Faith and Web

I’d been intending to post this past week, but between a couple of major projects, illness in my family, and the heat, haven’t had the time. Now I have another big project, so it will be two to three weeks before I have a chance to blog again.

Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking of you, gathering stories, and praying for rain in this part of the world.

No Comments »

The other day I got an email from a church webmaster who was embarrassed about the site he manages. I can’t tell you how often this happens, and I’ve been there too. Typically the site in question is out-of-date, both in content and look, or it’s missing critical information. But almost without exception, there’s no need to take on the added burden of remorse.

In fact, I can only think of one exception, and that was a long time ago. Back around 1999, I had to pick up the pieces left by a webmaster who had promised the moon and delivered next-to-nothing. He was inexperienced, so that in itself wasn’t so bad. What made me want to go into scolding mother mode was that he locked the site down, wouldn’t share the password and made it impossible for others to help. Of course, he wasn’t embarrassed at all.

But that’s not the norm. Your average church webmaster is conscientious and doing the best he or she can. Many have been saddled with a site that barely works and looks woefully out-of-date. Often they don’t have a lot of background, but are plucky enough to be willing to do what it takes to improve the site.

So what are the keys to overcoming being self-conscious about a site you manage?

1. Understand to your core that the website is the responsibility of the whole church, not just you. I really can’t say this enough, and chances are you too are going to have to spread this message to others. Church leadership is especially accountable for the site, and often they don’t realize it. This is most obvious when they aren’t getting their content to you, but it’s true in other ways too. For example, the minister of my church is great to work with. While as best I can tell she doesn’t have a tech bone in her, nonetheless she’s appreciative and willing to manage staff on the rare occasions there’s a need for that.
2. Do the best you can. There are always things about the site that need work, so just get organized, set reasonable goals, and get going.
3. Enjoy. Celebrate what you’ve accomplished with others who have helped. It’s a joy to see a new technology you’ve installed work or to overhear a visitor say, “I found your church on the web.”

Having said this, it cuts both ways. When the day comes that your church site is fabulous, you can’t puff and preen and take all the credit. Be prepared to share the glory. In any event, it turns out that’s more satisfying. What better feeling is there than to crow with others who have helped? And what more likely way is there to ensure that the site will continue to be first-rate?

6 Comments »

Yesterday I got a frantic phone call about our church’s website. It was a staff member wanting to know if our new alcohol policy was on the site. There was about to be an event on church property and she needed to let the people running it know our rules. She was delighted to hear it was, and I was delighted she’d called. I had always known having our policies on the web would be useful, and here was a great example.

I suspect it may be peculiar to my faith, or perhaps even to my church, but we are awash in policies and procedures. Give us a good challenge, and we answer it with a policy. Not that I think this a bad thing. To the contrary. I even enjoyed reading Robert’s Rules of Order. Seriously. When difficulties arise, and there’s a relevant policy, things typically calm down more quickly.

However, policies don’t do much good if you can’t get your hands on them. For many years our bylaws said they would be available in the church office. However, few of us had easy access to the office. Then even if we did, 80% of the time it was hard to find the needed document – and that’s assuming you knew it existed at all.

Enter the web. About four years ago, I started one of my major nag campaigns. “We need the policies and procedures on the web,” was my constant refrain. Gradually we started to get few on the site. And then, as luck would have it, I got put on a committee that was making recommendations about minor changes to our bylaws. I bet you can guess where that took us.

Our Bylaws Section 8.1.3 now reads: “A current and complete copy of the Policy and Procedures Manual shall be available from the church office and on the church website for reference by the general membership.”

Of course, as anyone who has been around the block a few times might guess, just having this in the bylaws still didn’t guarantee success. It just gave the web diva more leverage. And now, I’m happy to say, we have a fairly comprehensive set of Policies and Procedures on our site.

We also have developed a good process for getting policies on the web. The Board has a designated person (a past president of our congregation) who vets all policies, reformats them and gets them to me. I then take the original Word documents and keep them in a private folder on the web, while also posting a PDF version.

While even I will never argue that having policies on the web is easy to organize, let alone cool, nonetheless I think it’s one of the best uses of your time. If information is power, then this is a simple and effective way to share the power and promote a healthy congregation.

