websites

Lisa Hendey

This presentation was given at the 2011 Catholic New Media Conference. Below are my notes on the presentation:

Why Bother?

• Educate about the Church
• Provide parish information
• Outreach to interest groups
• Build community

10 Best Practices for Parish Websites

From Craig Berry:

1. Useful contact us page
2. About Us/History Page
3. Prominent use of Social Media
4. Online Map/Directions
5. Calendar of Events
6. Weekly Bulletins
   

Starting today, I'm going to be slowly working on:

1. Upgrading some of my older sites to a newer version of Drupal.
2. Rethinking where I post about certain things.

With regard to the latter point, I'm going to start focusing more on life, religion, philosophy, and such things on this particular blog, while I will focus more on technology (and web development in particular) on my Midwestern Mac, LLC site.

I've hit a point where I think I'll start putting a few sites I maintain on mothballs (much like I have my old 2002-era Latin website, the Duel of the Seminarians site, et all).

After staring at a todo in my inbox for a few weeks, I finally got around to doing it on the flight back from Boston yesterday. I simply wanted an easy, quick, at-a-glance way of telling what time it was in different timezones/cities around the US (and eventually around the world).

So, I created Alltheti.me:

(as displayed on the iPad)

I've been wanting something like this for quite some time, and I finally got a few hours to play around with dates and times in PHP and JavaScript. The times may not be quite right when viewed in certain timezones, so I'd appreciate if any friends from outside US Central time could tell me if their own times are correct.

Lest I forget to mention it, flockNote's 'version 3' website has been launched as of Wednesday afternoon! I spent many (if not most) of my waking hours working on the website and hundreds of features contained within, and after a couple days up and running, the website's still going like a champ!

Excellent home page design by Matthew Warner.

The site is built entirely on top of Drupal 7, and over the past three months, I've grown to appreciate Drupal many times more, as I've learned so much more about the deep and thorough APIs—bugs and all—that have developed into an extremely solid, reliable, and capable framework that is Drupal 7.x. Heck, I even dream about Drupal these days!

Catholic Tech Talk, a Catholic tech/web discussion website, recently posted what they believe to be the five best Catholic Diocesan websites, and I'm happy to report that our very own Archdiocese of St. Louis was ranked #2!

Other dioceses to make the list:

I just had dinner last night with a great young Catholic, Seth DeMoor, who is from Colorado and runs a (relatively) new Catholic website, One Billion Stories.com.

The website has a pretty simple premise: go around the world, collecting stories of some of the billion-plus Catholics, and post them as five-minute videos to the website.

Seth seems like he has a pretty good idea, and the videos cover a lot of great stories. I like the idea, and I hope Seth can find more support, video producers, etc. in the coming years! Maybe, someday, the site will have over a billion stories—but for now, I'm content with the few hundred that are up.

Today, January 5, Drupal version 7.0 was released (download Drupal here). Drupal 7 release parties will be held worldwide on January 7 (which also happens to be my birthday - yay!).

Congratulations to the team of almost 1,000 developers who helped make Drupal 7 a reality, and congratulations to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and webchick, the person who shepherded (and continues herding) the community as the Drupal 7 core maintainer!

Due almost exclusively to the Articles section of this website, it seems that Lifeisaprayer.com (this website) ranks at number 422,290 of approximately 180,000,000 websites on the Internet (according to Alexa).

The most popular content on the site, by a very large margin, are the following articles:

My highest-level password (I have about 8 levels of passwords, memorized, then a couple levels that are even higher than the password below, but which I haven't memorized, so I can't use them that often):

Visit How Secure is My Password?