Category: Reading Room

Friday fun, or mandatory reading? You be the judge. For me, it is a little of both. I’m reading two recently updated tables of common internet usage and activities by the good people at the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIP). Both have information that could be useful in convincing others at your church that your web site should be more than just a pretty brochure, or worse, attempt to emulate TV or movies.

First is the results for “Daily Internet Activities,” which is a a chart detailing the percentage of Internet Users who do a specific online activity on any given day. Notice that 59% of the population gets online, everyday. Primarily to exchange email. Followed by obtaining news, an activity followed by using a search engine.

Second is a chart entitled “Internet Activities” which deals with percentage of actual Internet Users (those who go online) who have ever done a particular online activity. Again the top three activities don’t change, but the fourth and fifth activities that follow are very interesting to those of us maintaining church and/or charity web sites. Researching a product or service before buying it and searching for a map or driving directions.

So what does this tell us? Here is how I interpret the results:

• Make sure your web host allows you to establish and maintain numerous listserves (automated mailing lists). Make sure the listserves are well supported with a user friendly/idiot-proof user interface. Teach those individuals who would use them, pastors and lay staff, how to keep their listserves maintained.
• The content on your web site must be presented in a fashion that is search-engine friendly. This includes simple things such as your <title> tags including not only the name, but the city and state/province of your church (e.g. Redland Baptsit Church Rockville MD or Redland Baptist Church Montgomery County Maryland). Another simple thing would be running a string of text links of major sections along the bottom of your site. A bit more complex, it is equally important that you have user friendly URLs. All these things add up to good search engine placement.
• Because it there is a good chance someone visiting your church may first visit your church web site, make sure you have easy-to-find, easy-to-read, easy-to-print information of how to get to your church. It may also useful to include the times of the services on such a page as I would think someone would print the info out the night before.
• Provide maps, or at least links to maps and driving directions.
• Conspicious contact information.
• Sermons, devotionals and other documents that convey what it is you believe.
• And something I just thought of, perhaps provide a page on where to go when you get there, such as Sunday school maps and/or what to expect in the sanctuary (e.g. dress, children, etc).

Of course, it goes without saying that all of the above need to be presented in a fashion that conveys the purpose and personality of your church.

At least that’s the way I read the data. So what did you get out of these tables? Leave a comment, and don’t be afraid to disagree.

Some years back, that clever cartoonist of the Far Side defined what I like to call the “Larson’s Dog Syndrome.” Here is a transcription of the dialog in the bubbles over the characters heads:

Which is why this past Sunday’s artistic offering from UserFriendly based upon the original so hilarious … if the whole SCO/*nix saga weren’t so daggumed pathetic.

Michael Boyink once again provides me with some good topical information. This time, it is a rather post entitled “Church Web Sites – What We Don’t Know” in which he enumerates discussion on three basic questions regarding your church or charity web site:

1. How Christians (and people interested in Christianity) Use the Web?
2. What a Church Web Site Should Be?
3. How To Measure the Success of a Church site?

I like these questions. They specifically remind me of an important question posed to me in my interview with Niphal Online:

Would you say that there is an understanding of the importance of the Internet in people’s lives? That this translates into a massive mission field? Do church leaders recognise this?

No, yes and no. One only need read the Pew Internet Project’s December 29, 2002 report in which asserts that most people expect to find the information they seek via online sources before any other. This means for those who are seeking to fill that “God shaped vacuum in every heart” identified by Blaise Pascal 150 years ago are turning to the net.

Unfortunately, the Church doesn’t understand that and not only misses on leading seekers to Christ, but losing believers to heresy, agnosticism and/or apostasy. Like every area of our lives, we are commanded not just to make converts, but disciples. Which means you can have all the slick Flash animation you want on the site, but if you’re all style and no substance than you may attract a seeker who’s prone to shiny things, but you’re not going to keep them.

This is reflective not only in the number of church web sites that haven’t been updated since the turn of the century, but also the lack of resource and time most churches fail to invest their web presence.

In other words, Mr. Boyink is dead on when he asserts that just like everything and everywhere else on the web “People are going to the web, and your church site, with a specific task to do, or question to answer — let’s forget about having to entertain easily-bored surfers.”

He later buttresses this point with an excellent example of why we waste our time and the time of those visiting our church web site by trying to turn it into an uber-portals chock-full of syndicated news feeds, and one of my pet peeves, the local weather when he writes:

What this unique content doesn’t include is the local news, sports, and weather. Given that to an individual web user the entire Internet is the same distance away, and takes the same effort to get to, there is just no good reason to give up your church’s valuable home page space to this type of content. Based on our knowledge of “direct driving” on the net, people wanting weather will go to weather.com – even if your feed is from weather.com. Weather from a weather site will be perceived as being more up to date, and more trustworthy than that same weather presented in the context of a church site. The average user is confused by the function of the home page button, for goodness sake – what do they know about dynamic syndicated content?