1 Comment »

“Where is God in the Web?” I asked the Rev. Luminous the other day. He’s a brilliant minister, who happens to have a good-sized geek-streak that he mostly ignores. He’s got other things to do – including constantly inspiring me. Not that he spends a lot of time on that directly. It just sort of happens when I go to church.

I could see him flinch. (”Sorry,” I thought.) Of course, I’d caught him unawares. But I wasn’t looking for a carefully crafted answer – just a bit of help.

His first response was to speak of the power imbalance in blogging. He’s been burned by this. For me this issue speaks right to my Collection Development Librarian heart. In my constructs, he’s talking about the paucity of editorial control, where anyone can be a self-proclaimed expert. The way I have it figured, the savvy web user has worked out new ways to determine authority and worthiness. It’s fascinating that he instantly thought of blogging, which for me is just one small part of the Web, albeit astonishingly rich.

Then he gave me a more academic answer, mentioning a book we’d had a sermon on a few years ago: Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger. Although I’d read the book back then, I’d forgotten about it. I don’t recall Weinberger talking about God, but the way he holds up the Web is indeed part of my search.

And then Rev. Luminous really hit it for me. He mentioned the theory that (as I understand it) God is what happens between you and me. While Martin Buber’s I and Thou is somewhere between difficult and impossible for me to grasp, nonetheless this helps. The Thou of the Web. It’s stupendous.

And it was such a delightful moment in time. The Rev. Luminous: comfortable with God, but reacting to the word Web. Me: comfortable with the Web, but reacting to the word God.

7 Comments »

Sooner or later, any aspiring webmaster worth her salt is going to come into contact with the .htaccess file. The best response to this is to say, “On Guard!” It’s one tricky rascal of a file to deal with, particularly if you are on a Mac.

You’ll read that it’s powerful. True. And you’ll read that it’s easy. Also true. But that’s only in a limited sense. Among other things it’s easy to hose your whole site with it. I should know. I’ve done it twice in the brief life of this blog. The first time I knew instantly, and probably none of you saw it. The second time was Saturday, and for 18 hours it slipped under my radar. Horrors!

I knew I’d altered the .htacess file and I knew I was playing with fire, but I also double-checked and thought all was well. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The home page was fine. Everything else disappeared, while I blithely went to a wonderful oh-so-Nashville concert and got a good night’s sleep. Yesterday I awoke to an email from a dear friend politely inquiring about the state of my blog. I knew in a trice what the problem was. The dreaded .htaccess file. Fortunately, I was also able to fix it in a trice.

I’ll tell you why I was monkeying with the .htaccess file in an upcoming post, but before that, I think a very brief discussion of what it is, why it matters and why it’s such a slippery beast is in order.

What The Heck Is An .htacess File?

First off, it’s an Apache thing. Most of you (whether you realize it or not) probably are using servers running Apache. If your server uses some other software (the most likely alternative being Microsoft’s IIS), you may happily ignore this post.

Second, even if it is Apache, depending on how the sysadmin (system administrator) has configured your server, you may or may not be able to use it. Usually you can, but in highly secured environments you can’t.

Sysadmins can control the things you do with Apache in other ways, which are more efficient and safe than .htaccess. However, most sysadmins aren’t at the beck and call of your average webmaster. If you are using an inexpensive host (a likelihood for most church sites), then you won’t have easy access to the sysadmins, but chances are they will let you use .htaccess.

So now, with those caveats aside, the .htaccess is a text file that controls the configuration of all the files in its directory and child directories, unless the child, as growing children are wont to do, sprouts its own .htaccess file with a countermanding directive.

Most often, I alter an .htaccess to route users to a more friendly page-not-found message than the standard, bleak 404. I also have altered it to control password access to a portion of a website and to speed up response time.

Sample .htaccess Commands

Now for some examples of the commands you can add to your .htaccess file. These snippets of code take up one line each of the file. All you have to alter are the strings in italics (and be sure not to use the quotation marks).

To Disable Directory Browsing (a good thing to do)
“Options All -Indexes”

Change the Default Page
“DirectoryIndex myhome.htm index.htm index.php”

Redirect to a New Page
“Redirect oldpage.html http://www.domain.org/newpage.html”

Redirect to a New Directory
“Redirect /olddir http://www.domain.org/newdir/”

Redirect to a Customized Error Page (another good thing to do)
“ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html”

Pretty cool to be able to do all of those things, huh? But….

