Archive for Ministry

Insider Secrets: Hosting Contracts

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Hosting contracts are sweet deals — for the vendor.

Since just about everything in technology gets cheaper every year (except labor costs), multi-year hosting contracts allow vendors to lock in long term revenue without having to remain competitive. Labor based service contracts can be a good deal for the customer, but hosting and any other software and technology will certainly get cheaper every year. Why sign a contract to guarantee today’s higher price?

Some vendors offer discounts for annual prepayment, which can be a good deal if you have the spare cash. But beware of contracts for more than one year.

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It’s Time to Upgrade WordPress

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

If you are running an older version of WordPress, it’s time to upgrade. The current version is 2.8.4, which we have found to be very stable and include some great features not found in prior versions.

Personally, I don’t recommend you blindly upgrade every time a new version comes out – in any software. New software versions almost always bring new bugs with the new features. I like to sit back a while and let other people find the bugs on their sites.

But today we have a stable version in 2.8.4 and there are several security issues with many of the older WP versions. Bad guys have written worms to find sites running older versions and to do malicious things to them. Unfortunately, we regularly get calls to restore and secure hacked sites.

If your site (or your client’s sites) are not running 2.8.4 we would strongly recommend this is a good time to get “up to date” , before they get discovered by a malicious worm!

Before you update:

Remember to backup your site (and your databases) before updating and always check your plugins before updating a WordPress site. A plugin that is not compatible with the current version can crash your site.

Main Street is available to help you with upgrades or to do an audit of your plugins before you install the update.

Automatically Update Facebook Fan Pages from Your Web Site

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Good news: each social media platform (ie. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) offers a new chance to meet prospective customers or partners. Bad news: it takes a lot of time to keep each platform updated with current info.

At MainStreetOpen we have a new application that will ease some of this burden. Our Facebook Page App will create a custom tab with dynamic content from your web site on your Facebook Fan Page. Our app pulls data from your web site – both static content (about us, contact) and dynamic (via your RSS feed) — and generates a custom tab with this data on your FB Fan Page.

The best part is that this information is updated automatically when you change the web site content. You NEVER have to update the Facebook Fan Page data. Our app will automatically keep it in sync with you web content.

The Facebook Page App is fully customizable. We can configure the content and graphics to match your site. This works with WordPress sites and any other content manager that generate an RSS feed.

Two examples:

http://facebook.com/ministrycom (Latest News tab) — data comes from http://ministrycom.org
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MainStreetOpen/40320181025 (Web Site tab) — data comes from http://www.mainstreetopen.com.

MainStreetOpen’s Facebook Page App starts at $300 plus customization. That’s a one time cost that will keep your Facebook Fan Page current without any effort from you. Contact Main Street for details.

Working with Churches Quiz #7 – Meeting Attendance

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

** Note: If you don’t work for a church, or with churches, you can ignore this post. It probably won’t make much sense.) **
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Categories : Developers, Ministry
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Facebook Is Now 4th Largest Site in the World

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

facebook-logoAccording to comScore, in June 2009 Facebook became the 4th largest web site in the world based on unique visitors. It trails only behind Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

With over 340 million unique visitors for the month, it easily blew past EBay, Amazon, AOL and the entire family of Wikipedia sites.

If you’ve been waiting to see if social networking was a fad before getting involved — it’s probably time to jump in. With almost twice as many unique users as EBay, I think it’s safe to say Facebook is reaching more than just a bunch of college kids.

Is your business or ministry on Facebook? We can help.