Heal Your Church WebSite

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  • Addicted to Medicority

    The Washington Time has some must reading for Christians in an article entitled “Poll finds religion lost esteem over past year.” Basically it proves
    Franky Schaeffer was right when he asserted that Christians are no longer influencing society through various forms of media, but are instead influenced BY it. A neat trick when you think Francis Shaeffer’s son warned us about this as far back as 1981!

    A point shaved even finer back in 1994 by Os Guinness in
    Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It. Is it wonder why so many church web sites need healing? Until we Love (our) God With All Your Mind we’re going to continue to see the leprosy of modernism infect everything we do.

    WHOOOOSH – flame off!

  • Blog Netiquette

    When Virginia Shea penned the original “core rules of netiquette” there the concept of the blog was yet to be a gleam in David Winer’s eye.

    Well, it looks like blogs are here to stay, and with them, a set of rules and manners that though currently unspoken, should be written down and made part of Blogger.com’s terms of service. Until then, might i suggest a growing list over at Fred Peatross’ Grace Awakening>?

    BTW, what’s your pet peeve regarding badly behaved blogs? Let us hear from you.

  • Ernie the Attorney

    It’s not often geeks like me think about things legal until we’re hip deep in a bowl of flaming orange habanero kimchee. But it is a reality we have to deal with.

    That said, I was half joking when I e-mailed Ernest ‘Ernie the Attorney’ Svenson when I suggested there should be a law about hackers hijacking the WayBackMachine. Email being what it is, he responded as I often do when someone pin-pricks one of my passion spots – and goes deep!

    It was more than I could have ever hoped for in a response – it was GOOD reading and is a GOOD point. So much so that I insisted he blog it on his site. We have so many laws, yet criminals still manage abound … abundantly … about the only thing I might add is a link to the Flummery Digest.

    But I digress – first, the link to Ernies excellent article entitled: Toward a Theory of Justice.. But don’t stop there! I have found myself visiting Ernie’s site on a daily basis as he banters about issues legal – many of which are internet related – with the same ease I discuss sed and xarg.

    Once I get my permalinks thing added, I’m adding this one.

  • Usability Testing

    For today’s 1st cup-o-coffee reading, I am STRONGLY suggesting you read the following article – one which describes in detail about something we as a Body could bit more of. What am I saying? The target article explains something most church web sites could use in vast quantities:
    Designer & Developer – Usability Testing.

    If you are serious about your website being most things to most browsers, then you need to talk a long look at this article – and usability testing. By doing so, you compel you and that crack core of church web servants (usually me, myself and I) too THINK first about what you’re going to say, to whom you are addressing it, and how to best serve it up.

    Usability means running each gizmo and bleeding edge technology through the crucible of the “hey, do I really need this or am I showing off ?” test. Usability means not overlooking the fact that the client side of the Internet is comprised out of a wide variety of standards.

    Nothing is worse than taking your compelling content and hiding under a bowl or a bed. What’s that? You don’t have compelling content? Hmmm .. musn’t have too many visitors then either.

    Test everything. Hold on to the good – 1 Thessalonians 5:21

    BTW, credit to Vincent’s News of Interest Page for finding this one.

  • Global replace using find & xarg

    I’m part of an lively Yahoo group run by Tony Whittaker called ChurchSite-Chat.
    There, I learned about Rachel Cunliffe who runs a very cool bbs that offers Church Website Critiques. And from both sites, I’ve learned just how big of a plank I have to yank out of my own eye before I can go about piling heavy burdens burdens upon the shoulders of other church web servants.

    One of the problems pointed out to me were some broken links on my own church’s page, RedlandBaptist.org. I originally built this site using DreamWeaver 3, and being the code-monkey type of guy I am, relied heavily on server-side includes (SSI) to reduce my work. As I’ve stated in an earlier article, SSI’s can save you beaucoup time because you can write a file once, and include it often. Similarly, using DreamWeaver, you can create stock templates so all your pages look and feel the same.

    There’s only one big fat caveat with this approach …
    (more…)

  • Criteria – 88 Theses

    When this site opened, I promised everyone that I would critique sites both good and bad, using the former as examples to follow, the later as examples to avoid – and perhaps to gently instruct the errant web servant of that site back into the fold of good web design.

    Obviously, I’ve been putting this off, in small part due to the crash, in greater part because I had not listed my criteria. Judging without a standard is about as bad as designing a site without a plan. And we all know what God says about judging others …

    So here are the standards by which I myself am willing to live up to (on my church websites) … I hope you are too:
    (more…)

  • You SED What ?

    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:

    mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DATABASE
    Usually, from there it’s VIOLA, we’re done. Not so today. Which is why I’m imploring you to rehearse and practice your restorations from time to time.

    Appearently, the MySQL configuration at my friends production site, isn’t exactly the same as it is on the mirror site. Because I had the luxury of time, I was able to poke around until I figured out what had happened.

    In this case, ‘C’ like comments were followed with a semi-colon. Which meant MySQL was being instructed to execute a query. Only because the semi-colon was preceede with a comment, there was no query. Boom … an error was raised and the restore failed.

    Once I figured out what the problem was, I had to find a way of quickly and easily remedying the situation. Not such an easy task for 4mb of ASCII data ! But since we’re on a linux/unix based system, we do have some powerful text processing tools … in this case, the weapon of choice was SED which is short for ‘stream editor‘.

    Using the following command, I ran a search and replace on the entire file in under 2 seconds:

    sed ‘s/ \*\/;/\*\//’ ORIGDUMP.sql > NEWDUMP.sql

    With that accomplished, I was able to run the mysql command as exampled earlier:

    mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DATABASE As my voice teacher in undergrad used to tell me “practice doesn’t make perfect, rather perfect practice makes perfect.”

    “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me–put it into practice” – Philippians 4:9

  • Putty

    One of the free tools I find priceless in helping me backup and restore my sites is a little Telnet/SSH terminal emulator program known as PuTTY: a free Win32 telnet/ssh client.

    Written and maintained by Simon Tatham, this tool allows you to login to your host computer … provided your host provider allows such acess.

    Why not use something else? Because more and more host providers are switching from providing Telnet access to SSH. Why … because one of the ‘S’s in SSH stands for secure … as in encrypted.

    Using this tool, I can get to the linux … from there, I can play with other fun commands I’ll talk about in some very near future posts, like TAR and GREP.