Written by Well, now that we’re somewhat settled in at our new house, things have started to move in life again. We’ve had some discussion on the new church website this morning, and it looks like we’re getting close to the release date. Hopefully we will be able to iron everything out in the next couple of weeks and get it up before the end of September.
One of the big things that we still have left to do is get some pictures. The meat of the site is about finished, but it’s going to look dead without pictures on it. We really want to have pictures of the actual people that go to our church instead of plastering our site with a bunch of meaningless stock photos.
We’re planning on putting a lot of other items up on the site once we get it released as well. I’m hoping to get some welcome and promo videos up to give yet another view inside the life of the church. We have an invite that can be sent to anyone via e-mail, all of our sermons with full transcripts, audio, and slides will be available, and lots of other good stuff.
I don’t think we’re going to push the whole “Web 2.0″ or community aspect on the site as of right now, but we do want to get things on the site that will make people come back weekly or even daily. We’ll have our weekly newsletters available online, and Mike’s blog is linked to, so hopefully that will push more traffic as well. Other than getting regular content on the site, any other suggestions for making this successful?
I meant to mention how you like to use things from other services, like Google. I prefer to use something that may lack a feature or two, but allows me to control it 100%. I mention this because of the picture gallary stuff.
It helps that I have root access to the server that host our site. I could format the hard drive if I felt like it :-).
Let me know when you get something for me to look at. I’m curious to what you are doing.
Oh, one thing about your flash stuff. I’d assume you use FF, but there has been a change in how IE handles embedded flash. You have to write it in a java script file for it to work correctly.
Adobe’s official solution.
This could make your mp3 player less user friendly.
ck
My Blog
Clarence: The mp3 player I’m using is actually being called from an outside file anyway, so there haven’t been any issues with it as far as I’ve been able to test it. I don’t just test it in Firefox (even though that’s my primary browser). I am very careful to test in multiple browsers. I’ve tried to put a lot of focus on compatibility and accessibility with this design.
And as far as using outside services, there are several cases where I disagree with what you’re saying. We’re actually using Google Calendar for our calendar, and it has streamlined things considerably. There’s not much other control we need over it honestly, so it didn’t make sense for me to do anything different. It integrates really well in our new site, and members who already use Google calendar can “subscribe” to the church’s calendar so that it will show up on theirs.
I actually started out with a couple different integrated solutions that gave me “100% control,” and neither of them were going to work for us in practice. They just weren’t what we needed. I’d rather have a solution that will work in the situation than to sacrifice something just to have total control over all of the code (plus, I don’t always have time to write all of the code for some things).
The flash thing has nothing to do with it being called from an outside source. It is an activex thing. M$ got sued so they couldn’t just automatically activate activex controls (which Flash with button is). So in IE (with all the updates) you have to click it once to activate it, then click it again to make it do what you want it to do.
IE 7 will have this behavior by default. Right now it is dependant on whether or not you have all IE updates.
So you have to write it with a javascript function, otherwise you require the user to activate the flash item before they can use it. Now this is a little different if there is no user interactio needed.
Check out this church menu as an example of what I am talking about (assuming you have the most up to date updates.
The using external services vs. using internal stuff is a matter of preference. I know that if there is a feature I truly desire, I can develop it. I use my web development as a learning platform as well. When I first saw you using Google Calendar’s I checked them out, and didn’t much care for it. But its a matter of preference. Also the features I may lose by not using an outside source, would also cost me a feature that I have developed on my own. The main thing that I didn’t like about Google’s calendar is that I couldn’t find a way to read the next three events, to display on our home page. It may be there, but I couldn’t find it. So for me it was a trade-off I wasn’t willing to take.
In today’s open source market, its not very hard to find a comparable component for free that you can “own” and update as needed. Like the WYSIWYG editor I recently added to my site. I actually use it in HPCC’s site for my wife to be able to easily send out the announcements.
And when I finally get John Robinson to commit to the time to update a blog, I am going to use the one I’ve developed from scratch.
ttyl.
ck
My Blog
One more note about your mp3 player. Keep an eye out for your sample rate. When James did it he had it at around 44K, but there is a podcast site out there that uses a flash mp3 player and it played our sermons REALLY fast. I figured out that it was the sample rate. I had to lower it to around 22K. That made it play normal…. Not sure what your current mp3′s are set to… guess I could download one and see :-). But Flash does have some issue with dealing with sample rates, some cause it to play slow others fast. Not sure how much of this you already know… but maybe somebody searching on the web will read this :-D.
I just found the site that had this issue.
Clarence:
This is what I was referring to when I said that it was being called from an external file:
“However, HTML pages that use tags generated by external script files (like JavaScript)—such as sites that use complex Flash detection scripts—should continue to work normally with no change.”
As for the sample rate, I actually encode it at 40kbps, and it works fine with the flash player that I use. That was the best sample rate I’ve found for maintaining enough clarity while keeping the file size down. I’ll test it on Odeo later to see if it’s screwey with their player. I have tried 3 flash players though, and all of them play it fine.
