Smarter Sheep

Tonight is the kickoff for our Geek Squad small group. The group name name is still pending and you can win a Apple Ipod Shuffle if you win the naming contest and show up at the barbecue tonight! If you have a couple name submissions for the group in mind make sure to post them in the comments to the previous post announcing the contest!

See you there!

Get your small group name entries in and land an ipod shuffle! When was the last time you won cool fruit prizes for just making stuff up? ok… your right… some of you do that for a living, but this is serious business that requires depth of character, creative thinking and possibly a google search.

We are kicking off our new Geek Squad small group for anyone that lives, works or eats in a computer or technology field and desires to hang out with us. It looks like Tuesday evenings at 7pm starting the first Tuesday in September is the big night. Do to lack of creativity I am running a contest here on my blog to find an appropriate name for the group.

Here are the rules for the contest:

1. You can’t use the word “geek” or “nerd” in the name.
2. Your name submission should be trendy, creative and even amusing.
3. Geeks have feelings too… be nice.
4. No words with more than 4 syllables.
5 .Submit your group name entry as a comment and make sure to identify your first name and email address so that we know who you are.
6. You must be present to collect your prize at the first group meeting.
7. Submit as many times as you like and increase your chances to win.
8. Invite your friends.

Don’t download and install free screen savers…. yes I know.. they come with pretty waterfalls, flying geese and spectacular mountain scenes. But, they also install junk on your computer that sends all your internet browsing information back to some secret website on an island in a third world country where hackers are selling your information to feed their children. Yes, I know.. you want to help feed their children, it’s a great ministry idea…but us computer guys prefer you just send them a check rather than causing more computer work for us.

We are working at some new options for online event registration. We have used FellowshipOne in the past for much of this where it made sense, however F1 forces us to have every event registrant create a login. When we have concerts and more community related events we just want to take online payments and reserve seating. We are currently looking at Event Brite as well as a custom local option that may be promising. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m really liking Ruby and Rails development. I have been working through some rails books the last few weeks along with evaluating various php frameworks and at this point I have to say that Rails kicks the snot out of anything else so far. phpCake is a close second. I also found Netbeans to be my editor of choice. Coming from a .net world where we have had some amazing editors that I often took for granted, I found it hard to find a good editor for php and rails, but Netbeans is amazing so far and I am quite impressed.

2:00 pm - just finished 2 days of work moving pages around in our Sitefinity based website. Performance was dead slow so it took much longer than it should have.

2:05 pm - testing all the pages in the website menu structure. Hmm.. none of the most important ones are working. I’m getting a generic error message that something failed in the framework.

2:10 pm - logging back in as admin. Can’t edit the pages either. Same generic error message. I’ve seen this before with the framework and I’m concerned.

2:15 pm - go to sitefinity website and login to get latest framework patch which i’ve been avoiding. Hope applying this will fix the issue.
2:20 pm - download completes, unzipping and getting ready to upload to site. Good thing I made a backup last week.
2:25 pm - Put up a website maintanance page and start uploading Sitefinity patch… nearly 3600 files…

3:01 pm - 1 cell call, 1 google chat and 1 text message from 3 different people that the main website was down. No maintanance page or anything just a big server error.

