Another Brick In the Wall

The above subject heading should not be interpreted the same way as Roger Waters originally intended. I have finished the redesign. Hazaa!!! What I mean by the above metaphor is that this is another piece of the puzzle to a site that I hope to get bigger and bigger, to give you more reasons to come back.

Any problems with any part of the site, don't be afraid to let me know. Don't suffer in silence. I want to make this site as good as it can possibly be.

There is still loads of sections to go on there. We've got the groups section to come up, with all the necessary contacts; The parish history; Parish Profiles (If I get more than the 2 I already have); rotas for each ministry (depending on the willingness of others to maintain them). The possibilties are endless and are only limited by the time I have on this Planet Earth (Bidding prayer reference that I thought some of you might enjoy).

I will be doing a little talk at all masses this weekend as it is communication Sunday. What a fitting day to plug the website and stir up interest.

I'm going to bed now, I am zoinked (tired).

Goodnight.

Almost there...

Today, I have worked from 11am til 2am.  I have had the odd break for eating but apart from that I have been concentrating solely on the site.  I've managed to complete all the intended new content for this upgrade apart from the dreaded dropdown menu, which is still not working on IE6.  I will be trying a different one tomorrow.    

What remains for me to do is to reconfigure all the existing site to the new design.  A process that involves a lot of repetitive and time-consuming cutting and pasting, amending etc.  It will be worth it when it is all done.  

Football was fun yesterday, although I am still aching as a result.  First touch I had on the ball, I slipped and fell on my bottom.  That got a big laugh and I couldn't help but laugh myself.  I hadn't played 11-a-side football on grass since secondary school (at least 12 years ago) and I was starting to feel fatigued after 5 minutes of match time on the pitch.  I kept going for the rest of the game but my passing and control was awful for the most part.  Practice makes perfect as they say.  

Cheerio-io for now, ladies and gents.  I will post again at some point this weekend but not tomorrow as I am going to see an excellent Finnish band called Sonata Arctica.  

A late one...

Got a fair bit of work done this evening.  The layouts for the new pages appear to be falling into place more, so a lot of the time consumed fine-tuning is finally beginning to pay off.  But this is just for the menu pages.  It will be a little more challenging structuring the bios of the saints, a combination of text and pictures which must be positioned in an interesting yet simultaneously easy-to-read way.  

Still having problems with the drop-down menu on Internet Explorer 6.  I am hoping to put them to rest at work today.  

Received some edits for the site off Father Vin, most of which I have done.  One will be a little more demanding of my time, adding mass times for all churches in our pastoral area.  That will be catered for post-launch-of-the-blessed-redesign. 

  

After work, I will be playing in a football match for the first time in 6 years.  I'm fitter than I was back then but whether I can kick a ball in a straight line or not is another thing altogether.  I shall give you a quick report tomorrow. 

I have the pleasure of being able to devote the whole of thursday to the website due to the strike at work and I am relishing putting in a mammoth effort to get the next stage of the site complete.  Stay tuned, folks ;)  

Monday Funday!

I returned to my full-time job after my week off working on the website.  I managed to get a bit of work on the site done whilst I was there.  The joys of being able to edit online anywhere using the webhost's built in FTP (File Transfer Protocol) facility, where you can edit files whilst they are on the web server. 

Whilst checking out the redesign on my work PC, I noticed the drop-down menu had gone completely west (wrong) on Internet Explorer 6.  It is quite a common browser so it needs to be corrected.  I have meticulously gone through the text this evening and corrected a fair few errors so hopefully I will go to work tomorrow and it will be sorted.  

I fixed the problem to do with the positioning of elements on the page, so I can now press on with new pages for the site.  I will complete the new pages before I integrate the redesign into the existing site.  I don't see the point in redesigning the site and not adding new pages.  Gotta give people reasons to keep coming back.  I have the following pages to complete:

• About Us Menu
• Community Menu
• Media Menu
• Change News section to News and Events
• Change Weekly Mass Times to what's happening this week
• Links section
• Prayers and Intentions page
• Page for each Saint and Holy Family

Once these pages are complete the redesign will be up and running.  I don't want to put a timescale on things but it would be fan-dabby-dozy if I could get it all done by end of play thursday, including the already completed Post-A-Prayer.

A little bit about the links section before I go.  Bearing in mind this is a parish community website, I thought it would be a good idea to eventually allow users to come onto the links section and suggest websites for us all to check out.  Another way for parishioners to make their own mark on the site.  It will start off as me doing the links but I will add the user functionality in the future.    

Now it's goodnight from me, and it's goodnight from me.  Goodnight!

