Blogs

I was recently emailed by an organization who has recently had their website go belly-up, and they lost most of their recent data. Their development company supposedly has some backups, but are not being the best of communicators right now (it can happen to the best of us).

So, in the email, I was asked to offer my help in getting their site back online. Unfortunately, I can do just about nothing, since the organization has no backups, no data, not even an old database backup.

If you run a website, do the following right now:

1. Set up an automated weekly or monthly backup of the entire website (daily, if your data merits that level of backup), including the site database, in case of catastrophe. Keep it locally (i.e. within your offices, or on an accessible backup server). This way, even if your developer goes belly-up, you can transfer the backup to someone else and quickly get back up and running (within a day or two). (I might do a post on how the Archdiocese maintains weekly backups of everything in two separate locations soon...).
2. Develop a site maintenance and upgrade plan; with content managed websites, maintenance and security patches must be applied on a monthly or quarterly basis (I do it every week on the Archdiocesan website), otherwise maintenance and upgrade costs will go through the roof in as little as a year's time.

Do these things, and nobody gets hurt.

On the Archdiocese of Saint Louis website, we moved thousands of files around as part of our site migration from 49 separate Joomla sites to Drupal. Internally, all our file links were updated. However, there are thousands of hotlinks from different websites to the Archdiocesan website (for instance, the blog American Papist hits a missing file of a Church interior about 80 times a day).

This was creating a lot of overhead for the server, as Drupal would do a full bootstrap, sending out a fully-rendered 404 page on each missing file request.

Looking to Drupal forums for help, I found some help from kbahey, founder/owner of 2bits, a Drupal shop that specializes in speeding up large Drupal sites. The advice in the issue linked above has the proper code for speeding up requests on a Drupal 7 site, but the code is slightly different for Drupal 6.x. Here's the code:

"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 (!).

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?

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:

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!):

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.

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