A minor example of the social web facilitating the gospel

This past Sunday (July 12) we had a excellent sermon on Habakkuk by one of our elders.  This particular elder is a high school and college history teacher and has many “friends” on Facebook, including myself.  After I published the sermon Sunday night I posted the link on his Facebook wall.  I was hoping to see a bit of a bump on the web stats.

Habakkuk stats bump as of July 14, 2009 for Word of Life Christian Fellowship

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the bump we received.  A bit under half of the hits were referrers from the Facebook post. I pulled the raw stats and found the number of clicks on the PDF sermon notes was about the same as the Facebook referrer count (as was the sum of the hits against the audio format hits).  I’m not going to say that each referrer from Facebook clicked on the PDF and listened to the audio, but I will say that a fair percentage appear to have.

I post our sermons to our Facebook group every week and we receive almost no hits from Facebook normally.  Those associated with our Facebook page typically have already heard the sermon in person.  It is the diversity of his “friends” that, I think, is the difference here.  It is an interesting enough difference that I think I need to reconsider how I’m using Facebook a bit.

Reflecting on six months of blogging

It has been six months since I started writing this blog.  I have discovered a number of things that have surprised me since I start writing.

Writing is hard work

This certainly isn’t a surprise to most, and I’ve done enough in my career to have already know this.  But still, the commitment necessary to write thoughtful content is large.  I didn’t expect to write every day, but I was hoping to write at least once or twice a week.  I started doing the bi-weekly “interesting church tech links” just to force me to keep doing something related to this effort in general.  When you only have a fairly limited amount of time to write it is harder still when you throw out posts after days and weeks of writing.  For someone who is not 0verly prolific in writing in the first place, this really cuts into the few posts that do come out.

Things have changed

Originally, I was dissatisfied with Christian web-tech related writing.  I think to some degree I was not looking in the right places.  However, I also think the quality of the content (at least that I’m interested in) has blossomed immensely in the last 9-12 months.  Sites like ChurchCrunch.com, ChurchMarketingSucks.com, and AnthonyCoppedge.com are providing quality and thought provoking writing of the likes I’ve not seen previously.  But, I do see some value writing here.  In my area, the largest church is around is only 1500 members and mine is only 150.  We don’t have the resources of the mega-chruches, but we have some of the same vision.  I think there are things to be learned but also be tuned for our smaller communities.

Topics of choice

I’d not intended for this to be a WordPress blog, or a copyright blog.  But it would seem the first six months have had a number of posts related to those topics.  Those posts have correlated with some recent personal efforts and interests.  I am pleased that my analysis of playing CD’s at a church service seems to be helping people (though I can only derive it from the hits, not the comments).

Thank you

“Thank you” to those of you who have stopped by to read my posts and who have occasionally commented.  While this hasn’t gone exactly as I’d intended, I don’t think this effort has been wasted.  I am considering starting a second blog that’s a bit more general to my life but I do wish to continue writing here.  This “web ministry” is a growing part of my life and I look forward to writing about this topic more and the upcoming improvements in my church’s web related outreach efforts.

WordPress Plugin: Breadcrumb NavXT

I just finished installing the Breadcrumb NavXT WordPress Plugin on the church site.  I’d been half-heartedly been looking at what it would take to write the equivalent functionality into my template.  It wasn’t seeming to be too bad, but  when I ran across this plugin, I had to give it a try.  Why rewrite something already done and working?

Obviously, you’re situation may be different from mine, but after activation I changed exactly one value (use “Home” for the Home link title instead of “Blog”), and dropped the default code into my standard and wide page templates.  The result was precisely what I was looking for: standard breadcrumb navigation.  PHP5 is required, but I needed to enable it anyway for the DST support added in WordPress 2.8.

All-in-all, another good plugin and another demonstration of the positive value of WordPress.

Interesting Church Tech links for June 14, 2009

With WordPress 2.8 out, here’s some good WordPress links.

WordPress 2.8 And 10 Things That You Should Know Before/After You Upgrade

DST is finally supported if you’re running on PHP 5… unfortunately none of my sites are… time to ask for an upgrade…

Joomla to WordPress – Content Converter!

Seems like a good starting place for a Joomla migration.

10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks

Somehow I’ve missed #4 and am doing it a much harder way… I have code to update now.

WordPress Theme Development Frameworks

When I do my next WP project I will be looking closely at these frameworks.

Simple WordPress Example Plugin

Having started building my own plugin this is a nice simple example.

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade

I finished upgrading three sites (including the church site) to WordPress 2.8 and had absoluely no problems at all.  I am so very pleased with this platform.  For about a year now I’ve been working seriously with it and its been rock solid all the way along.

Interesting Church Tech Links for May 31, 2009

Some visual design links today:

Fluid Grids

One of the best pure CSS implementations of fluid grids I’ve seen.

O rule + golden proportion for calculating the gutter in the grid

A interesting experiment in picking spacing for grid systems.

