This is clever.  Someone sent me this video today with this unknown candidate “Matthew Irvine” running for president.  I totally fell for it.  You can put in anyone’s name in this site and it gets embedded throughout the video.  That’s funny!

You know me well enough now to understand that I’m pretty well-balanced. I don’t like to always operate in the negative, but I’m not at all ashamed to point it out when I see it.

Last week, I received a moderation e-mail from our church blog. Nothing seemed unusual at first glance since I receive so many of these on a regular basis. What was surprising was the contents of the message and most notably who’s IP address it came from.

A new comment on the post #185 "Vacation Bible School" is waiting for your approval
http://www.fbcbelton.org/2008/06/vacation-bible-school/

Author : Barb Jones (IP: 208.36.200.226 , mail.fellowshiptech.com)
E-mail : bjones@gmail.com
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=208.36.200.226
Comment:
Why can I not register for VBS online? Let’s get with the times!

There is so much about this comment that causes curiosity. I don’t believe that the IP address was forged - it looks like it did in fact come from a computer owned by Fellowship Technologies, makers of the ChMS product Fellowship One. I’m left with three questions that I want answers to:

1. Why would a company that we don’t have a relationship with post a comment that, in effect, demeans our church and the way we do ministry?
2. Is online registration the only way to share the life-saving message of Jesus Christ? We evaluated it extensively and we have a platform that is capable of handling the registrations, but we decided that this was not the year to do it.
3. Is Barb Jones on a personal crusade or is this a common corporate practice of Fellowship Technologies? Is Barb Jones a real person?

I’m hoping that Jeff Hook, president of Fellowship, will weigh in on this post. I know he reads my blog, and he’s even commented here before.

We’re in the midst of a church survey for our strategic planning council.  This is something we do about every five years, and we ask a ton of questions to our church members and regular attenders.  It helps us to discover the pulse of the church, what we’re doing right, and what needs improvement.  It also gives us massive insight into who we are reaching.

Previously, it has been done completely on paper.  The paper surveys would be turned in to the office and everything transcribed.  When looking at 1,000+ surveys at about 8 pages, this comes at considerable cost.  With some help, I finally convinced the church to put the survey online.  We are offering paper copies to anyone who absolutely cannot use the World Wide Web.

I’m hoping that everything is going well with the process.  See, I’m on a cruise ship right now and I’m disconnected from what is going on with the survey.  I hope that the members and visitors are finding it easy to use and navigate, that we haven’t crashed the Web server or database server with all the traffic we’re sending, and that we’ll have as many people complete it by this method as we used to on our all paper method.

After we’ve tabulated all of our results, I’ll post the URL so that you can play around.

I hate spam (a.k.a. unsolicited commercial email).  I can’t stand it when vulgar messages get through our filters and end up in staff mailboxes.  A lot of that stuff has horrible text and images about various body parts and activities.  So, my aim is to make our Web site as safe as possible to prevent spam bots from grabbing up all of our addresses and sending us a bunch of junk.

In the past, I developed a simple form.  Our standard for e-mail addresses is firstname.lastname@fbcbelton.org.  So, my script address would be http://www.fbcbelton.org/cgi-bin/send.pl?to=firstname.lastname.  It then added the domain on the server side, out of the view of spammers.

When I moved to the new server, I made a number of changes here.

• I changed it to a PHP script rather than a Perl script.  There was only one reason for this - it’s easier to use the PHP library for Mailhide than the Perl library.
• I was showing the e-mail address in graphic form on the page, in addition to the contact form.  So, matthew.irvine@domain.org was broken into 16 images (i.e. m.jpg, a.jpg, t.jpg, t.jpg … etc)  People were just confused by that since they couldn’t click on the address.  Plus, I bet spammers will figure out how to read those (if they haven’t already).  Well, I took that off.  Now, the “To” area shows the staff person’s first and last name.
• It was very difficult to teach staff to use their e-mail URL since it was cumbersome (http://www.fbcbelton.org/cgi-bin/send.pl?to=firstname.lastname).  So, I added a mod_rewrite rule to change the structure to the much friendlier http://www.fbcbelton.org/send/firstname.lastname.  Here’s how:
  RewriteRule ^send/([^/\.]+).([^/\.]+)/?$ /cgi-bin/send.php?to=$1.$2 [L]
• Finally, I added the Mailhide API to the page so that people who need to send attachments or just want to use their regular e-mail client can do so.  Now users can click on “Show actual e-mail address,” enter a captcha, and be shown an actual mailto with the honest-to-goodness address.  By the way, I really like Mailhide - I think you might also.

We’ll see how it all works out.  I bet it’ll do well.  I have several things still left to do.

1. Instead of creating a separate directory of e-mail addresses to pull from, I will change the script to pull the actual address from Wordpress based on their Wordpress username.
2. Currently, you can enter any name into the URL and it will generate a page, so http://www.fbcbelton.org/send/poopy.face will indeed generate a page.  It will error out if you send a message, but the page will be generated.  I’ll fix that later.
3. Lastly, I might make it a little more difficult for the address to be guessed from the URL.  I know I’m overly paranoid, but I’m worried that eventually spammers will be able to figure out that http://www.fbcbelton.org/send/firstname.lastname belongs to firstname.lastname@fbcbelton.org, since all of that is in the URL.  By the way, that same line of paranoia is also why I used “send” in the URL instead of “contact.”

P.S. - I’m at sea right now.  This post was previously written.

I have been working for the last couple of weeks on a new Web site design for our church.  There are plusses and minues still, and I have a long list of items still left to do, but I felt like it was time to get this thing out the door.  Now, when ACS gets around to implementing my needs for Facility Scheduler, we’ll really be in business!

Check out the new site, and  compare it to the old site.

I’m no expert designer, but I’d love to hear your comments, critiques, and questions.