Category: Reading Room

Stating the obvious, usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports today that:

Redesigning an intranet for usability often more than doubled the use of these award-winning designs from ten public-sector organizations.

Shortly after I filed this webly wisdom under “duh,” I read through the article and found buried deep in the middle what you can do on your own to make your church and/or charity’s website or intranet more usable.

Here is the phrase that pays:

Quite appropriately, user testing was the most common usability method, and was used in 70% of the winning projects.

Allow me to enumerate this into plain English:

1. Those who test their intranets often wind-up with more usable intranets.
2. Those with more usable intranets enjoy greater use and more successful use by their user base.
3. What goes for government intranets goes for your church website.

Yeah, okay, so that last point was mine, still, how do you go about testing your church’s website without incurring Nielsen’s $10,000 consulting fee?

My first suggesting is purchasing, and then reading, Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” In the book, he not only discusses important issues such as navigation and layout, but he also dedicates two chapters on how to perform what he calls “Usability testing on 10 cents a day.”

Once you’ve read this, then I suggest you not create your own usability test from scratch, but instead customize one from the following online resources:

• U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services – Usability: Methods for Designing Usable Web Sites
• The Usability Tookit from the Usability Special Interest Group
• University of Washingotn – Guide to Planning and Conducting Usability Tests

For as it is written in Hacks 8:36, “See, here are specifications! What prevents you testing your site?“

Before ‘Home Improvement’ became a sit-com, and more recently a reality TV theme (sigh), Norm Abram was reminding us of the carpenter’s aphorism to “Measure Twice, Cut Once.” This is because once you cut a piece of wood, that’s it. The only way to compensate for a mistake is either through a messy glue and nails process and/or to suffer the expense of purchasing more lumber.

The same is true with email, listservs and the publishing of web content. Once you’ve hit the post or send button, it is about as difficult to retract as putting an envelope inside of a U.S. Mail box. A reality that can lead to very costly mistakes if not caught before you transmit and/or publish – such as the case of the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Montana whom after winning the primary election this past Tuesday, transmitted his concession press release to various news services which read:

“It did not go as we had hoped tonight, but tomorrow is a new day, and we endorse our party’s choice for governor at this time,… You ran a hard race, and we encourage our supporters to back your candidacy in a united effort to defeat Brian Schweitzer. Congratulations and good luck!” – Billings Gazette

Well at least Brown lands on his feet for being gracious, instead of a career killer … like let’s say for giggles: “you scum sucking idiot, you stole the election from me and I’m going to make you pay if it is the last thing I do …” Still, the email mistake could have been avoided had Brown’s staff put some controls on their email machine.

Now I realize that I’m always complaining about user interfaces that frustrate users with an array of nested forms, menus and/or confirmation pop-ups, but here is one situation where I think making a process a bit annoying would have avoided what could have been a painful and costly mistake.

How? Well, I’m sure each of us can think of a something (and if you do, please don’t be shy, leave a comment) for example, why not set up post-election distributions on two different listservs, one if they won, the other if they lost? Or at least configure the listserv or email system so administration confirmation is required before a message is transmitted.

Not all controls require massive amounts of computing power. Why not create a step-by-step script and/or check-list on paper for what to do in which scenario; then rehearse it, including sending email to test accounts? Why not have test destination accounts that receive an important email for proof-reading before the trigger is pulled for real?

The point is to look at your church’s ‘standard operating procedures’ regarding computerized publishing and/or transmissions and see if they have any form of controls, automated or manual, to insure that ONLY the right information gets to the right people at the right time each and every time. If not, then put some in place or suffer the consequences of something with the potential to embarass and/or even divide your church’s congregation.

Even though you may have installed Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist to thwart comment spam, wouldn’t it be nice to deny spambots from consuming your system’s bandwidth and CPU by redirecting them to an ‘error page’ especially designed for our vermonous visitors?

Apache Wunderwerkzeug : mod_rewrite

A quick tip-toe through our archives and you’ll see that in the past we’ve given some detailed attention to the use of mod_rewrite for a variety of tasks, including:

• as a tool to redirect old, well indexed pages and/or domains to new pages;
• to make your URLs search engine friendly;
• to switch from html or shtml to php without causing link rot;
• to tell evil spambots to go to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks!

Comment spam … sucks

Like most legit webmasters, I’ve also given the topic of spam quite a bit of coverage on this blog, such as:

• dealing with comment spam;
• the dreaded Nigerian 419 Scam Spam;
• my Patented Anti Spam Email Obfuscation Tool;
• using mod_rewrite to tell spambots to go to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks!

