goodness. There are of course several scenes I can quote from memory. One being that hilarious scene at the troll bridge where King Arthur turns the tables on the evil bridge keeper when the King of the Brits responds to the question “What … is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?” with “African or European?” The demise of the old troll is made all the more hilarious as just prior to this, Galahad is tossed into the abyss under the expanse when he’s unable to correctly answer the keeper’s question “What is your favorite color?”

We all think this is funny because it’s so absurdly silly. I mean, this could never happen in real life, or could it? Imagine a situation where instead of having cheerful greeters meet you on Sunday morning, the doors of the church are guarded by deacons who will not let you pass until you answer four obvious questions. Pretty absurd and silly isn’t it?

Yet that is exactly what we have happening at the website for Joyce Meyer Ministries. Here the user is confronted splash page that contains 31kb of images, 24kb of HTML and 21kb of JavaScript that requires you enter your settings/preferences before moving on to the rest of the site.

Aside from abusing the bandwidth of dial-up users, this page will not index well with search engines because the indescript text is rendered as graphic … and a background graphic at that. Yes, it has meta-tags, but just as faith without works is dead, so too are meta-tags without related text in the body of the page.

So how would I heal this para-church website? First, I’d consider whether or not using Flash buys me anything. For example, if I’ve got a clip of an interview, an interactive tutorial, or something else that can’t be simply rendered as easy to read and search text, then I would use Flash’s Auto Detection features to determine whether or not the user’s browser is equipped with the Macromedia plug-in.

And while there are tools to determine the country of origin of the user, it may not necessary in this case. Instead, because the Spanish and English versions are different, why not buy a couple of international domains, such as joycemeyer.es and perhaps joycemayer.mx? This way, those visiting .org go to the English page, those using .es and .mx go to the page en Español. Both pages offer a way of getting to the other.

With these technical issues aside, I would then kill-off the splash page. Offering user settings is not a bad thing, but its not compelling homepage content. Instead, just go to the page default ministries page that includes lots of text about offers, upcoming events and such so first time visitors know what the site offers, and search engines can better index the content.

That and I’d fix some of the broken image problems by using mod_rewrite to automagically redirect references from litw.org to joycemeyer.org. Well, that and the entire ‘kitschy‘ TBN look-n-feel issue, but then again, I’m an Os Guinness type-o-guy.

For those of you reading this site via an aggregator, you might want to visit the visual example I’m providing my graphic-enabled browser equipped friends. It is a picture of a house in my neighborhood that goes a bit hog-wild when it comes to holiday decorations. And we’re not just talking Christmas, as you can see from an article I penned this past Easter entitled “Just Because You Can, Part 3.”

The point is, even though we’ve made great strides in creating a more usable and accessible Church online, there are still thousands of church and charity websites that offer the online equivalent of these over zealous neighbors. That is, they get so caught up in how things look that the message tends to get lost.

For example, check out the 60kb picture in all it’s glory, I’ll wait … Did you see the manger? It’s there, it’s just impossible to see among the four large inflatable snowmen, Santa Claus and Snoopy on his Dog house, candy canes, snowflakes hanging from trees and enough lights to illuminate all of Elizabeth City, New Jersey.

So it is with church websites that feel the need to include spinning animated crosses, splash pages, flash-based splash pages, flash-based navigation, animated marquees, page swipes, dhtml snowflakes drifting down the screen, pop-ups, pop-unders, cursed cursor trailers, disabled right-click, everything centered in eight bright colors using ten different fonts, all in bold.

Don’t do this. Yes they effects are all cool … for about the first five seconds, after that, they tend to drive your users away.

“Never have Christians tried to be so relevant. But never have Christians ended up so irrelevant. How can this be?” – Os Guinness, “Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance”

So with that in mind, let us resolve this next year to heal our church and charity websites of these encumberances as we keep our eyes on the prize …

… and with that, I want to wish all of you a very happy new year. 2003 has been great, in no small part because of the many of you who have participated in this little project. Thank you, and God Bless!

As a trained, operatic soloist, one of the things I can’t stand are auditions or performances where people get up and tell a little story before they sing. Or what I call, apologizing in advance. You see, if the content of the song is any good, then there is no need to explain it. In other words, shut-up and sing. Let your peformance and the music do the talking.

Similarly, when a someone visits your church web site, they are doing to satisfy some need or requirement they have — not to hear your excuses. For those of you who haven’t read THE BOOK, there is a wonderful section caption that describes this entitled “Don’t tell me your problems. Solve Mine!”

And that is exactly the case we have with the Living Word of Faith, origins unknown (though I suspect its Lubbock, TX).

At least leave up the old site until you can get the new site up. While there are some sites better left offline until an update — I think from what I can discern from the Google cache that this is indeed a case where something would have been better than nothing.

Which web page title is more descriptive?

1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
2. First Presbyterian Church Natchitoches, La.

While I suppose #1 may be attractive to some of our Catholic bretheren, I suspect most Presbyterian churches in Natchitoches would prefer #2. As I said in my June 21, 2002 article entitled “Lorem Ipsum Dolor” is a jumble from Cicero’s ‘de Finibus‘ long employed to display fonts and more recently, to test web pages … Which in this case, someone did without noticing what was between the <TITLE> tags.

This is not good. Many search engines use the title tag as their primary key for storage and retreival. This is why so many “how to” sites say to be very descriptive with your page titles. I mean how many people do you know would look for a Presbyterian church on Natchitoches by entering “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet?” Which is ironic, because in Natchitoches there is a church web site that needs to re-evaluate their home page title. Equally ironic is that the webmaster ahs decided to offer links to the major search engines where one would normally expect a navigational menu for links within the site.

I suppose I could go on, but the good people at 1st Pres. in Natchitoches didn’t ask for a review. That, and it appears that the example case may have been a situation where the web servant modified an example page that came with FrontPage 4.0, fake Latin and all. To which my instruction is, unless you have an iterpreter handy, then you don’t want your page speaking in tongues. This means remembering to check <TITLE> tags!

After last weekend’s disaster, I decided to “practice” a recovery of a huge mysql database of my friends phpBB.

Good thing too. I found a potential problem that could have made an emergency repair a real pain. The fix is easy, when you have the luxury of time to look.

Here’s what I did …

I programmed my friend’s production site to automagically made backup in the wee hours via crontab, which in turn invoked mysqldump with the ‘–opt’ option. The output file was compressed using our buddy tar using the -zcvf options.

About 10 hours later, when the rest of us were awake, using SSH, I logged into another system on a different server that had a mirror of my friends phpBB. I FTP’d the backup. Decompressed using tar -zxvf .

At this point, I was ready to restore the data file. Because I mysqldump’d with the –opt option, it meant that the dump file contained the backup data in SQL languge format. This included deleting tables, then re-creating them, then populating them. The command to restore is simple enough:

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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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.