Heal Your Church WebSite

“According to Pew, almost half of adults said they needed someone to help them set up or learn how to use their gadgets. Once they finally get them going, however, things aren’t all smooth sailing—44 percent of adults with home Internet connections reported service failure sometime in the last 12 months.”

With apologies to Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng for so shamelessly ripping her pithy headline “Study reminds us why we’re always fixing our parents’ PCs” - I only do so because she’s so on target to point out the relevance of a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report entitled “When Technology Fails.”

So Dean What’s your point? Glad you asked …

Just a quick reminder that any technology we introduce into the operations of our church and/or charitable organization is going to have an infrastructure cost. Here are some specifics from the aforementioned PEW, that though specific to a home setup, translate easily enough to the IT operations of our own religions institutions:

• 44% of those with home internet access say their connection failed to work properly for them at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 39% of those with desktop or laptop computers have had their machines not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 29% of cell phone users say their device failed to work properly at some time in the previous year.
• 26% of those with Blackberries, Palm Pilots or other personal digital assistants say they have encountered a problem with their device at some time in the previous 12 months.
• 15% of those with an iPod or MP3 player say their devices have not worked properly at some time in the prior year.

Consider the first bullet point in terms of operational impact. The internet goes down. Here’s how home users react - which I suspect would be similar to how your pastor, music minister and/or church secretary might behave:

• 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.
• 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
• 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.
• 2% found help online.

What that tells me is that those of us running a church and/or charity website, because of the our conspicuous computing prowess, may in fact be part of that 53% (38%+15%) contacted when anything from a printer to an internet connection goes down.

Yeah, okay, so I get those calls - what can I do about them? Glad you asked!

Some suggestions of how I’ve kept my part-time work as a church webmaster from turning into a full-time IT support desk:

1. Identify other members of the congregation willing to help with non-website related IT issues
2. Learn what service contracts the church has, and be willing to remind individuals (in a grace-driven and loving way) that’s where the call needs to go
3. Establish a help/ticket system. I like Mantis Bug Tracker, but there are just as many others out there that get the job done.
4. Establish an internal Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and/or WIKI system that can be used for quick reference.
5. Get buy in for the above four points from the church staff. If they don’t enforce said policy, then you’ll quickly run into a polity issue.

I know I can’t be the only one whose experienced this - so let me know what you’ve done to remedy this situation.

Ever get that annoying email from a church, friend, and/or family member who ‘accidentally‘ sent a rant to everyone in their address book and/or a group-related email directory? With the recent election, my wife and I have been getting more than our fair share.

And while I’ve written about how to address ‘Christian SPAM‘ in the recent past, I wanted to share with you my most recent response to what I sub-categorize as Christian SPAM email bombing runs (CSEBRs):

- - - § - - -

Hi {name withheld to protect the guilty};

Next time we get together, make sure I spend about 5 minutes on my laptop showing you 5 cool — and free — things about the web that don’t rock like it’s 1995. For example:

