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Catholic Programmer's T-Shirt and Mousepad

Submitted by geerlingguy on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 10:05am
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A few weeks back, after finishing a full day of swimming in PHP, HTML and CSS, I was pondering the great mystery of human existence, but probably had a little too much to drink. The result?

Catholic Programmer's Design

You can buy the design on the following products (via Zazzle):

Would you like the design on anything else? I could do a mug, or socks, or anything else in Zazzle's catalog...

Alternatively, can you think of a way to code this better? ;-)

Drupal Gardens enters Open Public Beta

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 4:02pm
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...and now anyone can set up a fresh, hosted Drupal 7 website in seconds—for free.

From Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and president of Acquia, the company behind Drupal Gardens (basically, a site like wordpress.com, except with more awesome):

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

I expect this service, and others like it, to grow in popularity in the coming years. For many parishes, a site on Drupal Gardens would do 90% of what they'd need (or 100%, if they weren't shooting for the stars...).

And it's free (for basic plans), community-based, and super-easy to use (the theme developer is especially nice). On top of that, you can, at any time, download your entire site and put it on your own web host!

Live-Blogging to Drive Traffic, Interest to Organizational Events

Submitted by geerlingguy on Fri, 07/16/2010 - 4:28pm
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The Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America conference is attended by over 6,000 teens every year, and there are many parents, friends, and other teens who wish they could participate as well. We have always posted information after the conference, but in St. Louis, for the past two years, we've started live-blogging and posting to social networks frequently throughout the conference, driving up traffic to our OYM websites.

Here are some of the things we've been doing to drive traffic and share information live from the conference.

ST101 - Friday Afternoon 002
My setup for the first week... watch a video highlighting the gear » Continue Reading »

(Arch)Dioceses Getting On Board with Online Evangelization

Submitted by oscatholic on Fri, 07/02/2010 - 2:27pm
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On July 1, it looks like two separate Archdioceses made announcements relating to online evangelization:

Archdiocese of St. Louis' new Office of Web Development:

In July of 2010, seeing the need for an increasing presence online and in social media outlets, the Archdiocese of St. Louis has created a new office, the Office of Web Development, to help Archdiocesan agencies, affiliated organizations, and (eventually) parishes with their online development.

The Office of Web Development will work in especially close collaboration with the St. Louis Review and the Office of Communications in making sure news and newsworthy stories are delivered online to as many people as possible.

Read more »

Archdiocese of Boston's New Media & Initiatives group:

BRAINTREE — Embracing new and state-of-the-art forms of digital communication to reach the faithful has been a top priority of Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley.

As part of that effort, effective July 1, the secretariat for Catholic Media will be added to Cardinal O’Malley’s cabinet. Scot Landry, the current secretary for Institutional Advancement, will become the secretary for Catholic Media and oversee all of the archdiocese’s print and digital media including The Pilot’s print edition and its website, CatholicTV, the Boston Catholic Directory, Cardinal O’Malley’s weekly email, the archdiocese’s website, the archdiocese’s new media accounts including Facebook, Twitter and photo sharing.

Read more »

Are there any other dioceses getting started (or already well-established) in these areas?

Setting up an Apache Solr Search Server (for many sites/hosts)

Submitted by oscatholic on Tue, 06/29/2010 - 11:17am
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Magnifying GlassIn the Archdiocese of St. Louis, I manage more than 15 separate Drupal websites (plus a few others), and I have often wanted to use Apache Solr for search across all these sites. I finally had some time to tackle this issue, and I have a pretty good (and very fast) Solr server set up, and this server is shared across all these sites on two (so far) different webservers through two different hosting companies.

The main Archdiocesan sites (archstl.org, archstldev.com, and stlouisreview.com) are all hosted via SoftLayer in Dallas, while Catholic Youth Apostolate sites (like stlyouth.org and cycstl.net) are hosted via Hot Drupal in North Carolina.

I was able to set up a linode (linode.com) for less than $20 to run Apache Solr via Jetty, and that server is then accessible to all our other servers to send and receive search index data. This solution allows our main web servers to keep resources free from expensive MySQL search queries and the large databases that result from storing 20k+ nodes' search data in the main site DB.

