IT / Web

As has been mentioned previously on this blog, we are big fans of the Apple platform. Ask 15 people across North Point why this is, and you will likely get 15 different answers. However, from an IT perspective there are two main reasons:

1. It puts lots of creativity into the hands of our users. Sure, you could accomplish this with a Windows machine as well, but not with out of the box software. We put a very high value on creativity around here, so the more that’s available to the fingertips of our users with minimal additional cost, the better.
2. Viruses, Adware, and Malware oh my.

I am sure you all have your arguments with me on this topic. So, don’t take it from me, take it from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. And as always, feel free to disagree with me by commenting below!!

This post is a long time in the making, but a recent article from Google renewed my passion for the topic, so I thought I would share our journey into the clouds with you.

Step back with me, way back to 2002, when I began my employment here at North Point. At that time all of our email was handled through a Mac clone running EIMS. People only used POP on this bad boy, so all email was contained within the individual Entourage databases of our users. If this doesn’t strike fear in your heart, then you might be reading the wrong blog.  On top of this, there was no real contact or calendar sharing to speak of.  And to make matters even worse, we were (and still are) an all-Mac shop on the end user side. So to move to something like exchange was a very difficult idea for us to swallow.

We went on like this for the next 4 years until…one day…. we hired…a windows guy to run our IT department….

dum dum dum…..

Fear not though… we quickly assimilated him into our undying devotion to the Apple platform. This turned out to be great because he had the best of both worlds. He had the experience of the real world, and the love of the pretty one. So, we began our search for a replacement of EIMS.

Fast forward a few years to the end of 2007 when a friend of mine asked an alarmingly simple question, “Why don’t you guys use Google Apps? Its free?” What?!? I did a double take to make sure he was serious. After I casually blew him off, I quickly ran back to my desk to ponder the idea. Eventually, we set up a test domain, added some key users in the ministry, and quickly fell in love. Here’s why:

1. It democratizes technology: people only use what they need of Google apps. They don’t have to wait on the IT department for upgrades and feature additions.
2. They have more cash than me: they can provide backups and D/R sites that I will never be able to afford.
3. No infrastructure required: need I say more?
   
4. Its free: as in the First Amendment.
5. Spam filtering: it’s by Postini/Google, and it is awesome and crazy cheap for NPO’s. This also provides us with 1 year of email archiving.

There are many other reasons but these are the big five as I see them.

Over the next year or so, we migrated all of our users from Entourage POP to Mail.app/gmail/imap. We migrated all of their calendars to Google and provided training sessions of about 10-15 people per session until everyone was migrated.

As with any major move, we had many challenges.

• Google has not been the greatest customer service organization. Getting in touch with someone when a real issue arises has its problems.
• We are one big organization with many parts (campuses, and domain names), and Google apps only gives you one domain for everything to fall under. However, they also allow you to have alias domains. So, we created a parent domain to configure everything, and we set everyone’s default alias/domain to the campus/domain where they work.
• We had to develop our own training materials and migration plans. I only mention this because since then Google has created a deployment center for this. I highly recommend it.

The move to Google apps has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for us. As Google continues to shore up current features and add awesome new ones, it only gets better. The only problem we are having these days is how to get all this new information into the hands of the users that want/need it. Despite everything though, I would much rather have this problem than sending emails to my users about my exchange server being down.

Disclaimer: We were a bit unique with our move in that we went from nothing to something amazing. Most people already have Exchange, so moving to  Google apps may be a little more difficult for them because it may not solve all problems. Furthermore, your users already have certain expectations of a product that mine did not. Here is a great source of information on this point. http://citrt.pbworks.com/Google-Apps-Pros-Cons-Other

So I have spent some hours this week making sure that our web sites are “valid”. This means going through and filling out “ALT” tags in images, making sure “INPUTS” have a trailing “/” at the end and that your randon “DIV” has a closing “DIV” to match it. What does that /really/ mean to my team? why does that matter?
Well.. this is from the w3c site:

Validation as a debugging tool
While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag soup”, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.

When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.

I know that we do this for new projects, It is a great starting point for trying to figure our why /new/ problems are occuring as well as just a great double check to your own code.

Validation as a future-proof quality check
Checking that a page “displays fine” in several contemporary browsers may be a reasonable insurance that the page will “work” today, but it does not guarantee that it will work tomorrow.

Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.
Validation is a /starting point/ to figure out bugs, If you can prove that your site is valid, you can also rule out a lot of possible problems with it and discover the actual problem with your site.

Validation eases maintenance
It is reasonable to consider that standards such as HTML and CSS are a form of “coding style” which is globally agreed upon. Creating Web pages or applications according to a widely accepted coding style makes them easier to maintain, even if the maintenance and evolution is performed by someone else.
I completely agree with this, If sites are coded with standards then /anyone/ can come in and update them with ease. Understanding that /you/ might not be the one in charge of the site within the next 2 or 5 years is key.

Validation helps teach good practices
yes, I think we’ve covered this by now.

Validation is a sign of professionalism
As of today, there is little or no certification for Web professionals, and only few universities teach Web technologies, leaving most Web-smiths to learn by themselves, with varied success. Seasoned, able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup, separation of style and content, etc. Validation can then be used as a quick check to determine whether the code is the clean work of a seasoned HTML author, or quickly hacked-together tag soup.

I feel weird about this one, but I agree with it. If you hire a development firm to… say… design and develop a new template/system for a significant web property that you own, you would expect the final product would validate!

So, what have we learned here?
Validate to check your code, its another pair of eyes which we all know is very useful in the IT world.
Validate as a leveling ground for bug tracking, if you know your code is properly formatted then you have a place to start with debugging user issues.
Validate as a statement of professionalism, consider your customer and think of them “secretly” checking the validity of your work and to their chagrin it validates! that gives you +1 internets!

Source: validator.w3.org

If you’re anything like us, you’ve got more than enough work to keep your team busy. The appetite for web sites and applications continues to grow at a frenetic pace, and the ministry teams we support have no shortage of great ideas. And, of course, we all love to work on projects that come with new challenges, cutting-edge technologies, and high impact. Yet, in the midst of all of this activity, we cannot neglect the technology infrastructure that allows us to provide these great services to our ministries and their audience.

One particular challenge that we’ve been discussing lately is upgrades. There are many different schools of thought on this one - some could be considered “early adopters”, choosing to upgrade their systems with every new release. This is attractive in that you’re always up-to-date should any problems with your infrastructure arise, and you get the new features as soon as they come out. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that never upgrade unless they encounter a problem - “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

One of the by-products of our organization’s strategy to be a “House of Brands” is that we have a lot of different sites running on a variety of platforms, so we’ve recently started putting together a strategy for how and when to upgrade our systems. This includes the following, to name a few:

• Operating Systems for our web servers and database servers (Red Hat Linux and Windows Server)
• Database Systems (MySQL and Microsoft SQL)
• WordPress, WordPress MU, and Expression Engine content management systems
• Church Management Systems
• Java and .NET
• jQuery

We’re more than a little overdue to implement a proactive strategy around how we want to keep these systems up-to-date, but we are working on it and getting better. Whether you have one site or many to manage, it is prudent to sit down and figure out what strategy fits your organization best.

What’s your upgrade strategy?

Email Newsletters are still all the rage. Sometimes, on a bad day, I just wish they would go away.

It’s probably because I’m over email newsletter systems; most of them just don’t work well and cross-browser and email client testing can be such a hassle.

But, it’s still a significant part of how we communicate to our congregation, partners, and organization. I don’t see it going away anytime soon.

So the only logical choice is making sure we have the most robust emailing system available. We’ve been using one such system, Constant Contact, and it’s done an ok job so far, but we’re always on the lookout for other systems to either compare or contrast feature sets and functionalities.

Do you have any recommendations? What does your ministry use?

Let’s admit it. We’re human, and as human beings go we’re not very good at being “perfect.”

This obviously complicates everything the moment we get in teams. To think that we even have the capacity to do anything productive without killing each other! But, we do.

So, as a result, not only do we need to be more cognizant of who we are individually (and how we can improve ourselves) but also our team. As a result, we’re going through Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Disfunctions of a Team together!

I think it shall be grand. The first step in making things better is admitting that they need to get better! And, we can always do better.

So, how are you building up your web team? Are you guys going through anything together?

One of our goals for this year is to continue to solidify how we launch web properties and products. Process is what we’re looking for!