• Twitter - a “microblog” mechanism that lets you post 140 characters on any topic you want as often as you want. This is especially great as you’re standing around bored, upset, amused, and/or excited about things while equipped with nothing more than your cell phone. For an example, check mine out at http://twitter.com/deanpeters - no great shakes, but I’ve got enough subscribers whom seem interested.
• Facebook - a social networking service where friends and families can subscribe where you can post thoughts like the ones below and then engage people in dialog and/or banter as they can post comments, etc .. It’s also a nice place to throw out some family pix. If you’d like, I can also show you how to “plug-in” a Facebook app that update to your “wall” every time you post on Twitter (synchronization is an amazing thing). Here’s a link to my profie http://is.gd/6MgW … note how I used the http://is.gd mechanism to shorten the URL.
• Blogger.com - now I know Twitter and FaceBook have obviated bloggery to some degree, but I still love it as it allows me to venture deep into topics I enjoy such as healing church websites and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Moreover, less constraints on what I can post - and if you like, you can make some buck$ via instruments like Google’s adsense. Oh BTW, I’ve got my WordPress-driven blogs set up with the ‘twitter tools plugin‘ to update my Twitter and Facebook pages when I post. Best thing, again, people can subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed to keep up to date.
• Google Reader - note I’ve mentioned subscribe 3 times now. All of the above allow individuals to subscribe either through the site’s syndication feed (RSS) and/or through email alerts with links to the juicy and compelling content. And not just from annoying friends like me, but any blog, news wire, newspaper, microblog and/or social network to which you’re inclined to observe.
• BCC - finally … and I can’t stress this enough … if you must use email, that’s cool. But please, do me and others on your distribution one favor - use the BCC mechanism to distribute the email. Blind Carbon Copy is cool in that it’ll protect your friends, family and loved ones from nasty spammers and idiots like me from exposing their email addresses “into the wild.“Oh, and if you use a free email service like gMail, you can create categories for both incoming and outgoing email addresses - which is really handy when you quickly send out email broadcats to select groups of your address book (using BCC of course).

Anyway, have a great Sunday - and give  {spouse name withheld to protect the innocent} a hug from us.

Your (annoying) friend;

Dean

- - - § - - -

Feel free to use any portion of this email to respond to Christian SPAM email bombing runs aimed in your direction. Or better yet, just send them a link here.

I’ll be glad to respond to their rationalizations and excuses by explaining how the are endangering the tax exempt status of their church by dumping a political kvetch on the Sunday school rolls.

Last week, while attending the MS PDC 2008, Ray Ozzie got all jumbo-tron’d at me about Azure and cloud computing. Here’s what it means to you and your church computing operations - now that I’ve had a bit more than a week to catch up on work and think it all through.

First, I suspect some of you are wondering “Dean, what is cloud computing?” Glad you asked.

For the purposes of this conversation, and to avoid all the jargoneeze this IT buzzword is currently enjoying, the could is a metaphor for the Internet.

Cloud computing is effectively outsourcing applications, services, and/or infrastructure you might otherwise host in-house.

For example Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 for short, basically is a service where you’d rent a fully-managed computer to host your applications - that is accessible via the Internet. What you lose in paying rent is theoretically recouped in terms of not having to worry about the hard and soft costs of systems administration, housing, and/or securing such a computer in the basement of your church.

What Microsoft’s Windows Azure will provide is platform for developers to create applications that will leverage the following services via the Internet:

• Live Services - where everyone logs in, so this is where you’ll see social networking apps happening. Single Sign On (SSO) federation as well.
• SQL Services - where the data is kept, though right now, the service is not much better than someone else hosting a MySQL database for you. There are no triggers, stored procedures or other fun stuff yet available.
• .NET Services - while you’ll eventually be able to use PHP, Ruby, Java, and a bunch of other languages, currently this is where you create ‘federated’ applications that run locally and/or on the cloud itself (hosted by MSFT).
• SharePoint services - still a future thing, but basically taking what is effectively this Intranet service and providing some or all of its functionality outwards.
• CRM - also a future thing, but also taking this customer relationship management (CRM) system and providing some or all of its functionality outwards.

By now, I suspect some of you are asking yourselves “Dean, what does this have to do with my churhc website?” Glad you asked.

If you are blessed enough to be part of an über, mega-church complex that benefits from having your own IT operations, developers, and product support:

• you can save money in infrastructure costs by leveraging some of Azure’s services
• you can save time in having applications hosted via Azure’s servers
• you can save collaboration headaches by developing applications via the Azure platform
• you can save user login complexities by leveraging Azure’s security federation

If you’re part of a smaller church or charity organization, it likely means that sometime in your future may find yourselves subscribing to any number of “software+service” applications via Azure, such as:

• a social network
• a content management system
• a customer relationship management
• an office suite

On that last point, office suite, bear in mind that Microsoft is very good about eating its own dog food. Meaning, expect more product offerings by the Bellevue behemoth to also leverage or become part of the Azure platform - specifically Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel across a variety of platforms in a number of collaborative contexts.