And as far as the opensource alternatives, I have tested several for our calendar, and none of them gave me any benefit over what we’re using. Most of the stuff I do is based on opensource code that is hosted on my own server, but there are times when I use other solutions.
I think on the bit rate stuff we are talking about two different things.
I opened your file and your sample rate is at 22050, your bit rate is at the 40kbps that you mentioned…. but I am talking about your sample rate. You’d understand what the difference between the two is better than I, but your current file should be fine.
So is your mp3 file already included by a javascript file? Is that how you get it from an external site? If so… that probably does the same thing I am mentioning.
I’ve just recently (over this past year) learned to use Flash. I like it :-) Will probably either find a good open source flash player (any suggestions?) or make one myself for HPCC’s 3.0 site. I had a “client” buy it for me to work on their site. They bought it from a place called techsoup.com that gives discounts to non-profit organizations (churches can’t do it). They got it for $60!! 8.0 Professional.
Clarence:
That’s what happens when I’m not paying attention to what I’m reading or typing. :-) Yeah, the sample rate of our mp3′s are 22,050 because they’re in mono (if they were in this same type format in stereo, the sample rate would be 44,100).
The flash player doesn’t come from an external site. It’s all on our site, but yes, I believe it is called by JS. It’s actually a plugin to our CMS that was ported from another flash player. I basically can type some {play}{/play} tags in our WYSIWYG editor, and it embeds the flash player with the referenced audio file. I believe it uses JS to accomplish it, but I’m not certain. It’s been a few months since I’ve been in the guts of that plugin.
As for an opensource flash video player, I haven’t looked much into it myself, but I know there’s one called “Gnash.” Not sure if it’s any good or not.
We’ve always said it… we are a bunch of geeks :-)
Use a flash based player to play the sermon mp3 files, so a user can listen to the files directly on the site without having to download.
[object data="/player/player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" align="middle" height="24" width="320">
[param name="quality" value="best">
[param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never">
[param name="scale" value="noScale">
[param name="wmode" value="transparent">
[param name="salign" value="TL">
[param name="FlashVars" value="soundFile=http://ameliachurchofchrist.com/temp_homepage/sermons/acc_sermon_20060903.mp3">
[param name="movie" value="http://bloglines.com/player/player.swf">
[/object]
Note: All leading “<” characters were replaced with “[” so I could comment the code.
Actually, for each sermon, I have an integrated flash player, an available mp3 download if they wish, full transcript of the message, and downloadable powerpoint slides.
I’m using Joomla for our content management system (with some hacks I’ve done, as well as a lot of extras I added in and hacked), and I was able to find a great little flash player that works perfect for this.
Thanks for the suggestion! Keep ‘em coming!
Well you know what we do on our site. Present new info along with some study resources. I got a kick out of something a few weeks ago, I was on a discussion board and in a reply to me the poster linked to a baptism study on our site. He didn’t know I went to HPCC, so it was kind of funny.
Learn to automate things. It used to take me well over an hour to post our sermons to our site (edit them, and add the text to the 4 pages that needed them). Now it takes me less than 15 minutes. I created a VB.NET program that adds the tags to the mp3 file and creates the html/xml for me. Who is going to type the transcript of the sermon? It also used to take me a REAL long time to add picture gallaries to the site, that is almost instant now. Another .NET program I wrote takes the originals, resizes them to the three sizes I need… renames them and then writes to a database I use along with writing the html files I use.
Create and use an email list. Works wonders. For example, the email you got from me yesterday was nothing more than to remind people the site is out there.
Give your members a reason to come back. If they heard Mike’s sermon and have the newsletter they have no reason to come to your site. But we post all internal documents in our MyHPCC area, along with a membership directory.
Some folks like a site that is updated by many folks. I prefer it with one webmaster. It keeps it consistant throughout.
I plan on working on HPCC 3.0 the beginning of next year. Going .NET with it so I can utilize some of the features I want.
ck
My Blog
Clarence:
Yeah, most of our stuff is pretty automated anyway. I’m already doing the sermon stuff, and it doesn’t take me much time each week. Our transcripts are already typed out by our minister, it’s easy to slap them up there.
For the picture galleries, there are a few things that I’m considering, but that won’t be an initial feature of the site, other than the pictures that we’ll have on the site. I’m not sure if we’ll have galleries or not. We’ll see.
As for an e-mail list, we already have that in place. The only thing missing from it currently is the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe online, which is already in the new site design. I might expound upon those features in the coming months, but it just depends on what our needs are.
Clarence: After I fooled around with our flash player a bit more, it turns out it was in need of the update. Thanks for the heads up. I’ve used a variation of Adobe’s method as a fix, and it’s working great now in IE.
Glad I could be of some assistance. I just happened to be working on two flash related sites when the change was implemented by M$.
ck
My Blog