website

Pope Benedict XVI tweeted the launch of News.va, the new news website from the Vatican.

The site takes a while to load from my iPhone's data connection, but I don't know if that's because (a) the site isn't using a US-based CDN (looks like I'm connecting to Amazon Web Services' western-EU servers), or (b) my iPhone has a 1.5 Mbps connection...

Here's a link to the Pope's (first?) tweet »

Also, it looks like they're using Silverlight or Flash for some content. But at least most of the content is plain-vanilla HTML!

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 :)

After reading an article (from Six Revisions) on the History of the Internet, I realized just how cutting-edge our Church has been, historically, when it comes to using the web for communications. The Vatican website (www.vatican.va) was one of the first globally-relevant and vast websites in the world!

The site was built in 1995 as a repository of Church documents, and has since been greatly expanded. However, in this time, pages are getting lost, information is, at best, hard to find, and the generic design has barely changed.

Vatican.va - then (1998) and now. Not much has changed, at least on the surface.

What will it take to bring the Vatican back to the fore of the Internet? Pope Benedict, and Pope John Paul II before him, have repeatedly called for the responsible and widespread use of new communications technology in evangelization and preservation of the Gospel... let's get back on top of the game!

Steps Towards a Better Website

What can the Vatican do to get back in the game? Well, here are a few suggestions:

1. Get on a CMS. And make the site truly multi-lingual. Drupal would be a good choice, with it's i18n module. Content should be published in multiple languages quickly and properly-translated.
2. Auto-detect the user's region and give him the front page in their own language, with the option of changing languages.
3. Put more evangelical information on the front page. A picture of Saint Peter's square doesn't suffice. Have something that will bring a newcomer further into the site (maybe a tie-in to the Vatican Museums?).
4. Highlight Papal encyclicals and Church documents; perhaps start a blog for topics covered in the plethora of online documents!
5. Get rid of the ugly, 90s-era repeating background image. But keep an elegant, relatively-timeless style.

These are just a few of my suggestions – many more can be had. What do you think?

After reading Seth Godin's simple article on reducing complexity, entitled Fear of Apples, I felt compelled to write  short piece about steps one could take to make users' browsing experience that much nicer.

Basically, by reducing complexity and limiting people's options, you free them to (a) choose easier, and (b) remember what they've chosen.

As a quick example, we start with the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' current website, which gives users a metric ton of choices for navigation:

15 Navigation Options + Search + Quick Links

The way things are, people coming to the site for the first time have over 24 functional choices to make; it's not readily apparent what are the most important navigation options on the page. Continue Reading »

[UPDATE: Everything should be operational again. Please let me know if you have any trouble logging in or posting information!]

Well, after a few weeks on Slicehost, I've decided to switch to a different VPS with a company I've grown to like very much—Hot Drupal—and consolidate all my sites onto that system (right now my sites are spread across three different hosts).

Some observations after a couple weeks on the Slice:

• 64-bit OS memory usage makes a large amount of RAM important, especially when running Drupal or another CMS with relatively high memory usage.
• Even with a bunch of optimizations (like using the Boost module or a reverse-proxy http cache), a 256MB slice can feel very limiting—and that's with just one site running.
• Unless you want to become a bit of a Linux sysadmin (or at least become familiar with the CLI), don't get a slice or linode, or anything of the sort.
• Slices are more for fun and learning (at least on the low end) than for heavy-hitting high-traffic sites... imo.

Since we're moving again, please pardon the dust. In addition, in reference to this forum topic, I'll be merging Articles and Blogs (eek!) and working to streamline the posting process.

[Update: An article on Midwestern Mac explaining how I optimized the Slice to serve up OSC without any huge resource-hogging.]

If you can see this article, you're seeing Open Source Catholic served up fresh from Slicehost; all the sites I'm running will eventually be moved over... but for now, I'm working to optimize the Slice using Open Source Catholic as a test site.

In a short time, I'll post some of my problems/solutions, as well as thoughts on hosting providers, for the benefit of other Catholic webdevs looking to save a buck or two and have the best server setup possible!

Want to help offset hosting costs for Open Source Catholic, and use a great host? (Wow, that sounds like market-ese for you!) Go ahead and use our referral code (just click the link) when signing up for your own Slice of server goodness!

Just wanted to let everyone know a couple things:

1. I'm going to be working on moving Open Source Catholic over to the 'official' Airy Blue theme from Drupal.org, rather than a hacked-together version I made while working on the site (sometimes trying to get something out the door fast makes one do it the not-quite-exactly-perfect way). There might be a couple layout bugs here and there in the next couple days.
2. The IRC channel has been moved to #oscatholic, as that channel is more for the Catholic tech community, whereas some other channels (such as #Catholic and #romancatholic) are more targeted toward a general audience. If anyone has any good ideas for promoting the channels, let me know!
3. Any big projects coming down the pipe for anyone? I know the Archdiocese of Saint Louis is working on something pretty big... and will be sharing some of their findings/experiences here!

Happy almost-one-week-birthday, Open Source Catholic! One week in, we have 35 users, many websites to rate, and a few good comments, articles and blog entries. Plus, we've gotten 950 unique visitors in the past 4 days (not bad, eh?):

Thanks especially to all those who re-tweeted @oscatholic news on Twitter, and to those who have registered on the website. We hope that, over time, this website can promote the sharing of great ideas for making the web a better place for Catholics.

The website has already seen a few slight adjustments (most notably the fixing of the CAPTCHA, which is always a nuisance!), and they were all made because of your feedback - we hope this can truly become a community site, where the only role of the maintainers is to take your suggestions and use them to make this website and community stronger.

There is another community we'd like to promote in this post, too: SQPN (the "Star Quest Production Network") has started an SQPN Ning community, where you can interact with the many podcasters and listeners, many of whom are well-invested in seeing Catholics use online technology to its full potential. Check them out, and be sure to befriend OSC :-)

To New Users

If you haven't already, go ahead and visit your account page (must be logged in), and click the edit tab. You can now fill in more Personal Information, more about your work experience, and even link your Twitter account to your profile. This will allow you to tweet your new postings directly from this website, and will put your Tweets into the community's Twitter page!