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Down Time on Websites

December 1, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 5 Comments

UPDATE: Systems are back online (details)

I forgot to mention that MediaTemple had scheduled downtime last night. (details below)

As we sit now, MediaTemple is still down. You can check MediaTemple System Status here. This is impacting the following sites:

30DaystoLive.tv
Blog.YouVersion.com
MySecret.tv
SatanHatesLife.com
Swerve.LifeChurch.tv
Spread.LifeChurch.tv

I apologize if this downtime is impacting you!

–Details about downtime from MediaTemple–

Dear Site Owner,

(mt) Media Temple would like to notify you and the Contacts on your Account of a very important data center maintenance which may affect one of your hosting related services.

DATE/TIME WINDOW:
—————————-
Friday, November 30th 2007 9:30 PM – Saturday, December 1st 3:00AM PST

To see when this maintenance window will occur in a different timezone please visit:

http://mediatemple.net/go/date/0710112330

AFFECTED RESOURCES:
—————————-
(gs) Grid-Service
(ss) Shared Services
(dp)(dpv)(nitro) some Dedicated Physical Services

MAINTENANCE ACTION:
—————————-

On Friday, November 30th, our data center Electrical Engineers will facilitate proactive replacement of certain electrical systems in one of our Facility Power Segments at our EL-DC3 data center. In addition, an upgrade will be taking place to core components of the (gs), including the storage subsystem. This vendor-recommended upgrade required additional time and thus has been grouped with the data center activity in order to reduce customer impact.

This larger than normal maintenance period is a proactive measure to prevent power failure incidents as experienced by various other data centers mentioned in recent news. We would like to remind all customers that scheduled infrastructure maintenance and security related updates are a necessary and vital aspect of web hosting that ensures the long term uptime and reliability of your services.

Should you have any questions regarding the maintenance please open a support request inside the (mt) AccountCenter at the following URL:

https://ac.mediatemple.net/

This announcement is also viewable in our weblog:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/electrical-systems-maintenance-notice-nov-30th/

Digerati Team is Growing

November 19, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 7 Comments

As I talked about in a previous post…this was a huge weekend. Code name Kentucky and Albany were in town interviewing and meeting with the digerati team. Well I am pleased to announce that Kentucky and Albany will be relocating to the Edmond, Oklahoma area and joining the digerati team!

When Kentucky and Albany officially join the team I will formally introduce you all to them. But until then let me say they are both very young, highly talented, extremely creative, motivated and most of all…they are both amazing men of God. We are blessed to have them.

I can not tell you how excited I am about totally overwhelming them both with all the stuff we need to get started on. (just kidding…kinda)

Huge Weekend

November 16, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv with 6 Comments

This weekend is a HUGE weekend. Quite possibly one of the biggest weekends since I have been at LifeChurch.tv.

So what is so big about this weekend…..We have 2 digerati developer candidates flying in from NY and KY for final interviews. The candidates have already gone through our crazy testing, been through first stage interviews, and both have been through detailed technical interviews or been asked to build a specific web application.

So, again…why is this so big? Well it is very simple. Our vision is big. No…that is not correct. God’s vision is huge. Better said, the vision that is in front of us is bigger than anything that I have ever see, mapped out, strategized or executed. (Wayne and Garth would say…we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!) Anyway, God’s vision that we are starting to map out is going to require a team full of highly talented, highly motivated, highly creative, and most of all, team members that are highly committed to following Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, we have a freak’n amazing team right now…we just need more.

I am praying that this weekend goes great. And I am praying that God continues to deliver amazing people. We still have an open position even if we hire the 2 above…and even when the team is full….I will always be looking for highly talented, highly motivated, highly creative, and most of all, team members that are highly committed to following Jesus.

So there ya go…it’s going to be a huge weekend!

Media Temple Grid-Server

November 2, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 14 Comments

One month ago on Oct 6th, 2007 we moved a lot of our web hosting to Media Temple (MT) Grid-Server (gs). So far, so good. Actually no… so far, so great. Let me give you a little background and why we made the change.

