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Use Text Instead of Text-in-a-Picture/Flier for your Website

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 10:08am
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Make your information searchable, accessible, and reader-friendly... this is from a post on archstldev.com:

If you perform a web search via Google, or in the search engine on any website in the world, your search is done using simple words, like "bishop st. louis." A search engine must be able to see words like these in your pages if you want people to find your pages.

You need to have written text on the page (copied and pasted, or typed on the website) if you want people to be able to search for your information, and if you want people to be able to easily read and share your information.

Continue reading about the importance of text on your website (as opposed to an image of text) on archstldev.com »

News Websites: Make Your News Readable!

Submitted by oscatholic on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 9:24am
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For anyone involved in web development for news publications, one of the most important aspects of the website is its textual layout. Your site must be readable on a variety of devices, and, failing that, you should try to make it look great on at least one platform (usually the desktop browser)—typically other platforms will follow.

There are a few things to watch out for:

  1. You can have lines too close together—use line-height to give proper spacing/breathing room between consecutive lines of text.
  2. You can have paragraphs too close together—add some margins between paragraphs so they are divided visually.
  3. You can have too narrow a viewport for your content, meaning users spend more time scrolling than reading. (However, you don't want to have it too wide either—sometimes a semi-fluid layout can be useful).
Continue Reading »

The Real-Time Web – Staying Relevant

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 06/07/2010 - 4:19pm
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Something I posted on the Archdiocese of St. Louis' Development Website earlier today:

As technology has progressed in the past hundred years, the amount of information that is immediately accessible has increased at an exponential rate. As time goes on, people are more and more used to the idea of immediate gratification when it comes to images, text, and stories from events.

There is a new term phrased to wrap up this near-instantaneous stream of live information produced around the world: the 'real-time web.'

But what exactly is the real-time web? Wikipedia can help us here:

"The real-time web is a set of technologies and practices which enable users to receive information as soon as it is published by its authors, rather than requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates."

Basically, there are many new technologies available today that weren't even heard of just ten or fifteen years ago, including "RSS", "XML" and other ways of exchanging information.

What does this mean for you? Well, for your organization to stay at the fore online, and to reach the broadest range of people, you need to be able to participate in this real-time web.

Continue reading this post on the Archdiocese of St. Louis' Development Website: The Real-Time Web and Archdiocesan Websites.

The Parish Website: An Essential Tool for Ministry

Submitted by Carson Weber on Fri, 06/04/2010 - 5:41pm
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Jeff's post here on OSCatholic titled "What Makes a Good Parish Website?" brought me to brainstorm and design a PowerPoint presentation for clergy and parish staff/volunteers in the Diocese of Sacramento, to get folks moving in the right direction.

On Tuesday, June 1, 2010, I delivered this presentation to ~100 attendees at our first annual diocesan Stewardship Conference.

I recorded the audio on my Olympus WS-300M and edited it with Propaganda.  Then, I broke the audio into 21 separate files to match the 21 slides of the PowerPoint presentation using Roxio Creator 2010 (this step was a necessary evil, as I discovered).  Finally, I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Adobe Presenter 7 to sync each audio file to each slide's animation and to produce an online copy of the presentation in Flash.

To view the 28-minute presentation, click here or on the screenshot:

Screenshot

I'm hoping that this digital copy of the presentation will make its way into the offices of many diocesan and parish clergy and staff, to assist our Catholic parishes in publishing great parish websites.

Permalink to the presentation: http://www.diocese-sacramento.org/website

Download the handout that accompanies the presentation, which is essentially the presentation's text bullet points.

Drupal: Restoring core comment title permalinks in a Zen Subtheme

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 06/03/2010 - 4:40pm
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I was scratching my head after trying to troubleshoot a template problem for a few hours today; I was building a Zen subtheme for a site that had, until now, been using Garland for it's styling. In this subtheme, I wanted to have comments display with a similar look to Garland, and I especially wanted automatic permalinks to comments, referenced by a comment number:

Comment template - zen removes linked comment number titles.

I looked through comment.tpl.php, and my template.php file, as well as zen's template.php file, but couldn't find anything related to the $id variable, which is used to build the numbered permalink. After opening up Devel themer, I found that there was a call to _zen_preprocess_comment(), and that was the likely culprit...

To restore these comment numbers/permalinks, you will need to grab core's TEMPLATE_preprocess_comment function and place it in your subtheme's template.php file. (This is an easy fix... if you'd like to get more advanced, you can hack the code to do other more Zen-like things, like print 'first' and 'last' classes for comments).

Be sure to change TEMPLATE to the name of your theme!

After you do that, your theme should have comment styling very similar to that of other core themes, with the permalink comment number intact (see below for the final product).

Pretty Zen comment titles - numbered permalinks!
(numbered permalinks ftw!)

From the Catholic Media Conference (in LA)

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 06/03/2010 - 11:20am
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It looks like @iJimCoyle is tweeting from the Catholic Media Conference in Louisiana this week. Found today on his Twitter stream:

New Media & New Evangelization: 5 Ways to Make a Difference (from Sr Rose Pacatte FSP)

  1. Become mindful media consumers by watching (doing) media together and talking about what you experience.
  2. Use (mainstream) media in your teaching.
  3. Become a media producer & encourage students & people w/ whom you share faith to "make media."
  4. Make media the subject of evangelization, preaching, and catechesis.
  5. Become proactive advocate for media productions that reflect Catholic social teaching because these are human, humane, & Gospel themes.

Sounds great... but where is the significance for 'new media?' At a time when our news media is bleeding like never before, hurting for money and looking to find a solid path for working online in the midst of the traditional web, Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, etc., we need to be more specific in our goals for new media use in the Church, especially by Catholic publications.

Of course, reading from a live Twitter feed of a participant might not be the best way to participate in this Catholic Media Convention, but there isn't any other way to do it, and the Convention Blog doesn't even seem to have any content... It would be nice to have at least an official Twitter feed :)

At least they have a Facebook page...

A Formal Introduction from Cathnet

Submitted by lutra on Mon, 05/31/2010 - 3:37pm
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Hello, this is DJ Ortley (lutra.)  I've yet to have an opportunity to introduce either Cathnet or myself.

Cathnet was started a number of years ago to try and do basically the same thing that this site does, which is to create a central home for open source Catholic software and technologies.  While Cathnet has been around for much longer, we've not really been able to spend much time on our site, and a quick trip to the latest incarnation of our website will show this.

Looking through OpensourceCatholic, which seems to be a much more professional site, and looking at the overlap in functionality between the two sites, we at Cathet are given to pause and ask what we really want to do with the organization.  Whether we want to continue to try and host projects, or work on something else.

Cathnet is a registered non-profit in Australia that has managed to procure the rights to use the Catechism in a limited fashion.  We basically can create and publicly showcase any technology using the Catechism that we can come up with, as long as what we come up with is deemed acceptable (to be determined on a case-by-case basis.)  We also happen to have in our hands a couple of other texts, such as the bible, the Summa Theologicae, etc..  Which would be interesting to try and work with.

This post is a bit of an open invite.  It is an invite both to Cathnet (we hang out on freenode as well: irc://freenode/cathnet) and also to discussion.  We'd like to hear what people think about what I've just said.  We've been chewing over ideas for quite a while such as making an RDF of the Catechism, clustering analysis, etc..

As for my introduction, I think I'll just make a response to the 'New Users: Introduce yourselves :)' post.

-DJ

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