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Thursday, 25 August 2011 08:55 |
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It's been a long time coming, but hiddenv.com now follows the 3 laws of robotics. (Non-nerds need not attempt to understand this) |
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Monday, 18 April 2011 14:56 |
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Wow, long time no update! Well, a lot has happened in the last two years, but the main thing is the site received a complete overhaul last fall. We used a combination of commercially-purchased templates (since yours truly is a web programmer, not so much a designer), and have a couple more in the bag that we might pull out in the future. Speaking of programming, the site also is now more multi-site friendly. The site-selection popup you receive on first visit, as well as the buttons at the top right (well, today they're buttons and on the top-right) is all driven off a database, so new sites can be added easily. Your current site determines what dates appear by message titles, which announcements you see, and which tabs on multi-tab pages appear. We're looking into other ways to take advantage of this, as well.
We've also launched a podcast, which drives off our message library database (in other words, it's updated as soon as the message is uploaded). We're planning video podcasts, too; we're just working on getting mp4 files to render properly and not look horrible.
Our Facebook pages are starting to take off. Today, they're just links in the footer, but we're hoping to add them soon to a more prominent location.
In other techy-type news, we also have a 'Bug tracker' system to keep track of tasks still needed on the site. If you feel so inclined, hop over to http://hiddenv.com/todo if you see anything amiss in the site configuration, or just have a good idea for an enhancement. Of course, you can always contact the webmaster, too! |
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Friday, 16 January 2009 23:04 |
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Whew! We're finally upgraded to Joomla 1.5. I've checked most of the major things, and everything looks good, if not a little better than before. As always, please let me know if anything seems broken or just looks plain funky. Besides better security and performance, my favorite part of upgrading to the 'latest and greatest' version of Joomla is that URLs actually make sense! No longer are links scary looking like http://hiddenv.com/content/view/44/75. Now, instead, to go to the Contact Us page, for example, its a much easier-to-remember http://hiddenv.com/contact A few other stylish things that have finally been fixed, since I had to re-write most of the template from scratch
- A thin line designates the right edge of each page. Not really an enhancement as it's something that showed up with I was creating the new template file, and I sort of liked it.
- If you were using Internet Explorer, the announcement 'category' (like Dodgeville, Richland Center, Church-wide, etc) now is right-justified to make it stand out a bit more (did you even notice it before?)
- The front page right column and service times box now attach to their surroundings where they are supposed to. Maybe not a big deal with a future enhancement coming in a few weeks (hint, hint), but at least they aren't jagged and ugly anymore
- Print/PDF/Email links on articles have smaller, cuter icons
There may be some other things, but that's all I had written down. Anyway... time to go play with the latest components available for Joomla 1.5! |
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Friday, 18 July 2008 12:02 |
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The website is now actively using the message library database as the source for all things message-related. Mostly this means maintainability and speed-of-updates will be much better, but it also lays the groundwork for some cool new features. For example... on the homepage, we list series that are currently showing and that are coming soon. We don't display dates there because they're different depending on the site where you attend HVCC. - With the new database, you will be able to say which site you are from and see the message dates right on the homepage.
- Lists of messages have alternate row shading, so it's easier to know you're selecing the right media link for the message you're interested in.
- We'll also be able to add topic keywords to each message, so you can search for messages more easily.
- And if you click up on the message library itself (not any of the entries underneath, just the words 'Message Library'), you'll see a complete listing of every message we've ever done, withthumbnail images of the series' logos and direct links to all available media files.
- Probably some other things that I can't think of right now. Technical things.
Certainly let me know (select Website Administrator) if there's anything not working the way it's supposed to. Most of the series for the last two or three years haven't been transitioned over, but they'll get there eventually (you'll know when you start seeing the awesome alternate-row shading). |
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Thursday, 03 April 2008 09:29 |
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I know everyone's been desperately waiting until images work in the E-News archives. Well, I finally figured it out by hacking up some of Acajoom's code. It wasn't processing content mambots upon display. It was also doing something funky with direct-linked images. I took that out, but hopefully didn't break anything else.
Hey, it's a blog about website updates. It's supposed to be technical! |
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Thursday, 31 January 2008 02:10 |
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As tempting as it was to finally get something up on the site that uses AJAX (the new buzz-word in web technology), I couldn't bring myself to do it. I just upgraded the Announcements module to a less-buggy version that had the option of loading the announcements using AJAX. But since we never have more than 2-4 announcements up at a time, it doesn't exactly save a lot in terms of performance, and the fading effect was not as nice. So, I live to enhance the website another day.... Thus endeth my technical ramblings for January... |
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Sunday, 30 September 2007 12:36 |
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Got a new video player setup. Coolest thing: full screen actually works now! Just click the full-screen button while the video is playing and it'll pop up in full screen! I eventually intend to re-work the video popup to look more like the rest of the site, and ultimately, we hope to get some more descriptions and sermon notes up too. Look for more to come! |
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Monday, 25 June 2007 02:49 |
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Hidden Valley is hosted at Bluehost, an online web-hosting service with amazing features like 300GB (and rising, it seems) of storage, 3TB of transfer each month, and other fun stuff. One interesting way you can support Hidden Valley is if you're looking for a place to host your site, register through our affiliate link, and they'll send $65 of the registration to Hidden Valley. This will help pay for hosting HiddenV.com. Thanks for helping out! Click here to sign up for Bluehost using Hidden Valley's referral. |
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Friday, 30 March 2007 15:11 |
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Hidden Valley 4.0 is live and running well! The change-over appears to have gone off without too many problems, and everything seems to be in place. As with any new site, however, there may be glitches, missing data, or incorrect links. Please let me know if you run into any of these. You can click on 'Contact Us' and select Website - Benjamin Flessner to send me a message letting me know what's up. There's lots more planned for this new site, like online giving, e-newsletters, a bookstore, more videos, and lots of generally cool stuff. We just wanted to get all this information out as soon as possible. Keep checking back for updates!
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