We’re caught between two worlds though (and you’re probably as familiar as we are with these two); our desire to be fast, agile, and responsive as well as making sure that we can keep standards and boundaries for requests.

One of the ways in which we’re making headway is by starting to really leverage a number of web-based services and applications. For example, we’re using Basecamp for some of our project management.

It’s never too early (or late) to start developing process around your web projects. How are you doing that with your team?

Being a “mega-church” has it’s perks…cool buildings, great music, great messages, and thousands of people to join in community with.

But, being a “mega-church” also has its issues.

One of the biggest issues that our Web Team faces is being bombarded with “How did you do _____?” questions. Please don’t misunderstand me here, we LOVE helping other church leaders find their way in the crazy World Wide Web, but literally answering 50-100 phone calls and emails a week regarding “How’d ya do that?” was getting a bit much.

Now, this may seem simple to you (and why we haven’t done this sooner, I’ll never know!), but we have created a FAQs page to direct people to when they have specific questions. This page will be available very soon, and we will be happy to point everyone to it! I will even be changing my voice mail to say the following:

You have reached Amber Castleberry with North Point Ministries. If you have a question regarding how our Web Team has created or designed any portion of our website, please go to this URL _________ where you will most likely find your question (and many more) answered. All other inquiries, please leave a message. Thanks, and have a great day!

–

Please check back soon to find our shared FAQs page. And, if you have a question…feel free to drop one in the comments section - it may just end up being answered very soon!

One of the biggest tools in our toolbox lately is jQuery. Just about every site we create these days has at least one jQuery feature or plugin that we’re using. If you’ve read this far and your eyes haven’t rolled back in your head, then you most likely know what jQuery is and probably also know that there is no shortage of web pages and articles about jQuery. This is by no means a comprehensive look at using jQuery, but we thought we’d share some of the plugins we’ve found very useful.

Countdown Timer - this plugin makes it very easy to have a countdown clock on your site. We’ve used this quite a bit to count down to events, like a Night of Worship or the next KidStuf Live. We have even used it in a behind-the-scenes, invisible manner to kick off an action at a specific point in time using the callback methods.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/countdown2
• Example: http://northpointonline.tv/

Slideshow / Cycle - a simple plugin that allows you to create a quick slideshow or cycle feature. There are some basic animation effects that can be configured as well. One of our main uses of it is as a revolving banner area on our home page to show featured events and announcements.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/cycle
• Example: http://northpoint.org/

Table Sorter - sorts table columns based on pre-defined criteria and/or user action. You can configure it to default sort on a specific column, prohibit sorting on certain columns, etc. Very useful wherever you’re displaying tabular data.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/tablesorter
• Example: http://goglobalx.org/go

Kwicks - menu animation feature that slides open columns in a menu with a nice effect.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/kwicks
• Example: http://northpoint.org/ (Quick Links at the top of the page - effect shows as you hover over different columns)

Simple Modal - there are a lot of different light box plugins out there, and they all have pros and cons. This one is pretty simple to configure with CSS and allows any type of content in the modal dialog. We’re using it in several places.

• Plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/SimpleModal
• Example: http://insidenorthpoint.org/groups/group-life-resources/video/ (click on one of the video thumbnails)

Form Validation - there are also a bunch of different plugins that facilitate client-side validation on forms. This one can be configured to do a whole lot, but we’ve found that keeping it to a minimum yields the most consistent results.

• Plugin: http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation
• Example: http://kidstuf.com/site/invite

Got jQuery?

We’ve spent some time recently cleaning up.  This may not seem like fun to most people, but I actually enjoy it.

We are frequently updating our sites with new designs, technologies, and features, but we often neglect to decommission or delete our old stuff.  Sometimes we don’t want to get rid of things because we want to be able to roll back in case of problems, or we think that the old information may have some value at a later date.

Storage is cheap these days, so it may seem like a waste of time to look backwards and clean up your mess.  While I certainly don’t want to spend a majority of my time cleaning up, I think it is an important thing to do.

Here are some things to consider:

• Will your old data cause confusion and delay when you or someone else needs to work on your current system?
• Are you paying to backup old data?
• Could your old system cause a security problem down the road?

I’ve started creating calendar reminders to delete data and decommission systems when I feel that it will be safe.  We also have some processes in place that clean up our old log files automatically.

Are you being proactive and cleaning up, or do you wait until your disk is full?