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First iPhone App from the Vatican:

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 04/19/2010 - 3:13pm
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Daily Sermonettes iPhone App
"Daily Sermonettes" - $5.99 (!)

This just in off the wire:

We invite you to post on your website a feature about the launch of The Vatican Observatory Foundation’s new iPhone App Daily Sermonettes with Father Mike Manning launched Easter Sunday, with daily positive life-affirming messages of hope and faith and extras featuring reflections on major events of the day.

  • First-ever iPhone App from any part of the Vatican.
  • Follows the Pope’s recent publicized encouragement to spread the Vatican’s message to the faithful through the new media.
  • Launched on Easter Sunday.
  • Features daily video sermonettes of reflection and faith inspired by Scripture, with practical application to daily life.
  • Daily sermonettes presented on camera by Father Mike Manning, recipient of the Pope’s Pro Ecclesia Et Pontifice Cross of excellence.
  • Supports the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s humanitarian mission of scientific research, education and discovery.

You can view Daily Sermonettes on the iPhone App Store. The app has no ratings yet, and costs $5.99 (!).

Quote demonstrating bad software design

Submitted by jr.duboc on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 2:52pm
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From a paper I read recently: 

Based on the observation that users did not use a number of support functions, such as the medical notes and the consultation review interface, future trials will include a short tutorial.

The authors are talking about a virtual patient system, but this probably applies to many applications. If users didn't use certain functions, in my book there can be two reasons:

  1. The features are not well designed, and users don't know how to access them or,
  2. They don't actually need the features.

Either way, the right solution is probably not to bombard users with tutorials, but rather to do some proper user tests and redesign or eliminate useless features (or even better, not bother to build them at all. Duh. Life is too short for useless code).

I'd say that's how bad software is built. What's your opinion?

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Major Updates to Open Source Catholic!

Submitted by oscatholic on Sat, 04/03/2010 - 12:20am
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During this Easter season, I saw fit to spend a few hours on the OSC website, which has, I admit, taken a back seat to many of my other web projects, most notably the Archdiocese of St. Louis website and some other little projects I'm dabbling in (like an experimental HTML5 site).

Here are some of the recent changes I've made:

  • OSC Member Tweets are back online!
    (I Installed an updated version of Drupal's Twitter module. Cron is now much faster, and old Tweets are cleared from the database, so I feel save using the module again).
  • OSC Wiki Pages are being added! (and anyone with an account can edit them!)
    (Right now they're pretty sparse, but I plan on taking on the development of these pages as a personal project—mostly so I can have a nice resource to refer the poor helpless chaps that are burdened with parish/diocesan web development, but need help).
  • Theming Issues are being cleaned up!
    (I've spent a little more time working with the Airy Blue theme (on drupal.org) and fixing small theming issues I've found on OSC, in particular).

BUT, most importantly, the 'Beta' status of this site has been removed! I figure almost a year into the site's existence, it is time. Check out the new and improved (and 5 KB lighter) header at the top of this page!

Any other suggestions? Comments are welcome :)

One-Page Quick SEO Optimization

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 04/01/2010 - 9:25am
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Today I had to make some updates to the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Leadership page. While I was making the updates, I noticed a pattern on the page that was very ineffective in terms of giving proper keyword metadata to Google for page links.

For each leader in the Archdiocese, there was a link to "Read more..." at the end of the leader's description. Google and other spiders take that 'Read more' text and expect it to mean something, so they give a little weight (but not much) to the words 'read' and 'more' when searched in tandem with content on the page the words link to.

However, to give Google more context, and to let our pages get a tiny bit of extra link juice, I linked the names of the leaders directly to their pages (instead of 'Read more' referring to Archbishop Robert J. Carlson, now 'Archbishop' 'Robert' 'J' and 'Carlson' refer to him!):

<a href="/archstl/page/archbishop-robert-j-carlson">Most Reverend Robert J. Carlson</a>

Then I set all the 'Read more...' links to rel="nofollow":

<a href="/archstl/page/archbishop-robert-j-carlson" class="readon" rel="nofollow">Read more...</a>

This tells Google that it can disregard the 'Read more...' link, and lets Google instead use the more contextually-sound link (with SEO terms built in).

Prayer Clock 0.0.7

Submitted by allencch on Wed, 03/31/2010 - 6:03am
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I have upgraded the Prayer Clock with Divine Mercy Novena prayers, cause Easter is coming.

http://sites.google.com/site/allencch83/projects

Found: DISC (Diocesan Information Systems Conference)

Submitted by oscatholic on Fri, 03/26/2010 - 9:57am
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After a few months, I am finally able to access the 'Diocesan Information Systems Conference' discussions online (it uses some sort of Lotus Notes system), and it's actually a pretty good resources for IT administrators. There are a lot of great discussions about social networking, network stacks, and information management.

Diocesan Information Systems Conference

If you work in an (Arch)Diocese, you should head over to the DISC site and request access.

Please Stop Saying "Web 2.0"

Submitted by oscatholic on Thu, 03/25/2010 - 1:50pm
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...for the love of everything sacred and holy, do not use the term "Web 2.0" or say "we are joing the social media revolution."

We are not in some crazy new age of the web, nor are we in a revolution. The Internet is in a constant stage of evolution, and reorganization. There will never be a point at which the web will upgrade to 'Web 3.0,' or even 'Web 2.1.' So stop using that term!

The 'Web' is not a software product. It is a relatively new medium by which humans communicate. When television went color, it wasn't called "TV 2.0."

Web 2.0 is a buzzword that needs to die. Any organization that uses this term is dating itself and making the Church look passé and behind the times. Instead, say "we are constantly adapting our Gospel message to the latest technologies, and using social media to communicate this message to others on a more personal level."

Of course, if you say this, you have to follow through! Don't ever be content with where you are. Always innovate, always be adaptable. The world is not a static place, and neither is the Web.

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