3:02 pm - panic
3:03 pm - @#$%$#
3:04 pm - time of repentance and healing (had to keep it short for obvious reasons)
3:05 pm - checking site, ftp into server, start checking logs
3:08 pm - no logs to be found, editing global.asax file and turn on custom logging feature I wrote for such an occasion.
3:12 pm - log into host account and resetting asp.net
3:20 pm - still no luck…so editing web.config to turn off any caching etc and checking settings
3:30 pm - locating backups
3:35 pm - modifying backup web.config
3:40 pm - short prayer
3:41 pm - ftp and upload 7500 files to restore website file structure from backup
3:44 pm - realize this is going to take awhile… more repentence
3:50 pm - opening more sockets in the ftp client..hey hey.. that helped … short praise time
4:01 pm - backup restored..
4:02 pm - site still not coming up
4:04 pm - log back into hosting server and remove and reapply .net.
4:08 pm - site comes up yeah!
4:10 pm - testing menus because something doesn’t look right. A large group of pages won’t come up without the generic application error message.
4:15 pm - log into admin interface on website
4:16 pm - admin interface errors out
4:17 pm - sinking feeling
4:18 pm - panic, prayer, repentance (I’ve almost got this down now)
4:20 pm - try several other routes to login and finally get in. I can navigate anywhere within admin interface except to the pages screen which is where I need to go to try and repair any of the pages. Same error message there that I get on all the failing pages.
4:30 pm - create a trouble ticket with hosting company to see if they have anything in their logs that may help.
5:00 pm - still working on admin interface but no luck, hosting company responds that their are no errors logged in IIS so it looks like it’s all in our Sitefinity framework.
5:15 pm - make descision that we are going to lose the last several days of work on the site and have to restore database backups.
5:18 pm - log support ticket with hosting company to restore last week’s backup.
6:35 pm - hosting company says they have it done.
6:40 pm - something is wrong. Doesn’t look like they restored anything. data is the same.

7:00 pm - 1:00 am working on other things while waing for hosting company to reply to my ticket that something is wrong with their restoration of the database.
1:00 am - 1:40 am - tickets back and forth with hosting company as they realize they were trying to restore wrong database on wrong domain…. scary! they have always been superb in the past… must be a new guy having a bad night as well.
2:15 am - database backup finally successfully restored.
2:30 am - main church website is finally up and running again, but without any of the recent changes so it looks like a “do over”
2:35 am - testing pages and logging in to admin interface of website framework
2:40 am - looks like all is well and we are back to where we started… except for our main xml files on the site rotator got nuked during all this and I have to recreate them.
3:00 am - testing in several different browsers and it looks like we are back online.
3:05 am - sigh of relief mixed with thoughts of having to redo all the work and how to do it without the framework corrupting our data again.
3:10 am - prayer and thanks to God for getting us through another day in the church IT department. I’ve learned long ago that things could be much worse

We have been using Endian Firewall for the last year as our firewall and content management filter. We have it loaded on a PIII 1U Dell server with 1GB of memory. It has done a pretty good job. One of my beefs has been that we are running the free version and it’s been a year waiting for the new version to rollout that has the performance upgrades from the latest version of Squid. I finally started looking at other options and found Untangle. Our primary requirements were NAT and Content Filterting and remote access. Untangle appears to fullfill all three. It looks like a pretty good system and they have offered us a free trial as well as non-profit pricing on a monthly support subscription. I checked with the Endian folks and they were nearly double the price and they are not here in the states so it makes support etc a bit problematic. You can also get a free community version of Untangle to run as well if you want to setup your own box.

Windows 98 Blue Screen Launch

Reflecting back over the last year and the milestones that we have reached as well as the ones that we have missed, we are revising our strategies. It’s always hard to walk a balance between allowing staff and volunteers to utilize web tools for ministry and also protect them and the organization from problems. At the end of the day, I’ve decided that it’s more important to weigh on the side of buidling relationships however you can and getting the gospel message out. So with that in mind here are a few of my notes for the months ahead:

We want to create on-ramps rather than roadblocks for our staff and volunteers to be involved in
community and relationships using the internet as one of their tools.

1. Rebuild our site to make it more useful and more professional.
- Utilize more of the tools that other churches and ministries are successfully using.
- Utilize more of the community tools that are already available on the internet.

2. Train people in utilizing the internet for relationships and ministry
- Blogging classes, myspace and facebook type communities etc.

3. Encourage our staff and volunteers to use the tools.
- We manage the backend hard stuff and professional look and feel.
- Staff and volunteers just provide the fresh content.