Websites

From Matthew Warner's blog on the National Catholic Register website: How are parishes using new media?

Last week I asked my Twitter followers for some examples of parishes using new media. I got some good ones, which I was pleased with. So thank you fellow tweeters!

But I must admit that, overall, I was a bit disappointed in my search. I also “googled” the topic fairly extensively and the pickin’s were few. I hope that one day when we google “Catholic Parish,” we are blown away with how impressed we are with the many, many great results we find. In the meantime, we have some learning, sharing and working to do! Keep in mind I am looking for new media being applied specifically to the life of the parish, not simply its use in various other ministries by those in the Church.

I tried to capture a good variety of new media applications that parishes might find useful. But I hope it doesn’t stop there. I hope leaders of parishes will be contacting these parishes, asking them what works and what doesn’t and all taking some steps forward together. I also pray that the laity who have been blessed with the ability to produce and apply new media will come forward and fulfill an important roll in their Church.

What do you think? Be sure to drop Matthew a line either over on the original post (which has more findings from Matthew), or on Twitter (@MatthewWarner). (Matthew also blogs at Fallible Blogma, and is the founder of TweetCatholic).

An idea I've been having in the back of my mind for some time is putting the Rosary (or another devotional) online in such a way as to (a) faithfully instruct individuals on the purpose and beauty in its prayer, and (b) stretch my skills and build a usable, friendly, and prayerful web application.

I envision building a standards-compliant/HTML5 site which leads a Catholic through the recitation of the Holy Rosary, or maybe the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and works across as many modern browsers as is possible, without Flash, and without any of the 'cheese factor' that I see on many other similar projects...

Would anyone else be interested in collaborating in a project like this? I will probably do a little here, a little there, as I don't have a lot of time on my hands right now :)

The Vatican website (one of the oldest domains/websites on the Internet) has been due for an overhaul for some time. Looks like it's finally going to happen! Here's the news, from EWTN:

The director of the Vatican’s website, Msgr. Lucio Adrian Ruiz explained this week in an interview that the site is going through an extensive redesign to improve the Church's evangelization efforts.

The main reason for the redevelopment? Getting the Vatican website in line with Pope Benedict's call to a new evangelization on the 'digital continent.'

How long will this project take? Well, judging by the fact that the Vatican has over 500,000 pages (many, I am sure, not following any set standard of formatting... making migration scripting very tough), it could be a while.

Msgr. Ruiz said the Vatican site receives three million visits per day, with the greatest number of visits coming from the United States, followed by Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, France and China.

He also noted that the site has occasionally been the target of hackers [see an OSC report on one of the recent attacks here] and cyber attacks, but that the staff works closely with Italian online security officials to keep a close eye on their systems.

Just coming off the Catholic New Media Celebration (more info on the CNMC in a blog post here), this is a great step forward for our universal Church. Hopefully we'll see some movement soon!

In the next week or two, I'm going to configure the Feeds module to begin aggregating RSS feeds added on Open Source Catholic members' profile pages. If you'd like your feed added, make sure you go to your user account page (log in and click on 'My account' under your username) and Edit it to add the URL.

For the past year, I've watched the HTML5 <video> element debate (mostly over video formats/containers) with a great interest—I abhor having to use Adobe Flash on my sites to embed video, especially since that means many videos don't work on my Linux workstation (which doesn't have Flash), or on my iPhone/iPad.

The HTML5 <video> element (and similarly, the less-supported <audio> element) promises to take away the stress of having to have flash players, FLV-encoded video, etc. just to show a viewer a non-static piece of content.

In its simplest form, you can add the following code to embed a video on your page:

<video src="video-file.m4v"></video>

On my Drupal sites, I've been wanting to be able to simply grab an m4v video exported from iMovie, QuickTime, or straight from my camera, attach it to a post via a filefield, and have it display. In the old days, I would use SWFTools to embed the video using Flash.

I've found a solution that, in my opinion, is much more elegant, using the <video> element, with a Flash fallback for Internet Explorer:

1. I set up a filefield with which I can attach an m4v file to a piece of content.
2. I enabled Custom Formatters (an excellent Drupal module for CCK), and set up a simple formatter for this filefield with the code below:

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...

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 »