Basically what Boyink gets around to saying is that hits mean nothing, its about creating community and changing lives. I agree. On this site, we have examined several church web sites that have required healing because those creating it did not take time to ask the simple questions “who is my target audience?” and “how do I best serve them?”

Yo, Mike! That is so on target, I could kiss you on the lips for that one — though I’m sure you probably just prefer a well deserved “AMEN!”

This amusing note from dive into mark:

A representative for the company that makes PowerSiphon contacted me to correct my article on how to block spambots. I claimed that PowerSiphon was the spider with the User-Agent EmailSiphon. It is not. I have updated the article to retract my previous statement, and I apologize to the company for the mixup. You can draw your own conclusions about whether a retail web spidering product with a checkbox labeled “Extract email addresses” is a spammer’s tool, but it was not the specific tool I was seeing in my access logs.

Well, my feeling is that I would prefer any User Agent named “EmailSiphon” not visit my site. It’s probably a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but it is my opinion and I’m entitled to it.

I want to apologize for the lack of posting, and certainly being late with this great topic Mark Pilgrim had addressed this past Wednesday. I’ve been busy rebuilding a more usable Redland Baptist web site and it has consumed much of my free time. Don’t worry, I’m taking notes, and I intend to share them with the rest of you.

About a month ago, Vincent Flanders had emailed me. He was getting harvested hard by various spambots. I was reminded of that dialog when I read Mark Pilgrim’s 26-Feb-03 post entitled How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell. Here is what Mark said on his site — which sounded very similar to the original email I had received from Vincent:

I recently woke up to the staggering level of abuse occurring on this web site. This is old news to some, but we all wake up at different times. I’m talking, of course, about automated robots and spiders. They come at all hours, they take as much as they can, and they leave me with the (bandwidth) bill. They do so without respecting the Robot Exclusion Standard, now almost 10 years old. Some come to gather email addresses, which are then sold to spammers; some come to steal images or other content, and republish it without my consent; some come to spy on me and sell information to their clients about perceived violations of copyright, trademark, or some nebulous concept of brand identity.

None of them act in my best interest, or in the interests of my readers.

Can I hear an Amen? One of the biggest problems I’ve had with running a church web site, is pesky programs that rape and pillage the site for email addresses, sermons and images. Now mind you, I have no problem with a stranger who wants to copy one of Mark Adam’s sermons emailing me and requesting a copy for an upcoming Bible study. That’s why the information is out there free of charge. What I don’t like is ‘bots that come by and broadcast the latest pr0n to my pastors, or repackage and sell the sermon material in spite of our admonishion not to do so on in our Terms of Use. They’re crooks, so what’s breaking one more law? This is why I employ some anti-spam countermeasures — and have discussed them on THIS site.

And this is why I’m adding Mr. Pilgrim’s to the mandatory reading list.

Some more Friday Fun from yet another anonymous usenet joke that’s been passed almost as much as the “FCC To Ban Religious Broadcasting / Madalyn Murray O’Hair” urban legend. Today’s topic was selected with the hope that would help Jordon Cooper get through his Windows re-install without entirely losing his sanity.