Nice weekend

Saturday morning I was looking forward to putting the finishing touches to the website upgrade when a critical problem arose.  The test window I had been using to show my redesign was not maximized and when it was, the page went all over the place.  I had to redesign the redesign to make sure everything stayed in the right position no matter the window size.  I was not able to work on it as much as I would have liked as I had to pop to Holy Family to get a newsletter so I could update the existing website's news and mass times section.  Once I finished the update I was off to a friend's on the Wirral to hang out at their place while his parents were away.  

As I have touched upon in a previous post, CSS is a very powerful tool when it comes to structuring pages.  It can also be very unpredictable.  You can assign a position for an element on a page, an element being something like a paragraph of text or an image, and it affects the rest of the elements that are already on the page.  A delicate balancing act as I'm sure you can work out.  I am new to this aspect of CSS and have rapidly become accustomed to all its pitfalls this weekend. 

I have managed to get everything on the home page in order and most things staying in the right place when you change the size of the window.  I should be able to push on more tomorrow (sadly missing St Mark's Quiz night but needs must) and hope to get the redesign fully online by wednesday.  

On an unrelated note, Sunday's Youth Mass went really well.  Jane did brilliantly with her projector work,  Mark with his keyboard prowess, Brother James on guitar, the 2 Sophies singing, Mike the usual rock behind the scenes and all the youth that took part in the eucharistic, offertory/collecting and reading ministries.  A special mention must also go to Father Grant for stepping into the fray whilst Father Vin was away.  It was the first mass I've been to said by him and hope to see more in the future.   

I helped out by writing the bidding prayers that I wish I had spent a bit more time doing as although the intention was right, the implementation was slightly misplaced.  Mark commented on them being inspired by Star Wars.  I think I need to add a bit more pacing to the next ones so I can have a chance to pause for breath when I am reading them out.  I am guilty as charged when it comes to long-winded sentences sometimes.  Simplifying my diction might help as well.

Tune in tomorrow for the next chapter of Webmaster's Blog. 

Homepage Finished

I start this post at 1:48am Saturday morning.  After getting up at a decent time to do work every other day of the week, I fell below standard Fri morning.  Got up a little before 12pm and didn't get starting work 'til about 1:30pm after brunch.  Despite this hiccup it has been a very productive day.  

I started off working more on the homepage.  In doing so, I have enhanced my technique of laying out the page.  I had been using a method known as Cascading Style Sheets mainly for font colours and sizes.  CSS is a lot more powerful than that and can enable absolute precision for the whole layout of a page.  So, a lot of the afternoon was spent working out the coordinates of each individual aspect of the page to ensure everything was spaced out properly in an asethetically pleasing way.  

Another part which took a fair portion of my time was a drop-down menu for all pages on the site.  Once you put your mouse over this part, all the sub-sections will roll down for you to access instantly, as opposed to the icons that I have at the centre of most pages.  I will keep both navigation methods for now to give you a choice.  

After cooking a nice chicken Satay for myself and my girlfriend (and watching a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica with her of course) I got back to work and created some banners for use on all pages.  There is some code with the banners that makes random ones come up each time you go on a new page.  There are only 7 at the moment, but as the site gets bigger there will be more banners.  Using banners brings with it the possibility of sponsorship from companies, another avenue of revenue for the parish.  

Unfortunately, it is now 1:58am and there is so much more I want to do but best that I get a good night's sleep after finishing this post.  I hope to get some more done later today (it is technically the morning) but will probably not make another blog post 'til the Sunday as I will be staying at a friend's Sat night.  

Goodnight.

Mary and the posting of prayers

This morning, I met a charming lady named Mary.  She is 100 on 4th May.  I was asked by the Eucharistic minister, another Mary, if I would like to take some pictures for the website.  I gladly obliged.  I sat in on Mary administering the eucharist to Mary 100 and had a nice chat afterwards.  I have taken some really nice pictures for the News In Pictures section to put up around the time of her birthday. 

After that meeting, I assisted Father Vin on how to send emails with attachments, over the phone.  He picked up the procedure very quickly and so will be able to send me the newsletter for me to update the website in good time for the weekend's masses.  That is until I have got my plan in action to create the paper newsletter automatically online by feeding content from the website onto an online layout.  I will definitely get cracking on that one over the next couple of weeks.  

I have finished the system for the Post-A-Prayer section.  It's all in working order.  I just need to get the rest of the prayers and intentions section complete and the homepage redesign finished and then it will be online for all.  No silly errors today, any code problems I identified pretty quickly to get things running smoothly again.  The power of experience, huh?  And the Lord, of course.  He's always around to help for inspiration.  

