Heal Your Church WebSite

After today, Microsoft will discontinue sales of its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers; this despite protests lodged at InfoWorld’s ad-impaired Save XP petition page.

Meanwhile, the world of Linux continues to overlook major marketing opportunities - this time missing a chance to dance on XP’s grave by not planning and then announcing releases for any and preferably ALL ‘distro-butions’ today.

So what does this mean for your church and/or charity organization? For me it is just another reason why Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Zoho and/or ThinkFree.

Why? Because as long as you have a browser, and in many cases an up-to-date mobile phone with good data services, then you don’t have to worry about jumping through some of the potentially hazardous and most definately expensive flaming hoops required to ‘enjoy’ operating system paradigm shifts.

For example, you can still get XP once you realize Vista will choke your current hardware platform, but only if you first buy Vista and then “downgrade” to XP (nothing like giving the customer what they want).

Why bother?

Instead, if your laypersons and/or church staff are running a variety of computers on a mix of Mac, Ubuntu, or even Windows 2000 systems, no problem. There are many tasty selections from today’s cornucopia of online office ’sweets’ that offer collaboration capabilities that will not only allow everyone to work-n-play well together remotely, but will also save your budget from all the Advil required to deal with operating system update-induced migraines.

That and think of the gas everyone will save when you can hold meetings via products such as Skype and collaborate on documents via Google Apps Education Edition; the later provided to registered non-profits with current 501(c)(3) status free-of-charge.

Bottom line, quit thinking desktop and get that office-ware and associated operations into the web space.

Then it won’t matter that Microsoft in 2008 is beginning to look and feel a lot like the IBM of 1983.

On August 8th, the eyes of the entire world turn towards Beijing. Some on their TVs, others on their PC newly equipped with the Silverlight plugin. Then there will be those stuck in a line at the store or waiting at a restaurants who will be keeping up with the 2008 Summer Olympics via their mobile phone.

And though some may complain their pastor’s sermons are indeed a marathon event, that’s still no reason why the content on your church and/or charity website shouldn’t be made made available and readable to an ever growing community of mobile readers.

Here are 5 things you can do to quickly bring your organizations on-the-road browse-ability into the 21st century:

1. Render your content in simple, semantic HTML - or better yet, let your content management system do it for you. For example, if you use WordPress as a content management system on the cheap, then not only do you deliver valid XHTML but can effortlessly transform it to WML with any number of nifty plug-ins;
2. Create a subdomain - be like Yahoo, who makes access to their mobile content easy to remember and access: http://m.yahoo.com … Google also does this with a simple /m path after their domain name, but I like the subdomain approach the best. Even if it is nothing more than a redirect to another page or html to mobile rendering application.
3. Check your work using a variety of browser-based tools, here are four for FireFox that will allow you to consume your content posing as your favorite mobile device:
   • wmlbrowser - Add WML markup support to FireFox;
   • XHTML Mobile Profile - Add xHTML MP support to FireFox;
   • User Agent Switcher - Use this plugin to send the user-agent string of whichever mobile browser you want to emulate. ZyTrax offers a nice list of mobile user agents you can load up and test using this plugin; and
   • ModifyHeaders - Allows you to spoof headers. Use this to add an x-up-subno, x-wap-profile, etc. header to your FireFox browser session so your app thinks you are coming from a network operators proxy.
4. Remember to keep your sermon and calendar of event page titles pithy, powerful and to-the-point in 128 characters or less. Also consider adding driving directions to pages that go to mobile;
5. Once you get the above done, advertise it in your new letters, your Sunday bulletins and other places.

As I’ve said in past articles, as more and more of your church members and/or seekers go mobile, so must your content. Meaning, if you’re still rocking like it’s 1999 with FrontPage, consider these recent postings on this topic:

• iPhone & your church web site, iPhone & usability, iPhone article round-up
• Pastors preach: turn on & tune in … to your Blackberry
• Google + Sprint make mobile missions easier with WiMax
• Mobile email blogging test deux
• Remember the Milk: To-do list management made easy

Here are a few more articles of interest describing the disruptive technologies on display at the 2008 Olympic games:

• The Olympics Go Mobile
• Silverlight Helps Bring Streaming Video to Olympics Web Site
• Best of the China Blogs: June 20
• Olympic Games Special Section and Blog Launch on NYTimes.com

Who knew joining a new church or Bible study could be so dangerous? That was my thought at my last church after I mistakenly shared my email with other members of the Sunday morning Bible study - as no sooner than I had gotten home I began to receive emails about how Madalyn Murray O’Hair is conspiring with aliens from the grave to take images of the Cross off the airwaves.

And no sooner had I responded, nicely and in Christian love to please stop forwarding me such ‘hoax mail‘ did I receive a scathing reply accusing this died-in-the-wool conservative of being a commie pinko, ACLU loving liberal whose Christianity was called into question for even for a second considering any and all such messages to be urban legends … let alone spam.

I think I still have some on file that I need to dig up just for grins … but I digress.

The point is, most members of the HYCW audience are in the same camp as I. That is:

1. We prefer to get our latest and greatest news updates from our feed aggregators, not email. We assume this of our friends as well;
2. We tend to not believe everything we read but instead take Paul’s advice to the 1 Thessalonians 5:21 and “test everything” against the snopes urban legend database;
3. We believe that there is no need to cut-and-paste any article that is on the web when it is far more considering to write a single original sentence describing why the content is so compelling that ends with the URL of online article;
   
4. We get really, really grumpy when we see our email addresses exposed with several hundred in the others by an individual forwarding a message without the benefit of using or understanding the purpose and benefits of their email program’s BCC feature; and
5. We’ve received enough of this Christian spam that we don’t even bother to read it before summarily pressing the delete button.

