Codex ContentOne Man’s Tech Journey with Jesus - more work
By Mark Blair
In our last episode, I had just completed a new version of the Mars Hill Church members site which consisted of some static HTML pages, and some dynamic PHP pages that was a Directory of Members. This was an interesting coding experience for me, a first time volunteering the skills God gave me for a Church based ministry, and I actually kind of thought I was done with it. You know, did my time, contributed what I could, and now going back to my regularly scheduled life. What I soon learned was that this WAS my regularly scheduled life, even if I was not the one doing the scheduling.
I also learned that the needs never stop, ever. I should have figured this, being in the software development biz as long as I had already. There are always new features, no real useful product is ever really done. If it is, it dies and nobody will be using it for very much longer.
So what happened? Well, the church always had a good public facing site that tended to draw a lot of attention. Shortly after completing my previous work on the members site, it really started to draw a lot of attention due to a feature called………Midrash. All the Mars Hill old timers are like, yeah, I remember that. Midrash was really nothing more then an open forum that any anonymous user could sign up for and post whatever they wanted using any identity they choose to make up. I guess we figured since it was on a Church url, that the discussion would be proper, polite, and appropriate for the Church. As it turns out, the Internet in general is not really that at all, so in retrospect it is no surprise that the things got way out of control on the Midrash. Things really started drawing attention when a Mel Gibson impersonator showed up and declared war on the English. You can read about in a book if you want (something about confessions and a Reverend).
When this all came to a head, I was asked if we could recreate the forums on the members site and remove the anonymity that had caused so much havoc. This was to be a closed forum for members only, so some random nitwit from some random place couldn’t give official church statements to the public like on the Midrash if he wanted. So, I snapped out of the delusion that my work was done, and began doing what so many people talk about these days, I re-factored the code.
I didn’t write my own forum software, that would have been way over kill, I incorporated some forum software called phpbb into our existing system. This including modifying the existing phpbb code to recognize people who had log onto the site using the previously incorporated system. People would log onto the site using HTTP Basic authentication and the phpbb code was modified (hacked) to use that login as a registered user. No anonymous users were allowed. User information was stored in the mysql database, and the apache web server used a module called mod_auth_mysql to authenticate users. Users were added using a user/group tool I created on another website, that was only accessible by staff.
So now on our members site we had some static pages, a members directory, and members forums. All this work took a great deal of time, as most software projects tend to do. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just saying that I learned that God demands our time and not JUST our thoughts or money. I also learned that I enjoyed the work, and really felt that this was a worthwhile effort, even if it was really bad code I was writing.
I did finally learn to write decent code eventually…….but I think I’ll talk about that next time.
Thank you Pastor Zack for your gifts and talents. Jesus knows I could never focus my brainwaves on such endeavors and I think it is totally awesome that he has given you such ability.
In fact if I were ever to venture into the feeling of jealousy and envy it would be over people like you. I have been blessed with a computer since I was 3 years old (the early ’80s). My father understands them well and has done pioneering work with them.
I never got them. Growing up I used to ask my dad for help and he would just take over and do it all for me. It was difficult for me to get him to understand that I needed him to show me, not do it for me. Because when he did it for me, it never taught me how to do it myself. I share many characteristics with my father, but understanding computers is not one of them.
I am so glad that you have been blessed with this ability. The lie I need to defeat is that I should have the same ability, because I started using a computer as a toddler. My favorite game back then was the “cookie monster” game, where you used a joystick to see how many cookies you could get him to eat.
Actually, this post was written by Mark Blair, just to clarify all the kudos should go to him
Interesting history Mark. The members site has come along way over the years!
I’m interested in getting involved with The City, but I don’t live in Seattle. You mentioned shoot you an e-mail in the About page, but no email was listed.
I’m currently developing two church web sites using wordpress. One for Grace Community Church (Home of Gerry Breshears) and the other for miltewo::church. The member directory you mentioned that’s written in PHP might be an awesome candidate for a plugin to WordPress if you think you could make the code available. We need something like that. I’ve also started work on a small group locater plugin that uses Google Geocoding to plot the addresses on a map and find the closest one.
Let me know.
[...] my last post I talked about how I integrated new discussion features into our little Members Site and how the [...]