Prayer-Posting Antics

The majority of this working day (now technically yesterday) was spent on the Post-A-Prayer section of the website, which ended up being a combination of productivity and stupidity.  Allow me to explain...

Today was one of those days that every coder has.  Literally nothing works straight away.  You think you have typed everything correctly and then another error pops up, and another, and another.  At least I can say with my head held high that it wasn't due to a semi-colon being in the wrong place (learnt from that mistake ages ago).  My mistake this time was to assign variables the same name, so the web server started thinking, "What are you doing there, you're not supposed to be here.  I'm all confused" And didn't do what I wanted it to do.  I did eventually identify the error and the system should be completed tomorrow.  

One thing I am pleased about today is that I have worked out how to send an automatic email to parishioners, informing them that their prayer is online and where they will find it.  Saves having to cut and paste text like my original idea.  Thanks to my webhost, Streamline.net for showing me how to do that through one of their support tutorials. 

Further regarding saving time, Father has been discussing with me the need to create a newsletter without having to enter the same information on the website and the paper version.  I think I have worked out a way to do it without sacrificing the current dynamic layout and will put that theory to the test next week.  My priorities this week are to get the Post-A-Prayer section running smoothly for Parish use and the Home Page redesign.  It'll be a Brucie bonus if I can get a couple more sections up too by the end of the week.  

Ta ta for now,

Webmaster G

  

And so say we all!!!

I couldn't start my second post without quoting the greatest TV show of all time - Battlestar Galactica - the last season of which is now being broadcasted on Sky One and I watched at my Dad's. Awesome stuff.  

Now down to business.  I started work on the Post-A-Prayer section today.  The prayers need to be moderated so no untoward content can be submitted onto the site.  To do that there needs to be an admin section in place for a moderator (myself) to check and then the user needs to be informed that their prayer has been put online.  At the same time, there is the potential to be a lot of prayers submitted and users could have trouble finding theirs on the list.  So, on the Post-A-Prayer form, I have asked for users to put their Name and Email Address so I can contact them and say hello properly using their name and not just a generic salutation.  I can give them a prayer number and then they can search for it on the list.  I didn't get as much done as I would have liked due to some hosting problems that were preventing me from accessing the database until late noon.  At least I got started on the coding and also preoccupied myself with other tasks. 

Jane Norris gave me a disposable camera to develop, which contained pictures for the Gallery section of the website.  I went round to Max Spielmann's on Allerton Road and they had it developed onto a CD in 30 minutes.  I was well impressed until I got home and saw the quality of the pics.  Well, it was a disposable camera.  There are now (slightly grainy at times) pics of the last quiz in the Gallery section, replete with captions, of course.    

Parishioner's pets section is now up as well, located also in the Gallery section.  I'm hoping to receive a lot of photos of cute pets to aaaah and laugh at.  Currently, there are plenty of pictures of Father Vin's Cocoa, my dog Ben and one of Jane's cat Minnie.  Anyone with any other ideas for sections within the gallery, be them religious or not, drop me a mail at webmaster@vianneyhalewood.co.uk.

I've been trying to set stats up for the website in order to determine how many visitors we get to the site a day and which are the most popular sections.  The (free) technique I am currently using isn't registering anyone and I know people are visiting due to the lovely messages being entered into the Guestbook.  I'll hopefully get that sorted this week.  

Bye bye for now,

Webmaster

Yesterday's Work

Hello Everyone and welcome to my first webmaster blog.  I have set this up to give you an idea of the work that is going into your Parish website and the kind of effort required to design a website.

This week, I have taken a week off work to add several brand new features to the website.  I also intend to redesign the home page and general aesthetics of the site to maximise the space on your screens.

Here is what I got up to yesterday:

• Made a start on the new homepage and site redesign.  The couple of changes I have made are already making more space available for me to work with.
• Carried out research on using existing data on database to dynamically create a printable newsletter.  Result:  Technology is there but is too expensive.
• Researched religious clip art.  Result: Not impressed with what I have seen thus far, rather amateur, but will try and find something better.   
• Created icons for Parishioners Pets (cute picture of Cocoa) and new Community section that will house Parish Profiles, Post-A-Prayer and much more
• Filmed virtual tour of St Mark's Social Club.
• Uploaded all virtual tours onto my Mac for editing. 
• Contacted Mary McCormick about meeting with one of the parishioners she visits for a photo opportunity.  That's all I'm saying about that one for now.  

That's all for now folks.  I will post again later this evening to inform you of today's activities.