Unix-Girl to the rescue

So just in time for a weekend project , I found a brilliant bit of mod_rewrite by Kasia Trapszo, a.k.a. Unix-Girl, that concatenates these two topics into an effective way to thwart comment spam.

On her page, Kasia details a very simple snippet that demands anyone filling out a comment form first be referred by an article on the same site. In other words, bots just can’t come in out of the blue and fill out a form without at least first pretending to have read the article.

While I believe she, is running Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist, this form of .htaccess hackery is a good idea as it gives her publishing system and bandwidth a break by stopping this type of scum at the door.

With a little experimentation, this little code gem could also be used to protect any form on your site. Then again, this is mod_rewrite, so be careful not to shoot your foot off. Oh, and let me know if you come up with something unique based on Kasia’s kool example.

So you think you want to go the Microsoft Web Server route after reading a NetCraft post entitled “ASP.NET Overtakes JSP and Java Servlets” ??? Okay, I can understand that. I mean even with CPanel and WHM, managing an Apache web server can be a bit daunting. And while MySQL is free, there are some nifty tricks SQLServer has to offer, if you’re willing to pay for it.

While personally, I feel far more secure behind a Linux-based webserver, I’m required by my day job (you know, the one that pays the bills) to do the .NET/Windows Server dance.

One of the issues you might face in making the transition from one operating system and/or webserver to another is accessing your data. This is why APIs such as the PHP-based ADOdb and Perl DBI are popular on Linux/Apache platforms.

Similarly, this is why most competent Microsoft programmers access databases with interfaces such as the ADO, and more recently, OLEdb, unless of course you’ve been asked to use the MSDE 2000 while your crack technical staff obtains a license to and installs THE Microsoft SQL Server.

Wide Variety of Standards
Yeah, I know, the above paragraph reminds me of the only joke ever told by professor Frank da Cruz in my netorking class at Columbia University, a joke who’s punchline was “a wide variety of standards.” Took me about 3 seconds to get it, but I was sure to laugh out loud when I did (yes, I know, I’m a shameless suck-up that way, but I digress.)

In case you missed the reality that made the punch line funny, there are just too many daggoned different ‘connectivity standards’ out there for databases. Probably due to the fact that there are just too many daggoned RDBMS tools out there, many of which are rotting legacy systems that you and I are now compelled to maintain and integrate. I mean, forget deciding whether or not to use VB.Net over C#, how do I seamlessly patch together an enterprise where the the CEO’s contact database is in MS-Access, an HRD system in Oracle, and the sales and tracking system is running on an MS SQL and still have code that is reusable?

One solution I read about this weekend comes in the form of a nifty GenericADO connection class in VB.Net, based upon a similar generic data access component in C# by the same author.

Need connection strings?
This generic approach works fine, once you figure out the connection string … which itself can be a black art when dealing with anything other than a Microsoft database technology. Well, that is once you download, install and then reference the ODBC .NET Data Provider (why this isn’t included in distributions of Visual Studio .NET is beyond me).

Still, ODBC wasn’t the real show-stopper when I first took-on .Net two years ago … rather it was Sybase. The biggest problem was figuring out the whole ASE thingie, an effort hampered by the fact that Sybase released a buggy version of their Studio installer.

Once over this hump, and once you’ve spent another half day discovering you need to first create an OLE DB connection object via the Sybase ASE OLE DB Administrator, then all you need to do is hack away until you find a connection string that works.

At least that’s what I had to do because at that time, there wasn’t an instructive website chock full of examples for every known .NET Data Provider Connection String available to man and geek.

Lobotomy Time
If you haven’t figured it out, this post serves some selfish reasons, such as links to websites and tips on how to dive through the flaming hoops of database connectivity in a Microsoft-based enterprise without ‘burninating’ myself into a crisp. Hopefully, some of you guys and gals will find these links useful.

And for you religious purists who not only know what a “Factory Pattern” is, but are so entirely snooty as to pooh-pooh such utility classes, here is a link to some rather hairy template connection classes that are sure to amaze and confuse your co-workers.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Not that we don’t have enough on our plate with planning, developing, implementing and maintaining our church websites, but we also need to take care that our content doesn’t make us sound like a bunch of know-nothing hicks. Think about it, if an individual is using the Internet to check out your church before they visit, then there’s a good bet they’re probably looking for something a bit more substantive than rambling pages of all bold, all red, all centered, flashing text screaming at you that the end is near.

Which is why I’d like to bring to your attention a useful little article entitled the ‘Seven deadly sins of web writing‘ by Gerry McGovern; who writes:

What’s the single most important thing that could improve the Web? It’s not broadband. It’s better writing. The general quality of writing on the Web is poor. The way you write has a major impact on what people think of you. Avoid these common mistakes and you will achieve more with your website.

Can I hear an amen?

