When you go to buy something on eBay, you look at the seller’s reputation, their “Feedback Profile.” It’s that magic number that says this person is okay to buy from. What is interesting to me is that a rating of 97% is great, but you may not buy from the person if you see two people saying the same bad thing about the seller, even if there are 300 people saying the opposite same good thing about the seller.

If you’re looking at ChMS products for your church, don’t throw Fellowship One out of consideration because of one post that I’ve written.  For my church, ACS is the right solution.  For your church, Fellowship might well be the direction you need to head.  Weigh the pros and cons of each heavily before making such a spendy decision.  I write posts, good and bad, about what I know and who I’ve interacted with.  To me, not sharing what I know would be burdensome, so I hang it out there.  The decisions are always yours to make.

Please hear me well that I am not bashing Fellowship Technologies.  My interactions with them otherwise have always been positive.  They seem to be a terrific company overall.  In fact, I’ve personally recommended them to a couple of churches who have ended up purchasing the product.

I am very encouraged by the quick response of Fellowship on yesterday’s post, and I wanted to share that with you here.

Curtis Harris wrote in this morning:

Matthew, I can’t apologize enough for the blog comment that apparently came from our company.  This is nothing we would ever condone and certainly not something I would want to be a part of; for so many of us, me included, this is a chance to use our God given skills for His purpose… it is our mission field.  I am very embarrased that this type of thing has happened and prior to this took some pride that we were above all that.  Sorry again.  Curtis Harris, Co-Founder and Director of Product Strategy.

Ah, just as I’m writing this post, I noticed that Jeff Hook, the CEO of Fellowship Technologies commented on the previous one.  It’s certainly worth a read.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

Well, I’m not exactly a parent, but I do sponsor three kids with Compassion (you should too, by the way).  I realized that I’m a bad “parent” today.  See, I was walking down the street and the iPhone told me that it was my day to write them a letter.  I’ve been pretty poor about doing this lately.  The past few times, I’ve gone to Compassion.com and “e-mailed” them, but you know, it’s just not the same to the kids as receiving an honest-to-goodness letter.

I was trying to figure out what changed.  Why have I gone downhill in this area that I used to excel in.  Do I have too much on my plate?  Am I over-committed? The truth is, I’ve been too absorbed in my life to care about theirs.  That’s a pretty bitter realization, a hard pill to swallow.

As I began pondering this more and more, I kept thinking about that old adage, that “anything worth doing is worth doing well.”  I don’t want to half-heartedly do anything.  So, do I have too much on my plate?  Do you have too much on yours?

Well, as it turns out, I have allowed my work to overpower everything else.  God has called me to release children from poverty, but I have allowed my job to steal that.  Notice that the blame is placed firmly on me.  I’m not working more because it’s expected of me - it’s just because I do.  I have set firm boundaries in the amount of time I spend at the office, never more than 40 hours a week unless a major emergency comes up.  However, with computers, the office comes easily to my living room.  So, I’m actually working 60-80 hour weeks.

Here’s my recommendation to myself, and to you.  Leave work at work and don’t spend too much time there.  Meet and exceed the requirements of the job, but realize that you’re no good to anyone if you burn out.  If you’re single, like myself, consider this time preparation time for having a family.  The habits you form now will most likely stick with you.

It’s midnight, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about the day. It was a profitable day, having the opportunity to network with a group of other church IT professionals as well as the IT-curious. One lady was completely blown away that any church had even one full-time IT professional.

Here’s some of the topics we covered:

• Training - How do you train your users on technology topics?
  • Cool tool for training: Sony AirBoard - Get people involved in the training. Write on AirBoard and it shows up on the projector screen.
• E-mail marketing - Constant Contact is coming soon with 2-way sync to ACS. Another alternative solution used is ChurchPost.com.
• Text messaging - ChurchCast was discussed as a solution to send out a mass text to selected church groups. For instance, if the bus brakes down on the way back from youth camp, the youth pastor could activate ChurchCast to send an SMS to all parents telling them, “Flat tire on bus. All kids are safe. Delayed 2 hours.”
• Network monitoring / filtering / etc
  • Barracuda 210
  • GTA Firewall and GB-Ware
  • Wireshark University
  • PRTG - I’m definitely looking into this
  • What’s Up
  • IP Monitor - supposedly better than What’s Up
• Worship Attendance - what creative methods are you using to measure worship attendance? Directional infrared cameras to count number in and out of worship center, pew pads, individual cards, overhead cameras, installing chairs instead of pews in order to more easily count.