Faith and Web

While all of the sites that I maintain look fine on my lovely new iPhone, they are itsy-bitsy postage-stamp renditions of their big daddy monitor versions. Does that suffice, I wondered? My hope was it would be easy to “sniff” (i.e., have the browser recognize) an iPhone accessing a site and then direct it to an iPhone-friendly rendition (whatever that means).

Specifically I was hoping to point iPhones to alternate style-sheets (CSS). It turns out it’s a breeze — if you have a nice clean site (in the HTML/CSS-sense).

Why Point to Alternate CSS?

I haven’t talked much about the importance of CSS on this blog, but that’s only because the blog is young. If I’m a zealot about anything, it would be CSS. CSS is incredibly important to a web professional and this is a great example.

Back in the dawn of browser-sniffing time (1997ish), webmasters coping with browser inconsistencies would point users to alternate pages. This was an incredible amount of work, and fraught with peril. Then CSS started to mature and came into its own at the point browser producers started to support it.

The Cliff Notes version is that nowadays a webmaster worth her salt will aim to totally control a sites’ look, feel and layout with CSS. If you can achieve this separation of look and content, the site should be easy to adapt to the many unpredictable web twists like the creation of the iPhone.

How Does a Website “Sniff” an iPhone?

So how does one do this magic — using an iPhone as an example? It actually depends on the scripting used for a particular website. These days I use PHP on all my sites, although other technologies like ASP.NET and Coldfusion would work just as well.

It only needs one or two lines of code – something like the following:

<?php
$browser = getenv(”HTTP_USER_AGENT”);
echo ‘<p>HTTP User Agent is: ‘ . $browser . ‘</p>’;
?>

You can see the results of this little script here.

Mine says “HTTP User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4”. This translates to I’m using Firefox (Mozilla) on an aging Mac. But when I’m on my iPhone, ta da, the resulting page includes the magic string “iPhone”.

iPhone Detected; Then What?

That’s the big question. But to answer it from the simple coding perspective, you can do something like a classic if/then statement, along the lines of:

$browser = getenv(”HTTP_USER_AGENT”);
if (eregi(’iPhone’, $browser)) { … }

“Eregi” reads the resulting string stored in the variable $browser and if it sees “iPhone”, then it does its thing. So where the ellipses (…) are you do whatever you want — the most likely being point to an iPhone-friendly stylesheet.

For this example, I’ve monkeyed just a little with the embedded stylesheet.

<?php
$background = “#fef9b7″;
$browser = getenv(”HTTP_USER_AGENT”);
if (eregi(’iPhone’, $browser)) { $background = “#b7ebfe”; }
?>
<style type=”text/css”>
body { background: <?php echo $background ?>; }
</style>

The result? If you look at this page on an iPhone it’s light blue (#b7ebfe). On anything else, it’s light yellow (#fef9b7).

What Next?

For now, all I know is how to code. What best to code for an iPhone is a different kettle of fish. Actually, I think it’s too early to know. It depends on how users work with iPhones. I could fall into the classic trap of designing for me on my iPhone, and while that’s fun, it’s a big usability no-no.

The bottom line is we web pros now have two homework assignments:

• Figure out how most people look at our websites using an iPhone.
• Clean up our code. If you haven’t done this already (and most church sites haven’t in my observation), separate content from style. If yours is such, get going. It’s a great investment in the future of your site, iPhone or no.

1 Comment »

I succumbed. I got an iPhone.

It reminds me of the Christmas I was 7 and got the most amazing (to my eyes) dollhouse. I could hardly tear myself away. But unlike a dollhouse, this toy I can take with me.

To my surprise, it’s every bit as gorgeous as the hype led me to believe. I was prepared to be more disappointed than I am.

Of course, it’s not perfect. The biggest disappointment involves my main reason for getting an iPhone – that is, how it renders web pages. It starts to recognize the wireless connection in my house, but then flips over to the cell phone connection, at which point, it costs cell phone time and, worse, it crawls.

The pace it renders web pages reminds me of 1995 on some ancient modem attached to a machine with almost no RAM. Surf the web? Ha. Back in those days, I’d call up web pages and sometimes they’d come in fairly quickly, but sometimes I’d wander off and do little chores, like the dishes, while waiting for it to respond. That’s how slow the iPhone connection is right now.

The good news is web connectivity is likely to improve soon. I’ll either figure out how to configure things differently, or Apple will fix some glitch. No matter what, though, I can’t imagine choosing to call up sites using ATT’s network. In a word, it’s dreadful.