As I’ve done with other such lists, here are some of the bullet points from the article, followed with my own explanation of how to avoid this on your church or charity website:

1. I think I’m God. All too often I see church websites where the content is either all about the pastor or worse, is polluted with useless ‘geekery‘ that is between the lines, showing-off. The solution to this is to make sure you stay servant hearted. That is, all content is to convey the purpose and personality of your organization in a way that builds-up, provides solutions and/or solves problems for visitors.
2. I go on and on and on … ‘Say it don’t spray it.‘ Keep your home pages brief. Put your best content above the fold. If your page requires more than one or two taps on the Page-Down key, then you need to divide and conquer your content. If your tome covers several topics, then you need to create sub-categories with each topic getting it’s own page. If you have a long article or sermon, then it should also get it’s own page. If you want to include some content from a recent sermon on another page, offer an abstract with a [read more] link to the whole shebang.
3. I can’t spell and I’ve awful grammar. We’ve all sin links to web pages that display embrarassing ‘signs and blunders‘ found in various church newsletters and bulletins. I’ve found the best trick here is to find someone in the chruch who does have good spelling and grammar, then set up a system with them by which they can proof read pending posts and/or report ugly errors.
4. I’m locked in a print view of the world. Remember, people don’t read web pages, they scan them. Likewise, not everyone uses the same browser and/or screen resolution. Neither do they have all the same fonts nor may they perceive color as you do. The best solution I’ve found is making sure the page layout is liquid, and the color/font scheme basic.
5. I’m not very good at writing headings. If you want people to visit your site via a search engine, then make sure that what you have between the <title> tags, along with the first twenty words of your text is compelling, gripping, riveting. If you can’t make that happen, find someone who can.
6. Actually, I don’t think content is very important. Father Flanders is continually preaching that ‘Content is King.’ Jakob Nielsen offers boatloads of data crying out the case for content. And from what I gather from the over 20,000 unique page reads over at the sermon’s sub-site at RBC, and the outcries from visitors when the sermons aren’t updated, content is everything.
7. Don’t have seven points if there are only six … Hah, hah, very funny.

How about you? Do you find the writing at most church websites compelling or crappy? Leave a comment and let me know.

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.

Would someone mind telling me where the summer has gone? Here in the U.S., it’s Labor Day already. Well, at least the Labor Day weekend. Which I usually celebrate with some back-breaking weekend long project that makes me glad to return my office the following Tuesday.

This weekend, I get to cut the lawn, trim the hedges (big nasty 40 year old monsters), wack weeds, clean out the shed, clear the storm gutters, take some stuff to the dump and after all that, I have the joy of getting around to that 24’x12″x12″ ‘Freedom’ drain I ‘ditched’ last weekend in favor of chasing my 3.5 year old around the park.

For those of you who’d rather not feel the burn of sore shoulders and the satisfaction of complaining to your spouse about your aching back, why not Wi-Fi? For those of you not familiar with acronym for Wireless Fidelity, Wi-Fi is according to The WikiPedia “a set of Wireless LAN standards developed by working group 11 of IEEE 802.”

Yeah, okay, that was total geek-speak. Wi-Fi is a way you can provide network access to a home, your church, your charitable organization, or your nosey neighbor without having to snake wire through the walls and ceilings of your domicile. The problem is walking into your local computer store and trying to figure out where the network begins and the hype ends. For that, may I suggest a nice little article by Paul Boutin of the Slate aptly entitled “Wi-Fi for Dummies? In this article Mr. Boutin takes some of the fear factor out installing a simple wireless network.

Not convinced? If you are unable to inspire your congregation that this is a good way to get their offices, their classrooms and their sanctuary online, then perhaps this article from my April archives entitled Wireless Missions will help.

Going for it? Then please, do me 3 big favors:

1. Make sure your firewall (preferably dual-homed) is correctly placed to protect your internal systems from outside attack — or from those inside abusing things on the outside.
2. For those of you with web servers on site, see what you can do about making sure they’re not on the same ‘leg’ as your office or school systems.
3. Please enable message encryption or suffer “The Attack of the Eavesdropping Neighbors“

Okay, you have your assignment, get busy.

As the parade of pretty little posts continues today, we take a turn down Linux lane with a link to the the One Page Linux Manual. This 94KB Adobe Acrobat beauty (or if you prefer, a 542KB Postscript beast) contains all the essential command line instructions you love to forget reduced onto two sides of a single page (proving that some PDF documents are fit for human consumption).

Which you can then fold in quarters to fit inside your handy-dandy Linux Pocket Protector.

And just to show you what an ecumenical guy I am, here’s a link to a tutorial on “How to set double-sided printing by default [for] Windows computers.“