For the longest, we had hosted ourself via dedicated servers at Softlayer in Dallas. We LOVE Softlayer, and continue to use them on many projects. For example, we have 11 servers with Softlayer being used for YouVersion, Open, Video Streaming, Second Life Quicktime streaming, LifeChurch.tv, and some SMS projects.

Again, I love Softlayer, but I do not want to become LifeChurch.tv Hosting. Well, what I mean by that is we were really getting deeper, and deeper into an area where there are tons of professionals. So we decided that we were not going to become a professional hosting company, and we are going to use professionals. So we looked all around, and choose Media Temple (gs).

Currently we have 2 Media Temple (gs) accounts with an addition Lite MySQL GridContainer. 1 (gs) account for production, and 1 (gs) account for development. What is a GridContainer you ask? “MySQL GridContainer is perfect for customers who require large amounts of database memory and guaranteed performance with absolute reliability for their database-driven websites.”

Sites currently on 1 MT (gs) account- MySecret.tv, 30DaystoLive.tv, Blog.YouVersion.com, SatanHatesLife.com, Spread.LifeChurch.tv and Swerve.LifeChurch.tv.

When I first looked at MediaTemple (gs) I saw that it was $20 per month, and said something like… “There is NO way I am going to use something that is $20 per month to run our sites.” A month in we could not be happier. Here are a few things that I really like about the service.

Outstanding Control Panel

GPU Usage Reports

GridContainers

Reports (Urchin)

So far, there has been one challenge that does not have a solution. SSH. Each $20 account only has one SSH admin log in. So for us, with many different developers and external contractors we are unable to give SSH access to remote contractors. So, we have had to make some procedual changes, but it has not really caused to many issues.

If you are looking for a great place to host your websites, take a look at MediaTemple…it’s hard to beat $20 /month!

Podcasting Report

October 18, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 9 Comments

Podcasting at LifeChurch.tv has totally blown up over the past few months. In the last 5 months we have averaged over 14 TB of monthly transfer just in podcasts alone. That is Terabytes, not Gigabytes. I would guess that total monthly transfer with all we do would be in the neighborhood of 22-23 TB’s.

For our licensing requirements we have to report quarterly on the music that is downloaded. I thought I would share with you the top 20 worship songs that are downloaded and how many….so here ya go.

So there ya go. Not sure if you care, but I thought is was really cool. Totally amazing that in 3 months we served up 506,022 audio mp3s. Watch out iTunes. (just kidding)

New CMS solution for LifeChurch.tv

October 17, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 18 Comments

The Digerati team is in the middle of re-designing and architecting our www.lifechurch.tv site. For the past few years we have been using a tool called Content Fusion, built by Element Fusion. I think Content Fusion is a nice CMS for a single site, but when you get 12 campuses on it, you quickly see it is not designed to be used how we are using it. So, after a few months of research, phone calls (thanks David), etc, etc, we have decided to move our development efforts towards Expression Engine.

Here are some things that were very important to us, and why we chose Expression Engine.

1) Scaleability. Currently we have 12 campuses, that are truly sites and have many more on the way. We needed a CMS that could scale to 20, 50, 200 with no problem. We think that with Expression Engine’s Multiple Site Manager that we can facilitate this growth with ease.

2) Flexibility. Software can never be all things to all people. There are limits, and actually there need to be limits! However, when looking for a CMS we needed our solution to be flexible enough for us to customize it to meet our specific needs. This could be open source but did not NEED to be. Expression Engine has thousands of Add-Ons, and lets you develop plug-ins and build modules on top of their core. It also lets you integrate your own PHP code anywhere you need, so the sky is really the limit.

3) Give-away-ability. A core passion here at LifeChurch.tv is the ability to give things away. You see that modeled with Open, and in the near future you will see another big round of “giving” away. We are contacted all the time about giving away our code, and our site. We really want to be able to do that, so with Expression Engine we plan on making all our templates, plug-ins and modules available for free. Anything that we build we want to give it away. (more on this later!)