But enough about ‘we’ as this unfortunate but all-to-common occurrence raises the uncomfortable question “how does one go about teaching, rebuking, correcting &/or training such a ‘friend’ in righteous email netiquette?”

Glad you asked.

As I recall the numerous instances where I was excoriated for:

• asking nicely not to be included in such distributions;
• informing the sender that the content was probably false;
• that exposing my email address in such distributions potentially exposed me to professional spammers further down the chain; and
• anything worth cutting and pasting is probably already posted as a page on the web;

I realize that there’s no need for this messenger to continually expose himself to such emotional gunfire when there are already a number of web pages and services that will do the dirty work for me.

Most recently, the good folks over at LifeHacker fielded a poll entitled “Email Etiquette Pages Explain So You Don’t Have To” - offering individuals to vote on which ‘tell a friend they’re spammin’ya crazy‘ service they use:

• Thanks. No - for opting out of all types of unwanted email;
• BCC Please - for requesting the sender doesn’t expose your email address to a large list;
• Sentenc.es - for explaining your email brevity; and
• Waiting-For.com - to let your recipient know you’re waiting to hear back from them.

Had said survey not been closed, I might have possibly recommended some other pages that also go into detail over what’s proper and what’s not in terms of one’s SMTP activities, including:

• emailreplies.com rules for effective email replies
• E-Mail Etiquette at iwillfollow.com
• wpi.edu’s extract from M.Grey’s ‘Making E-Mail More Productive’
• Top 20 Most Important Rules of Email Netiquette by Heinz Tschabitscher
  • this includes a link to a must-read article entitled ‘Don’t Forward Hoaxes’
• ‘Forwarded emails create SPAM’ by Nora Thompson’s;
• Kass Johns’ seminal tutorial “Basic Electronic Mail Netiquette
  (Network Etiquette)” - which is every bit as valid today as it was back in 1996 when it was originally offered.

Note that I said “I might have possibly recommended some other pages” … this is because old ‘never met a Software as a Service he didn’t like’ author has found via the folks at AppScout a nice, free little online service offered by the generous and thoughtful folks at StopForwarding.Us.

What this neat little online tool does is simply send an anonymous email to the church spammer of your choice that sheds the light truth on said sinner’s incorrect use of the forward feature on their email program. Here’s a sample I sent myself:

Hi Dean is testing this service,

One of your friends has sent you this message from StopForwarding.Us, a website that allows individuals to anonymously email their friends and politely ask that they stop the habit of sending forwarded emails or FWDs.

Please do not forward chain letters, urban myths presented as truth, potentially offensive jokes, videos or photos without being asked or first receiving permission. If you find something that is funny and it is clean and you genuinely think the recipient will enjoy it then foward it to that person only (not in an email blast to all your friends and family) and include a personal note about why you enjoyed it and why you think they will too. Avoid sending forwards to friends or relatives that you’ve grown distant with. It can be frustrating for the recpient when the only correspondance you have with someone is via impersonal, unwanted email.

For more tips on email etiquette, visit StopForwarding.Us/etiq.html

Thank you,
A Friend (via stopforwarding.us)

And if that doesn’t work - send’m here to this post for a dose of tough love.

Now pardon me while I get some wiki work over at blogJordan.com.

This weekend, I ran into an elderly gentleman whom appointed himself the ‘Toaster Czar’ in a fashion similar to the infamous ‘Soup Nazi’ of Jerry Seinfeld fame. I made the mistake leaving my bagel momentary unattended to go get coffee while trying to enjoy the complimentary breakfast at the Hampton Inn Winston-Salem-I-40/Hanes Mall. Here are 5 things your church and/or charity webmaster can learn from this experience:

Already demonstrating earlier this week how to block spambots and rogue spiders. Today I’m completing the lesson with a nice little bash script sample that can help you identify some of these non-browser ‘candidates’ by parsing your access logs and placing the results in an easy-to-read text file.

Spambots and spiders that ignore robots exclusion file can kill your site both in bandwidth and by potentially exposing information you don’t want ‘harvested.’ With that in mind, here is a quick-n-dirty guide to blocking spambots and rogue search engine spiders by using .htaccess. First the essential example codeblock, followed by a working example:

I just overheard a useful conversation between two vending machine operators while loading up our office junk food dispenser with a bunch of products that didn’t sell last week. It is if nothing else, an object lesson in contrast to my oft quoted aphorism “solve their problems, don’t tell them yours.” Here are 5 things we can in turn do in contrast to improve the user experience on our church and/or charity websites …

Yes, I know, all cool programmers use Python these days - but to this old-school programmer, PERL is to my antiquated PC what GWBasic was to first computer at work back in 1983. That is a nice little tool to get things done, like identify a list of IP addresses by country - fast.

As a card-carrying member of the vast math conspiracy, and in light of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.’s statement made in Beaverton Oregon last week that has been all but ignored by old media - I have decided to fight off the fatigue of almost turning 50 next weekend by providing the blogosphere the tools required to accurately quote, report and interpret quotes such as the one made …

Those putting off the purchasing and/or long-term renewal of a domain name for their church and/or charity because the price was too high may want to re-think that strategy as it appears that the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for ‘.org’ domain names, will be raising their annual wholesale price for ‘.org’ domains by 10%.

There’s no getting around it, despite the efforts of many to teach, rebuke, correct & train in righteous web design, there still exists a great cloud of witlessness when it comes to the Church’s presence online. A fact painfully corroborated by the persistent body of ‘kitsch‘ out there that distracts, annoys and otherwise drives-away people seeking and/or serving the Lord.

Last night while listening to various speculations as why the horse that ‘placed’ at the Kentucky Derby was put down, my mind drifted to 5 things Eight Belles has in common with many church webmasters I know, including …