• DOS Air – All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the
  plane, push it until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits
  the ground again. Then they grab the plane again, push it back into
  the air, hop on, et cetera.
• DOS with QEMM Airlines – The same thing but with more leg room to push.
• Mac Airways – The cashiers, flight attendants and pilots all
  look the same, feel the same and act the same. When asked questions
  about the flight, they reply that you don’t want to know, don’t need
  to know and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.
• Fly Windows 95 – The terminal is very neat and clean, the
  attendants all very attractive, the pilots very capable. The fleet
  of Learjets the carrier operates is immense. Your jet takes off
  without a hitch, pushing above the clouds, and at 20,000 feet it
  explodes without warning.
• Windows NT Air – All the passengers carry their seats out
  onto the tarmac, placing the chairs in the outline of a plane.
  They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet swooshing sounds
  as if they are flying.
• OS/2 Skyways – The terminal is almost empty, with only a
  few prospective passengers milling about. The announcer says
  that their flight has just departed, wishes them a good flight,
  though there are no planes on the runway. Airline personnel walk
  around, apologizing profusely to customers in hushed voices,
  pointing from time to time to the sleek, powerful jets outside
  the terminal on the field. They tell each passenger how good
  the real flight will be on these new jets and how much safer
  it will be than Windows Airlines, but that they will have to
  wait a little longer for the technicians to finish the flight
  systems. Maybe another 10 years. Maybe longer.
• Amiga Airline – The airport terminal is nice and colorful, with friendly
  stewards and stewardesses, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff. For
  the more adventurous: travelers can travel on multiple planes and visit
  multiple destinations all at the same time. During these multiple plane trips
  the user can even take a side trip on Mac, DOS, Unix, or Windows airlines.
• Unix Express – All passenger bring a piece of the airplane
  and a box of tools with them to the airport. They gather on the
  tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want
  to build and how to put it together. Eventually, the passengers split
  into groups and build several different aircraft, but give them all
  the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All
  passengers believe they got there.
• Wings of OS/400 – The airline has bought ancient DC-3s,
  arguably the best and safest planes that ever flew, and painted “747”
  on their tails to make them look as if they are fast. The flight
  attendants, of course, attend to your every need, though the drinks
  cost $15 a pop. Stupid questions cost $230 per hour, unless you have
  SupportLine, which requires a first class ticket and membership in the
  frequent flyer club. Then they cost $500, but your accounting
  department can call it overhead.
• MVS Air Lines – The passengers all gather in the hangar,
  watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this
  immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats
  over 1,000 passengers; bigger models in the fleet can have more
  engines than anyone can count and fly even more passengers than there
  are on Earth. It is claimed to cost less per passenger mile to operate
  these humungous planes than any other aircraft ever built, unless you
  personally have to pay for the ticket. All the passengers scramble
  aboard, as do the 200 technicians needed to keep it from crashing. The
  pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines,
  only to realize that the plane is too big to get through the hangar
  doors.
• MPE Airline – It’s a little difficult to get a ticket because you have to sign
  up for the right plane, specify you want a seat to sit in, identify each piece
  of baggage and list it on your ticket, and once you enter the plane you may
  never see the same steward/ess twice. However, once the plane takes off, the
  ride is exceptionally smooth and usually on-time, unless you cross a timezone
  (this results in your being placed in a holding pattern for 1 hour until the
  plane’s clock and the local clocks are synchronized). Should the unthinkable
  happen and your flight ends in a crash, you will be magically whisked back to
  the origin of the flight where you will be placed on the next plane out.
• OpenVMS Airline – Security to get on the plane can be tight, but once you get
  on, everyone has their own roomy area (depending on your pilot, of course).
  You sit down in a comfortable roomy seat, and brace yourself for the launch to
  warp by the powerful Alpha/AXP engines. You enjoy looking out your first-class
  DEC-and-X-windows at the other planes flying haplessly in circles below. You
  feel almost guilty that they are limited to the Earth’s atmosphere, except for
  the Amiga, which is just off your port wing. 🙂 You enjoy witty,
  scintillating conversations with other passengers, and even other planes of
  almost any type. But the plane is too fast, and the air traffic controller
  doesn’t want to let you leave the country “for National Security”. Then you
  realize that your boss has you bumped from first-class to coach where your
  client PC’s are all contemplating closing their eyes, shouting “Geronimo!”, and
  jumping ship without a parachute, hoping to land on a Unix plane without
  crashing it…
• RISC-OS Airways – The plane looks like a twin-turboprop commuter aircraft, but
  as you take off it accelerates to Mach 1.2. The drinks are
  a lot cheaper than on most other airways, and the flight
  attendants are much friendlier, even if their appearance
  leaves something to be desired.
• Air PalmEveryone is in such a hurry that they bring their own ultralite. They pull it out of their pockets, proceed to unfold it, then they get their backpacks with all of the attachment parts (or their extreme geek belt where everything is attached to it). After plugging in their phone conduit, they call the traffic control and say that they are taking off. Air traffic says that they aren’t really a plane. Ultimately, the palm plane just plugs itself into a device attached to a real plane and the cool owner just presses a button and waits until the flight comes to an end, hopefully without some “out of something or another” message being sent back.
• Linux Atlantic – Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plan leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do WHAT with the seat?”

Kudos to all you who have joined me in our effort to get a Bible API from a major Bible publisher. Below describes just how significant and influential your comments and suggestions are/were:

What better way to celebrate our weekly venture into geekdom than to see the effect Christian tech blogging can have on propagating the Gospel to the furthest region of the Earth. Only this time, in yummy SOAP and XML flavors?!

What am I talking about? An article in Christianity Today entitled “Bible Is Getting Even Friendlier to Programmers” which describes how:

“Next week, Crossway’s English Standard Version (ESV) will become the first Bible to allow web programmers to use its text on their own websites.”

The article which goes on to report:

Other sites such as Bible Gateway offer web services in order to search Scripture or link to verses. But the ESV web service uses an Application Program Interface (API) that allows programmers to determine the format in which the text is retrieved. With very little programming, a user can use the web service to retrieve content from the ESV site and use it however they want.

“If I get text from another site, it has their formatting, fonts, and colors,” says Dean Peters, who runs HealYourChurchWebsite.com. “I don’t mind giving a site its due copyright, but their material needs to work in my site. This is the only Bible to offer an API. It allows me as a programmer to say, ‘I want this data and this is how I want it.’ “

As I’ve said before. We have both an opportunity and a responsibility to be the salt of the Earth — if we focus our personal blogs on our passions, we can go a long way in fulfilling the Great Commission!

One other thought — it would be really helpful if you contacted the good folks at Christianity Today and express to them your gratitude for covering this important topic.