Once you do get to your website of choice, be it church or state, it looks wonderful — like a dollhouse version. It shrinks down as advertised, and zooming in and out is great fun. It doesn’t recognize Flash, so if you have a Flash-dependent site, you’re out of luck. But the biggest issue is once you get to a page, it’s so slow you’re anything but motivated to go to another page.

So for now, my jury is out on the impact of the iPhone on designing church websites. Will you need to design an iPhone friendly version? And if so, what does that mean? Those are still the biggest questions in my mind. I’ll keep you posted as I get more answers.

1 Comment »

Several years ago, I attempted to create a members-only site for our congregation using phpBB. This limped along and was ignored by everyone except porn and viagra spammers. Stinker #1.

My second attempt was using MediaWiki software (Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia, MediaWiki is the software). I very proudly installed the software on wiki.chaliceuu.org and named it ChaliceWiki. I announced it and showed it to people.

I assumed that everyone knew about Wikipedia and that everyone knew that you could edit it. False on both counts. I spent all my time explaining Wikipedia. “You know, WIKIPEDIA!” Apparently, the “explaining it louder principle” doesn’t work for translating techno-babble any better than English. Stinker #2. Trashed it.

I recreated the site as members.chaliceuu.org - the members-only site that you can edit. No talk of Wikis or Wikipedia. I worked with colleagues on the Technology Committee, hashed out a basic organization for the information and populated a skeleton of content. I rolled it out to a few people and two recruits began adding material on their own. I can’t tell you how happy I was when someone else started creating content!

We have had the members-only section up since the beginning of April 2007 and it has been growing steadily. Currently, at three months we have 83 users and 369 pages.

What goes into a members-only section?

Roughly in the order that it went in, here is our current content:

• Directory of Members (our #1 draw)
• Official documents (eg. MUP)
• Maps, drawing & diagrams of the facility
• Congregational History while it is under development
• ByLaws
• ByLaw drafts
• Conflict resolution process
• Long Range Planning docs & drafts
• Committee pages (title, purpose, members, minutes)
• Policies
• Forms
• Newsletters (PDF)
• News clippings
• Support documents such as instructions for Greeters, Worship Associates, etc.
• Event photos
• Board Minutes
• Committee meeting minutes

Ask around for stuff. Troll for documents that you can easily convert like the By-laws and policy manuals. You’ll be amazed how much information is scattered among your congregation members. When I finally tracked down the ex-chair of Buildings and Grounds, he coughed up a ton of documents like major use permits, plans, diagrams, electrical layout, plumbing and sewer plans that he had at home. He scanned them in and uploaded them himself!

My Advice

Wikipedians may be comfortable with vast open empty spaces but congregation members are not. You’ll need to accumulate a certain amount of content and put a skeleton structure in place, like committee pages, before you roll out the site. People are more willing to edit than they are to create!

Take the rollout slowly and only involve people who have a reason to use the material you have loaded. For example, target key people like the Board Secretary to put the Board Minutes into the site. Then the entire board has a reason to go to the site and get accounts. Once you start accumulating material, people will want to get on board. Listen to their complaints and see what you can do to improve things. Work one on one or in small groups.

The software is far from perfect. The documentation leaves a lot to be desired. But, with some tweaking, it can become simple to use and will have content that attracts people. In another article, I’ll talk about some of the specific tweaks that are needed to make it easier to use. One of the tweaks is to make the main page as attractive, informative and easy to navigate as possible. This means making it very non-standard from a wiki standpoint but its crucial to helping people get oriented.

Save the Day!

All in all, our members-only site is successful and actively used. Most people browse and a small group create and edit content. But even if you are on your own, it takes less time than you think. Just make a habit of dumping anything appropriate that you find into the site. And scrounge! Eventually someone will ask “Does anyone know where the approved version of the watzit policy is?” Instead of “Hmm, I think Carol or Bob has a copy of that,” you’ll be able to pull it down from the members-only site and save the day. It’s happened. Once people see the sense of collecting all this information into one location, things will really take off.

Update, July 4: Be sure to see Dean’s more techie follow-up on this topic over on his blog: Members-Only: A Wiki in Sheep’s Clothing - Part 2. Anna Belle

9 Comments »

Yesterday the web professionals’ world was consumed with talk about Apple’s new version of its browser, Safari. Amazingly enough, it now runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista, as well as Mac OS X. It’s also free and you can download a beta version.

The question is why would you? I did, just to test the sites that I am paid to maintain. But these are very large sites with high traffic, and I needed to know if they worked on this new browser. (Answer: yes.)

