Parsing the Google Calendar XML Feed to Create New Calendars and RSS Feeds

We use Google's Calendar as part of our church web page. It's easy to keep up to date and we don't have to install any special calendar software on our server. It even has an extremely sophisticated XML feed. OK, the feed is considerably shorter, if you tweak the call a bit, using Google's published parameters. You can use this feed in an RSS aggregator, informing your readers about what's happening in the near future. But this might not be exactly what you want.

For instance: It's helpful to have a web-page listing of upcoming events, or a customized RSS feed.

This turns out to be relatively easy to do, if you know the trick,

Read more ⇒

RSS Feed Template

When we designed the new version of our church home page, we constructed a page where we collect sermons. It turns out that this page, and the associated sermons, gets hit a lot. I've been told that the hits match the biblical texts specified by the liturgical calendar for upcoming Sundays, which suggests that most of the traffic is pastors looking for sermon ideas.

Nevertheless, it's useful for a congregation to put its sermons on the web, because, let's face it, the sermon is the biggest chunk of time in a service, and is most likely to give you an idea of the church's, or at least the pastor's, theology. So we want to publicize the sermons as widely as possible.

One way to do this is to construct an RSS Feed. Once you have one, people can link to it as, say, a Live Bookmark, or with a feed aggregator. You can also export the feed to other sites. For example, we've set up a church newsletter blog, and you'll see the titles of the last few sermons on the right-hand side.

Setting up an RSS feed isn't all that hard. I was able to do it using the prescription in Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS, with a few modifications needed to get the thing to properly validate. I'm putting a template for the feed reader here, as much for my use as anyone else's:

Read more ⇒

Designing a Random Photo Album

More on my Church Web Page redo:

It's nice to have a picture on the front page, showing the church, or, more importantly, the people who make up the church. It's even nicer to have the picture change occasionally.

The ideal way to do this is to make a Flash slideshow, something easily accomplished with SWFTools, available in fine Linux distributions everywhere. It's fairly simple: Load up all the pictures in order, and export the file, possibly making a political statement everyone in the Universe will ignore. ahem Sorry, some things die hard.

The advantage of Flash is that everything is loaded into your visitors browser once, and then stays there, rotating pictures, for as long as she/he is on the page.

The disadvantage, at least with the method used here, is that the pictures are always in the same order. Which means that the casual visitor, who only stays on your site for maybe 60 seconds at a time, will only get a few pictures, always in the same order.

Not to mention, every time you add or subtract a picture from the lineup, you've got to recompile the animation — not an onerous task, but an annoyance.

PHP can solve part of this problem.

Read more ⇒

[Why Would You Want To] Run Multiple Copies of Internet Explorer[?]

Comes the time in the life of every web page designer, including those of us who are in no danger of losing our amateur status, when he must face the fact that half of is audience is going to be using Internet Explorer to view his artwork.

And not just the current version of Internet explorer. There's IE8, IE7, IE6, and, dear Lord protect us, even IE5 is sometimes seen in the wild. Of course, each version of IE has its quirks. IE6 does CSS badly, IE7 does it a bit better, and IE8 is better yet, though not perfect. To show you an example of the differences, here's a screen shot of one of our pop-up menus. The first one's IE8, but it's pretty much the same in all reasonable browsers:

Then there's IE7, which looks like this:

Read more ⇒

Amateur Web Page Design

Let's put this right out front: I'm not a professional web page designer. I'm not even a low-handicap amateur web page designer. I flunked web page design.

However, I have put together at least one web page that gets a lot of attention in its field — more for its content than for its looks. So, I guess, I'm a somewhat competent web page designer.

As a result, over the last dozen years or so I've been in charge of keeping up my church's web page. The thing just grew, sort of like Topsy. It started out as a high school web design project, the designer left for college and I just kept adding things. Sermon pages, Christian Education pages, newsletters, etc.

It got to be a bit of a mess.

Read more ⇒