Create a clean PSD layout with a 3D look

A really nice tutorial showing some easy techniques for those of us who aren’t graphic designers by nature – uses Photoshop but anyone should be able to adapt the instructions to their tool of choice (Inkscape for me).

How to Choose Colors Everyone Likes

An interesting way of picking sets of colors.

Finalizing Church Projection Team Content Before the Service

I’m curious about other church’s practices for when content/info is given to their multimedia team (or that guy in the back who runs the PC hooked up to the projector).  We’re considering some changes in the practices and some of what we can and cannot do depends on others’ ability to deliver that content.  E.g.:

• when the pastor submits his sermon notes
• any last minute changes to the announcements scroll
• last minute notifications of DVD’s being played
• when the worship leader finalizes the song list

Most of our content is delivered at the last minute (and I mean 5-10 minutes before the service start). We’re finding that the last minute nature of everything does not allow for failures to be managed gracefully.  I’m looking to freeze changes to the projection team sometime before the start of service.  How do others manage this situation?

Interesting Church Tech Links for May 17, 2009

Some more WordPress links today:

101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress

A whole lot of interesting ways to make WordPress work more like a CMS. Some I’ve used, some I’ve not.

Broken Link Checker for WordPress

Been using this and it finally forced me to fix a few already known but broken image links

Analyze WordPress Performance – Plugin!

This plugin generates some interesting stats about the queries for generating a page. Not sure exactly what I’m going to do with the information right now but I’m glad to have another tool for when I will need it.

Change Admin Pagination on Posts, Pages and Comments

WordPress 2.8 looks like its going to have some nice upgrades, but for those who cannot wait, here’s some code to let you alter the number of comments, posts or pages listed in the admin module.

Interesting Church Tech Links for May 3, 2009

Some good articles for WordPress and Google Apps.

Syndicated WordPress Plugin Keeps Your Brand Intact

A WordPress plugin that does URL shortening so you don’t need TinyURL.com or such and you keep your domain name in the resulting URL – good for keeping your brand identity in the steam for Twitter and such.

Mt. Gilead’s Experience with Google Apps for Domains – Part I and Part II

Some interesting analysis and experience with Google Apps for Domains

Embed WordPress Functions Outside WordPress

Used this technique to integrate my error pages into the WordPress template.

Auto-Email Web Server Errors with WordPress

404/403 Website Error Pages with PHP Auto-Mailer from Nettuts+ scrolled through my RSS feeds the other day.  I was thinking that since I have WordPress installed it should be really easy to add some auto-emailing to the 404 template page.  While there are a few 404 WordPress plugins I didn’t see any that added the emailing.  So I added this to the bottom of my 404.php file:

<?php
$s_headers = "";
$s_to = "" ;
$s_subject = "404 Page Generated" ;
$s_message = "<ul>" ;
$s_message .= "<li>Request URL:" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "</li>";
$s_message .= "<li>Request Method:" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] . "</li>";
$s_message .= "<li>Referer:" . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . "</li>";
$s_message .= "<li>Remote Address:" . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "</li>";
$s_message .= "</ul>";
mail($s_to, $s_subject, $s_message, $s_headers ) ;
?>

So when a 404 gets generated I now am informed what failed, where it came from, who it came from and if it was a GET or POST.

What about other errors?

Ok, that was easy for the 404 because it was built into the WP template system.  But what about other errors like 500 (server error) and 403 (forbidden)?  WP doesn’t have templates for them.  Well, its pretty easy to take an arbitrary PHP script and include the entire WP environment.  I created a 500.php file that looks something like this:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require_once('wp-load.php');
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<h2 class="center">Server Error - Pray For Us</h2>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
<?php /* all that emailing code I just wrote in the 404.php file but used "500" instead of 404 */ ?>

The define() and require_once() functions pull in the WordPress environment.  You only need to watch out for the relative path to the wp-load.php file since it depends on where your PHP script is executing.  Now, duplicate code is a poor programming practice and I had access to all of WP; that means I had access to the functions.php file for the current template.  So, I took the original emailing code and wrote it into a function in the functions.php file.  Of course, if I change the theme I’ll have to make sure this function moves also.  The alternative is to put it into a separate PHP script and include it like the wp-load.php script.  The last line of the 404.php and 500.php files now look like:

<?php mail_request_info( "404 Page" ) ; ?>

and

<?php mail_request_info( "500 Page" ) ; ?>

Wrapping Up

You’ll want to follow their tutorial for how to update your Apache environment to reference the 500.php in the event of a server error.  I also wrote a 403.php file that worked the same way.  This effort paid immediate dividends for me as I found a couple of minor broken links on the site.  Nothing an HTML validator wouldn’t have found but I don’t run one against the site unless I’m redesigning it.  Between these scripts and the Redirection Plugin there are now very few broken pages since the major redesign on the site.  One note of caution, if you’re a high-volume site you might get flooded with emails.