In fact from what I saw last week, they already are - but more on that in the very near future when I blog about what I learned about the upcoming Windows 7 at the MS PDC 2008.

Finally, some of you may be wondering, “where can I learn more about Windows Azure?” Glad you asked:

• Video of Ray Ozzie’s Day One Keynote in both WMV-HQ and MP4 formats.
• Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed - ZD|Net, Mary-Jo Foley
• Microsoft’s “What is the Azure Services Platform?” page
• Cloud computing - WikiPedia
• C|Net - Microsoft launches Windows Azure
• What cloud computing really means - InfoWorld
• The Register - What Ray Ozzie didn’t tell you about Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Azure Aims to Re-define the OS - ReadWrite Web

Here are also some recent blogs on the topic I found worth noting:

• Microsoft Azure Vs Google App Engine - Jon Paul Davies
• About.com - Is Microsoft Azure a Last Ditch Effort?
• Microsoft’s Azure is So 1997 (and Why I Love it) - Mashable.com
• C|Net Negative Approach - Microsoft’s Azure–I remain perplexed
• Microsoft Azure - Contribute or Cannibalize? - Enterprise 2.0 Essentials
• Perils of Parallel - Microsoft Azure Just Says NO to Multicore Apps in the Cloud
• Microsoft’s Azure is not Hailstorm, but what’s the point of it? - Guardian UK
• InfoWorld - Making sense of Microsoft’s Azure
• Windows Azure from a Developer’s Perspective - Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

Interesting stuff, no?

I cut you man! Seriously, it’s rare that I review a non-church nor charity website, but this site was so chock full of great lessons in what not to do on your church and/or charity website, I couldn’t help myself.
The basic message today being: don’t let fear of copyright violations drive your website design.
Site review
So [...]

So how did Google become a verb? Glad you asked … it did so by building an organization around intelligent people who understood how to grow the corporate needs around what the customer wanted. Put in more “Christian” terms, it’s about satisfying one’s self by first serving others.

How do you quickly change the default

tags to

on widget sidebar titles without hacking into the core WordPress engine? Glad you asked, as below I’m going to explain techniques I used at blogJordan.com that demonstrate how find what needs to be edited in your current theme, and them some approaches in how to make the edits - including a global search and replace for the brave.

Online office suites are great, usually missing only one or two applications I need to enhance a presentation and/or document. That missing link sometimes being a paint or paintbrush tool such as Photoshop, Photo Impact and/or MS Paint. That’s okay because there is an emerging set of Software as a Service applications that are online, [...]

Crowdsourcing describes the act of outsourcing a task to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.  Moderator is a new tool from Google that facilitates this practice by posing your question to the entirety a select portion of the Internet … almost.
What do I mean by almost? Glad [...]

In case you didn’t know, since 1954 there has been a federal ban on political activity for tax exempt, 501(c)(3) organizations such as charities and churches.  A lesson Atlah World Ministries may be learning the hard way when this past February, pastor James David Manning stood in the pulpit of his little church on 123rd [...]

Now that the new Twitter user interface (UI) has had a few days to shake itself out, here are 5 things I think the webmasters of church and charity websites might learn from Twitter’s simple, yet effective changes:

With apologies to Michelle Malkin, imagine waking up one day to this news flash: “Your pastor’s private e-mail hacked, family photos raided; cesspool blog gloats; feds investigate!” The hack of Sarah Palin’s email account via Yahoo’s password recovery system serves as a wake-up call that screams that no matter how strong a password you use - if you have weak password recovery questions - you’re open for an attack.

Just as good fences make good neighbors, strong passwords make secure users. Put another way, if your pastor is using his first name as a login, and his last name as a password, it won’t be long before your website and/or email system begins spewing spam for various online services not usually associated with a [...]