4) Standards based. A key for anything we are doing now following web standards. Expression Engine follows all the “rules” that are important to us.

5) Simple Integration. It was very important for us that our new CMS would play well with others. LifeChurch.tv is moving to FellowshipOne and our website will be highly integrated with it. So, our website needs to tightly integrate with our backend systems. Expression Engine and F1 will work well together via the F1 data exchange tool.

6) Design-ability. Many times I have found that a CMS limits the “design” capabilities to your website. This was not an option for our selection. Expression Engine is based on very flexible templates, and will allow us to design anything that we desire and use EE to manage the content.

7) Active user base. An active user base, developers group and forum was important to us. Typically when you find an active user base you find tons of people that offer support and ideas! We realize that we are not on an island, and really nothing is very original anymore. An active user base makes us better.

8 ) LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This was mission critical for us. The digerati team operates in this environment, and we needed our CMS to follow.

9) Multi Language support. Yep, this was important to us for the future.

10) Price. This might be a shock to some, but the digerati does have budget limits. Expression Engine core for non-profits is oly $99. After we added mulit-site manager, additional licenses for our campuses the total price was just over $400.

Currently we are in planning and design phase. We plan on rolling out the new site around the first of the year. As we get closer I am sure we will give some sneak peaks of new functionality and a peak at the new look.

For those who are wondering we also looked at: Drupal, WordPress, TextPattern, Typo3, and many others.

National Boss Day

October 16, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv with 1 Comment

Today is National Boss Day, and I got a free lunch out of it! If you are not a boss, you should try it out, the perks are really cool.

Seriously, I have a really cool team I work with! Here is a E-Card they sent me… link

Ninja’s Play by Play included this:
Gray Elephant= I fired that guy!
Pink Bear= Polymath
Brown Mouse= Bondini
Purple Cat= Ninja
Green Turtle= Arkitek
Monkey= Tenacious B?

Thanks guys!

SMS at Catalyst

October 12, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 5 Comments

Ok, I have received a ton of emails and now phone calls about the SMS technology that we displayed at Catalyst. So much so, that Bobby and I decided to post about it. Check out this Swerve post to learn more about the details.

I forgot to get Bobby screen shots for those of you guys who were not at Catalyst…so here are some visuals.

Hope this gives you an idea of how we used it. Due note, the tag cloud is from a design comp only. Those are not the words that were actually texed in. I did not screen grab the actual cloud while we were in progress….dumb move on my part!

O.P.E.N

October 4, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv with 3 Comments

Wow, I have an amazing team! It is such a blessing to be able to work along side such talented folks (and we are looking for more!)The team launched LifeChurch.tv OPEN this week, and it looks amazing. Go check it out, I would love your feedback.Props to the Ninja, if you like the design and the usability…thank him! Ryan and his crew kicked some tail on the overall core!Best of all? Open continues to grow and bless so many ministries across the world. I pray that God continues to use it to impact millions of people for his purpose.

YouVersion Public Beta Launch

September 27, 2007 in LifeChurch.tv, Technology with 4 Comments

So the day has come that the public beta of YouVersion.com has launched. I must stop and thank the amazing team that I work with! The YouVersion Team is totally amazing, and continually blow me away. As I pull out of the micro, and look at the macro it is hard to realize that we wrote our first line of code just over 90 days ago…

Check out the Swerve Blog for more details…

A close friend emailed me a few minuites ago with an awsome note of encouragment…but this was hilarious:

“Do you feel kind of like a little kid on Christmas morning?!”

My response….

Kid on Christmas morning, no, not really. More like I just broke out of prison and I am running for my life. It’s pitch black and I can see freedom…it’s right there, the get away car is just a few hundred yards away. BUT, in the back of my mind I know that the prison guards have rifles with scopes and I just might be shot and killed!

I thought is was funny.

Anyway, check you the public beta here, and let me know what you think.

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