Why .htaccess Is So Crazy Making, Especially On a Mac

First notice that this file name is in fact only a file extension. Nothing precedes the period – and the period is crucial. Upload a file named “htaccess” (instead of “.htaccess”) and it won’t do a thing.

On a Mac, this means you normally won’t be able to even see the file, much less create it. One way Apple protects its machines from user error is to hide system files, including ones that begin with a period. I usually get around this by using either TinkerTool or the “File / Open Hidden” command in BBEdit. Oddly enough, Dreamweaver can see the .htaccess file locally on my machine, but not remotely on the server. For that I use Cyberduck.

However, not only is the .htaccess file hard to find for many of us, it’s hazardous. It turns out you can do much worse things than I have done, such as set up infinite loops. Read some of the official documentation for Apache 1.3 if you’d like a sobering experience.

Also, unbeknownst to you, programs you use like WordPress may be altering your .htaccess file. If you overwrite them, your site will stop working. That’s what I did Saturday. I accidentally overwrote a WordPress directive.

Precautionary Measures

To avoid the pitfalls, there are four things to do.

First, on your server find the .htacess file in the appropriate directory of your site, download it and back it up before you alter a thing.

Second, be clear on your environment. Know not just if you are running Apache, but what version. And be sure to track down your host’s documentation about .htaccess. It can be a goldmine. See, for example, my host’s documentation.

Third, read up on a particular command before you upload a change to the .htaccess. It’s kind of like getting a second opinion for an illness.

Finally, don’t just double check after you upload an altered .htaccess file. Triple check. Try it in another browser and test several pages in different subdirectories.

While I don’t mean to frighten you unduly with talk of illness and hazard, precaution is the key. Using .htaccess wisely can do many great things for your site that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, so get to know it and handle with care.

6 Comments »

• Test your web design in different browsers - Browsershots
  (tags: browsers)
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
  Recommended by Church Marketing Sucks ($24.95)
  (tags: books-to-read)
• phplist.com
  An open source newsletter manager recommended by Scott Wells
  (tags: email PHP)
• VnTutor: 10 GIMP Video Lessons online
  (tags: photos software)
• The power of search: Making your blog content relevant | Vanessa Fox. Nude.
  Includes excellent keyword research tips; relevant to websites in general
  (tags: search)
• FileZilla Homepage - Index
  My favorite free Windows FTP/SFTP client
  (tags: software)
• Cyberduck
  My favorite free Mac FTP/SFTP client
  (tags: OSX software)

No Comments »

I’m of two minds about website Content Management Systems (CMSs). On the one hand, they make getting information into a site much easier. You don’t have to know HTML (let alone PHP, etc., etc.) to use one. On the other hand, they are limiting and (worse) they are seductive.

The idea of a CMS seems to particularly appeal to the people who drive me the craziest in the web universe. I’m talking about those who believe that even though they can’t do a website themselves that doing a website should be easy. Not just that is easy, but that it should be easy. So it’s the webmaster’s fault when inevitably it’s not? A webmaster doesn’t really have that much value?

I’m tempted to go into a major rant here. At times such people have led me to call CMSs the devil’s handmaiden. But suffice it to say, they are even more toxic when they convince others of their position. They will say with great authority in their voice, “All you need is a good content management system.” Ministers and Board Presidents are particularly vulnerable to such authoritative nonsense.

I’ve actually had to back several groups out of CMSs, including one very large one. By large, I mean thousands of pages. It was incredibly expensive for them to do this (much more expensive than the initial costs), and they chose to return to a mostly static site. But two years later they are still happy.

The heart of the issue here isn’t whether CMSs are inherently good or bad. It’s the extremes. As with most things in life, the middle way holds the key. Use a CMS wisely, and it’s a beautiful thing. They can make the difference between having a website or not. Or they can enhance a healthy site. However, I expect I’m preaching to the choir here, since blog software is arguably a stripped down, highly focused type of CMS.

In the final analysis, what really matters is your site and its stakeholders. What will work best for them, if anything? Hint: there are no easy answers.

Why and Whither Drupal?

After doing fairly extensive research, I’ve concluded that for now, for my particular congregation, Drupal would be a helpful CMS to at least augment our website – particularly to build the community that’s already there.

