I just finished a few upgrades on catholicnewslive.com - check it out! If you have a blog or website, you can now embed a Catholic News Live 'latest news' widget on your blog by clicking on the 'Embed' button at the bottom right of any listing page.
After a few months without seeing an update, I finally took the time to process a few more photos for the front page of Lifeisaprayer.com - you can visit the front page and take a look for yourself. You can always click on one of the images to see them all for yourself, in a timeline of sorts.
The Archdiocese of Saint Louis today upgraded its entire website to a new design and a new platform, allowing offices and agencies to more quickly and more easily communicate with the faithful in the Archdiocese (and around the world!).
I've been working on this project (with a lot of help from Palantir, a web development company in Chicago) and some local developers for the past year, and I am pleased with the result (I hope you are, too!). I've written up more information about the technical aspects of the site on Open Source Catholic (read more about the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website), and I will continue writing some posts about specific details on the Open Source Catholic website.
Some of the highlights of the redesign:
As explained on Drupal.org today, Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1 has been released, and it incorporates (among other things) a revamped user interface, custom fields (CCK) in core, image handling in core, an update manager, and a ton of 'under the hood' improvements.
This is going to be the best Drupal release to date, for two reasons:
[UPDATE: I've posted a more comprehensive guide that I intend to keep updated here: St. Louis-area Catholic Bloggers/Websites].
I've come to the realization that many St. Louis-area Catholics have no idea how many excellent blogs are published by other Catholics in the area. Here are the ones I know of - feel free to leave a link to any that I've missed in the comments below.
Obviously the main source of information for Archdiocesan events. I hear they're getting a site upgrade soon... more to come ;-)
A great blog about timely news in the Archdiocese, with a bit of a traditional slant. Often uses colorful and entertaining language when discussing the current state of affairs.
After reading a few articles mulling over the implications of Rupert Murdoch's purported move to pull out all News Corp content from Google News, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, especially since the 'pay wall' issue is something I deal with from day to day with a local news publication...
With the popularity of Google Ads and other similar ad networks, where impressions are free, and clicks cost money, it's no surprise companies are hard-pressed to make any real money with this traditionally-based advertising medium. Heck, only 16% of Internet Users actually click on ads—that's not something the accountants and marketers are excited to hear, when all their business models are based on CTRs (click-through rates). Impression-based pricing is problematic, as well, especially considering the many different techniques people have for tricking ad-impression trackers.
There are a plethora of problems with online advertising metrics, and with revenue from online advertising. There are a few areas where online advertising is extremely effective (YouTube and other video sites have a successful pre-video commercial model, which works well). But for simple news and blog pages, the flashy, arrogant and often irrelevant ads that display in and around the content are largely ignored.
I don't propose any solutions to this huge problem—especially for news companies who, in the past, received more than half their revenue through advertising dollars. However, it's necessary to acknowledge the problem.
Bing, Google, Yahoo - whatever the site is, online search and aggregation is the way of the future—I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have any particular website besides the three above (or one of their sub-sites) as their homepage. The fact is, people don't use the Internet as a replacement for the morning newspaper and bagel. People browse topics that interest them, then follow a topic around to different sources, and gather more information about this topic than was ever before possible in such a short period of time.
Packt publishing just announced earlier this morning that Drupal has won the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS award!
Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.
Joomla was the second place winner (kudos to them as well!); read the original release here.
With Drupal being used on Whitehouse.gov, AT&T's mobile apps website, and countless other corporate sites and subsites, it's a good time to be in the Open Source arena!
More award categories will be announced soon!
Catholic News Live is a new site I've been working on - it is kinda-sorta out of the 'official public beta' status, although most of my sites are in perpetual beta as of late (most notably, Open Source Catholic!), but you can now check the About section of CNL for badges, follow @cathnewslive on Twitter, and subscribe to the many feeds.
Catholic News Live - a little site I whipped up yesterday afternoon. Still in early, early beta. If you're interested in joining and helping sort items into channels (and maybe other perks sooner or later), please email [email protected].
As of today (October 5, 2009), I have moved all the content off the old Lifeisaprayer.com into a new Drupal-based site, in order that I might not have to do so much manual labor in maintaining and updating the site.
This has been a long time coming, as I had the idea to move to a CMS (it was a heat between Drupal (for extensibility) vs. WordPress (for it's ease of use for blogging). But as I didn't know exactly what I wanted this site to become (is it about articles? the blog? photo galleries? what???), I figured Drupal would be the best choice, as I can have a lot more freedom in building out new functionality now. Wordpress is a little limiting if you want to really stretch your site into different directions.
I'm working on the site's theme right now, and probably will be tweaking it over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you have any problems or have suggestions for improvement!