Blogging

I don’t blog much…have you noticed. I certainly intend to, but I get busy. There’s so many projects to work on.

It just so happens one of my latest projects involves blogging. We were using .Text for the church’s blogs, but it wasn’t working out that great. The main problem we were having was that we were getting overrun by SPAM comments. The configuration wasn’t didn’t give us any options to filter out these comments, or to require comments to be approved, or to disable comments all together. Any one of these would have satisfied my users, but none of the above would work. So I’ve been looking into other options.

This of course is why I first switched to WordPress here. I like it and it gives me control over those same options I was looking for, but I wanted a multi-user/multi-blog site like we had before. There is a multi-user version of WordPress but it ONLY runs on Apache. Unfortunately our host runs on IIS. So I’ve looked into other options, and have recently setup Community Server. As it turns out, the guy who created .Text went to work for Telligent and now works on Community Server. So the next version of .Text became Community Server. There were even upgrade scripts to convert all the data. So I worked on it all weekend and got it up and running. Now we’ll see how it goes.

The other big project I’ve been working on is the CHCC forum. We’ve been using PHPBB, which I HATE!!! As does the rest of the staff/leadership and thus it hasn’t been utilized at all in recent months. So I’ve looked into other options. One of these options is Community Server. It has a forum as well as blogs and other stuff. (Note: I like it!) I’ve also setup a couple of other test sites. One running FUDForum(another one I like) and one running PunBB(the one http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org is running). We’re going to try them out and decide in the next week or so which one we’ll stick with.

So… who is the ‘we’ I keep mentioning? Recently, CHCC has combined the Communications and the IT Department into a single Communications and Technology Department. What does this mean? Well, we’re still working that out, but for the moment it means Nathan and I are working together, under the skilled supervision of Wade, to enhance CHCC communication and technology. We meet weekly and work things out together. It’s all fairly new, but I think it’ll be a good change. Alot of what Nathan and I do are just two sides of the same coin, so if we work together more we hope to get more done. For example, the CHCC website. It falls under my jurisdiction to make sure it works, to take care of any code that needs written, keep the MSSQL database in good working order, and any other purely ‘technical’ things that need done to set up new features or keep it working. It falls under Nathan’s jurisdiction to gather content for the site and publish it, make the site look good, etc.

Anyway, that’s enough blogging for now. I’ll try to get back and blog more later.