You can find the process by which I set up the search server in this issue on the Development website. The best thing about this system is that I can really make the search server fly; ping takes about 30-40ms between the search server and our other servers, and queries only take about 150-250ms to reach the websites.

Any large organization looking to vastly improve search performance (and usability), especially on a Drupal site (it's so easy, with the Apache Solr Search Integration module pluggable right out of the box), should look into setting up a dedicated search VPS or server (depending on your search traffic).

Our linode Solr server typically sits close to idle, even at peak hours (right now it's showing 0.00, 0.00, 0.00), and I'll probably set it up to do some other tasks off-site as well, since it has the spare CPU, memory and disk space available (and a really fat pipe to the Internet!).

MA Parish Using Social Media/Website Effectively

Submitted by oscatholic on Fri, 06/25/2010 - 10:52am
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After reading this article from the CNS about a Massachusetts parish's use of its website, YouTube, Facebook, etc., it seems like they would be a good example of what to emulate in other parishes.

Father Longe and parishioner Timothy Hourihan believe in taking the message of Jesus to new people in new ways. Specifically, during the past year they initiated many forms of electronic evangelization to attract more people to the faith.

Since April 2009, the parish YouTube site has had more than 20,000 views of its home-produced videos. The men have created a church blog, Facebook site and Twitter account, and have homilies, songs and prayers available for free downloads on iTunes.

The electronic offerings from the parish are a mix of education and entertainment. For example, one popular YouTube video involved Father Longe just standing in front of the parish statue of Mary and talking about the mother of Jesus.

Another video features Father Brian F. McGrath, St. Mary's pastor, cooking an Italian meal. The show follows him from the rectory garden to the kitchen to the dinner table.

It's not just about the technologies—it's about how interested a parish actually is in using those technologies. It seems like Fr. McGrath (the pastor of St. Mary's) is being very helpful in this regard, encouraging parishioners to help him promote the parish online.

I think more parishes will take this approach in the coming years (especially those with younger parishioners).

Here's the St. Mary's parish website; one thing I wish more parishes (including St. Mary's) would do is use a better content management system/strategy so they could wrap all their online offerings in one consistent website, rather than having a link to an offsite blog, a link to YouTube, a link to Facebook, etc...

Celebrating the Holy Mass from an iPad

Submitted by geerlingguy on Fri, 06/18/2010 - 4:10pm
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iPad with Roman MissalAs seen on WDTPRS earlier today (and quoted from the AP—Fr. Z's comments in bold):

ROME — An Italian priest has developed an iPad application that will let priests celebrate Mass with an iPad on the altar instead of the regular Roman missal.

The Rev. Paolo Padrini, a consultant with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said Friday that the free application will be launched in July in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. [In this case, I hope it will be complete. I found iBreviary to be… sub-optimal.]

Two years ago, Padrini developed the iBreviary, an application that brought the book of daily prayers used by priests onto iPhones. He said the iPad application is similar but also contains the complete missal — containing all that is said and sung during Mass throughout the liturgical year. [Since the Missal is less complicated, perhaps it will be complete. However…. will it be only the 2002 Missale Romanum? And what to do, for English, about the translation? Other languages have already updated their translations.]

Pope Benedict XVI has sought to reach out to young people through new media.

Thoughts? On first reading this, I was a little distressed... but thinking more about this, I wonder if this is not an altogether bad idea. At first, for traveling priests, this would be a godsend. Carrying around a Roman Missal is a major chore (I know, because I had to do this for a while in the Seminary). And, as time goes on, and these devices become less of an obtrusive piece of technology, and more ingrained with how we consume and display content, would they be more acceptable in this kind of setting?

I think two things would have to happen before it would be acceptable to use an iPad-like device during a Sacred Liturgy:

  1. An appropriate case would need to be manufactured to (a) mask the logo on the back, and (b) downplay the fact that a bit of electronic technology is being used. Something simple; perhaps a nice red leather case? (Definitely not a gaudy gold 'bling' cover like I see at some parishes, with a happy Jesus on the front).
  2. The screens on the devices will need to be improved, and able to operate without backlighting. Seeing someone in a relatively dim room with an iPad, iPhone or laptop is distracting, due to the blueish glow on their faces. Advancements in e-ink and related technologies could get us there, sometime in the next few years.

What do you think? Should this be (for now) relegated to private Masses? Should it be allowed at all?

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