For a church website, though, I can’t see why you’d want to, unless you simply enjoy this kind of thing. Safari 3 is full of bugs and security flaws. It crashes easily and often. It’s beta, so I don’t think that’s a big deal, but it does argue against downloading it unless you have a compelling reason. A compelling reason would be your site statistics showing a significant number of visitors using Safari 3.

Steve Jobs says it’s twice as fast as other browsers. That appeared to be true on my PC, but so what if it doesn’t work correctly? According to the New York Times, Mr. Jobs also said “the company was encouraging Apple software developers to use modern Internet software standards to make applications compatible with Apple’s iPhone.” To my mind, this is where Safari 3 has the potential to really matter.

When I tested, I did notice the improved use of standards, particularly in the way it renders forms (which previously have been quirky in Safari). But most important is that WebKit, the engine behind Safari, is being open-sourced, so developers can create apps that will run within Safari on the iPhone.

What this means is that in time (maybe this fall?) church professionals are likely to hear from congregants looking at the church site on their new iPhones. When that day arrives, ask them to show you. That’s when Safari 3 will matter for your church site, and chances are they would love to show off their new toy.

For more information, see Techmeme’s aggregation of Safari 3 articles.

2 Comments »

Weebly, a new startup by three Penn State students, makes it incredibly easy to build a professional-looking website for your congregation – and it’s free. As they put it: “Our focus is to maintain elegance and simplicity coupled with powerful features, to allow all types of users to create, manage, and host their website, free of charge.”

I tried it out, and set up a site in under an hour. All you have to do is sign up for an account. After that it’s mostly just dragging and dropping “elements” (text and image holders, Google maps, YouTube videos, etc.). You don’t need to know the first thing about HTML, much less how to program. You can even test-drive it.

How Does It Break Down?

In the Plus Column

• The interface is both simple and intuitive.
• Blogging is built in.
• It has a developer section, so programmers can make widgets for Weebly.
• It’s gotten good reviews from notables like Techcrunch.
• It seems to be stable. At least it didn’t crash on me.
• It’s great for videos.
• It even has a simple contact form you can add.
• You can download your whole site as a zip file, which is great for backup.
• You don’t have to use “weebly.com.” You can use your own domain name.

In the Minus Column

• You can only design simple, small sites. In particular, you can only set up a limited number of pages, all of which are part of the main menu.
• You are limited to Weebly’s set of about 20 designs. In my case, I chose one where I could incorporate my graphic. Then I desperately wanted to get into the CSS and make the text darker, so its contrast with the background would be more readable, but couldn’t do it. “Theme specifications (for user-submitted themes)” is on their to-do list, so hopefully this will change soon.
• Statistics are limited to page views.
• You can’t have multiple site administrators, with varying degrees of control over the site.
• It’s new, so who knows how stable it is.

The bottom line: if you need a small, simple website or if ease-of-construction is paramount and you’re willing to compromise on a small site, Weebly looks like a winner. I’d recommend trying it out.

No Comments »

A Christian web developer recently asked me about web apps for prayer requests.  He thinks, and I agree, that, “The social networking aspect of web 2.0 applications would be a great platform.”  I think Ajax in particular has a lot of potential.

He asked if I knew of resources that might be helpful.  I don’t, but thought some of you readers might.  If you do, drop me a line.

2 Comments »

Birthday season and Mother’s Day are rapidly approaching, and I have a dreadful case of hardware greed. When the iPhone was first announced, I quickly persuaded myself it could wait. But yesterday when walking home, I suddenly knew: it’s a must-have. I’m convinced within a year cell phones (particularly iPhones) are going to be a major source of web page views. So what webmaster can live without one? Or so my “thinking” went.

The last 24 hours I’ve been attempting to be less impulsive. Here’s how it shakes out:

The Cons

• They cost the earth. $499 or $599.
• That’s before the carrier. I’ve still got a year more on Verizon, and iPhone is only on Cingular.
• When they first come out, they are likely to be buggy.
• Email will be too convenient.
• They won’t be out until June.

The Pros

• Just look at the web interface. Is it not amazing? I’m particularly drawn to the ability to switch from portrait to landscape.
• What webmistress can be without one? We have to be able to check our sites, right?
• They are drop-dead gorgeous.

So, that’s 3 yeas and 5 nays, but don’t you think the yea’s still win?

No Comments »

Can you imagine combining the technological genius behind Facebook and Napster with belief-based organizations? I’m trying hard and find the possibilities jaw-dropping. Actually, it had never occurred to me before reading this a recent story in Techcrunch.

But it makes such sense. As the article notes: “Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fundraising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era.”

It could be a reality very soon. Project Agape is a priority for Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and Plaxo and founding president of Facebook. According to Techcrunch, his goal is “to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.”

2 Comments »