We’ve got a fair number of geeks in the congregation, so if I set it up and am hit by a bus, someone else can continue to do the not inconsiderable backend work – securing and upgrading it in particular. It’s also open source, and the software itself costs nothing.

The other open source CMS I’ve played with is Joomla. I like it a lot too, but Drupal has been around longer, and I gravitate to the greater sense of stability. However, for me the biggest difference between the two is that Joomla starts out with lots of bells and whistles, while Drupal you build out with modules. The core program is quite simple.

Further whetting my Drupal appetite was Dan Harper’s call for “Unitarian Universalist geeks [to] commit themselves to maintaining a subset of Drupal” and Scott Well’s response.

Like Scott, I recently discovered and loved the Geeks and God podcast series about Drupal. I highly recommend them for church geeks considering or using Drupal. Alas, Geeks and God is going on a brief hiatus. But if you listen to later episodes (e.g. the most recent, which is excellent for other reasons), they sometimes have more Drupal hints.

In any event (drum roll) here is My Drupal Playground. I won’t guarantee that it will continue to work, since this is the place where I can be as bad as I want to be. While you could in theory subscribe to the feed, I’d advise against it. Even I’m not subscribing to it. I’m just using the blog to jot down quick notes to myself as I learn the peculiarities of Drupal.

One final note for other Drupal enthusiasts: Drupal 6 should be released in the next month or two. For a project like building a subset, we’d probably be better off to postpone getting serious until it’s out and we can assess it. But I, for one, am eager to get going. So happy Drupaling, y’all, and may some of us build something the rest of us can put to good use.

4 Comments »

I don’t have many web heroes, but Jeffrey Zeldman is one of them. Zeldman has been a web pioneer in many ways, but is best known as a constant, clear and effective advocate for web standards. In its most recent issue, Business Week just dubbed him the King.

For those who aren’t well acquainted with web standards, the article is a surprisingly good place to start. It gets right to the nub of why standards matter so very much, and has leads to some of the best resources.

For those who are well acquainted with web standards, it’s a helpful piece to point out to others – those who don’t understand, aren’t interested, and (often inadvertently) are standing in the way. As Zeldman himself points out, “At the least, its publication in Business Week will command some business people’s attention, and perhaps their respect.” I expect the same is true in the non-profit and even the church world.

Congratulations, Zeldman, and keep up the great work.

No Comments »

Our church has done a weekly email for almost eight years now. In the main, it’s been a great success. However, the last few years we’ve been haunted by formatting issues.

The crux of the problem is that most church members and staff don’t understand how their email clients work. Thus what looks fine on their machines can be a mess on someone else’s. This is particularly true for something like our weekly email, which is initially built in Microsoft Word. Plop the document into Outlook with HTML email turned on, and the results are a disaster. While we know how to stop this problem (turn HTML off and plain text on), we’re at risk every time staff or computers change.

Enter Constant Contact, one of the best-know email marketing services. One of our Communication Committee members happened across it some months ago and signed up for a free trial. Committee members experimented with it and we were impressed. However, we were busy and forgot about it, until the end of the fiscal year came round. When we had a little extra money, one of the co-chairs shrewdly suggested that we dive in.

We did, and the results have been even better than we had hoped. Church members love it, and (surprisingly enough) in many ways it’s easier to produce than a text email. Moreover, on Websters, the listserv for UU webmasters, a couple of people who have been using it for much longer than us (including Dean Goddette — thoughts, Dean?), recently wrote that they too have been very happy with Constant Contact.

If you, like us, have been hovering on the edge of using an HTML email service, I’d recommend giving it a try.

Why Do I Recommend It?

• Both church members and committee members really like it.
• Many think it’s attractive. I’m actually not crazy about the way it looks, but that’s probably just because I’m an HTML snoot. More to the point, I’m clearly in a minority. And really, I don’t think it’s bad. In fact, it’s easier to read than the old text version. My aging eyes appreciate the larger font.
• Managing subscribers is amazingly simple. It only took me about 15 minutes to import our list, and adding new subscribers is a breeze. In fact, they can easily do it themselves…
• I followed Constant Contact’s simple directions, and we now have a nifty newsletter sign-up box on our home page. Not only that, it turns out to be rather clever. I tested it and it knew I was already a subscriber; it refused to let me sign up twice and spam myself.
• Unsubscribing is equally easy for the end user.
• While designing a template for the look-and-feel isn’t the easiest, comparatively speaking it is. In my professional life, I use a comparable service, and Constant Contact’s interface is considerably more intuitive.
• Once the template is set up, it’s easier to produce than plain text emails.
• The company is geared to small businesses, and nonprofits.
• It’s relatively inexpensive. One year’s service is under $300 for us.
• A user can receive it in plain text if they’d prefer or if they have a firewall that prevents HTML email.

The Drawbacks?

• It’s an ongoing cost. But compare it to other ongoing costs, such as the Yellow Pages, and the value becomes more obvious.
• The WYSIWYG interface can be temperamental. We had one link that absolutely refused to match others. I finally had to go in and force its hand using raw HTML.
• I’m told that when producing it, response time can be incredibly slow on some machines.

The Bottom Line

If you’re interested in it and think it might meet your congregation’s needs, give it a whirl. They have a free 60 day trial. So far, we’re delighted with it.

8 Comments »

A few months ago I read The Blogging Church and was sold. I’m convinced that blogs can be an incredibly effective tool for congregational communication. But I’m just one of my church’s webmasters. It’s not enough for me to see this potential. For it to take off, this understanding has to spread.

To that end, yesterday I met with one of our committees that’s likely to take the blogging ball and run with it. It’s our Children’s Religious Education steering committee. The committee is functioning well and many on it are very comfortable with computers. They generously allocated 45 minutes of their annual retreat to discussing this possibility with me.

Because I’m such an enthusiast, I wish I could report that they instantly understood what a blog could do for them, and were poised and ready to run with it. But given the larger world’s understanding and use of blogs, that was unlikely in the extreme. Thus, while that wasn’t the outcome, we made good progress.

From my perspective, the main work that has to be done is bridging a gap. Judging by yesterday, most of the gap is a lack of understanding of what blogs really are. It makes perfect sense. From my perspective, even the definition of “blogs” is a rapidly moving target. I think back to 1999, when I first learned I was already doing a “weblog.” I’d been collecting web links of interest to others in my profession, and thought of my posts as “web news.” I’d been doing it for a while. I just didn’t know it was called a weblog (what later became shortened to blog).

Fast forward to today, when the definition is more meshed with a new breed of software that generates blogs, including another very powerful technology in its own right — RSS feeds. Of course, that’s a technical perspective. Add to this mix the perception of blogs, and you get to the crux of the gap we were trying to bridge yesterday.

The Big Barriers

It turns out there are three big barriers we face, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other churches face them too.

Blogs are perceived as online journaling. Of course, much of the blogosphere is just that. But for someone like me, that’s never been the primary appeal of blogs. The vast majority of blogs I subscribe to I still think of as “news.” This was an enormous eye-opener for the committee. When I mentioned my original news blog, one member said, “Well I’d be interested in a blog like that.”

Blogs are perceived as a “time-suck.” This certainly makes sense, and I think it’s probably the biggest barrier. Time is so precious these days, especially to committed church volunteers like them. Of course, they’re thinking of more traditional blogs, such as this very one that you are reading. Yes, this is a big time commitment for me. But another type of blog, such as one for Children’s Religious Education, should end up saving many people a lot of time, and wouldn’t be that big of a time investment for any one person. To that end, one person asked, “Can it replace the listserv we already have?” It’s a great question. And while I can’t be sure, my bet is the answer is yes. What I am certain of is that it can largely replace the listserv if they want it to — and clearly they do.

We don’t yet share a vision. This is the hardest barrier to cross. The members of this committee are, on average, tech-savvy. But tech-savvy does not equate with blog-savvy. Two people in the group clearly do see the potential. One of them (our Director of Religious Education) made it possible for me to be there yesterday. But we shouldn’t be doing a blog for the sake of indulging us enthusiasts. Even worse would be doing a blog for blogging’s sake. To do it right, this has to be a shared ministry.

Yesterday my church planted and watered more blogging seeds. While I don’t know how these particular seeds will bear fruit, it seems certain that in time they will. The barriers are much clearer now, and that means we’re more likely to get past them. It mostly takes patience and a willingness to communicate to become a blogging church.

6 Comments »