Holy B & B Info!

So being the geek I am, I was easily roped into working the website at my church. I say roped, but it's more like I easily roped myself into doing it once I heard the person who was supposed to be doing it really wasn't that much, and I actually went to the church and could keep it up so much more easily, not to mention interacting with them more closely. This, naturally lead to my also upkeeping our pastor's website for his bed & breakfast, since he knew I did this sort of thing once I took over the church site.

Well, a year or so ago, I asked if they wanted to put some stuff out there on the net, and at the time, it was a video presentation of our announcements. I also brought up the idea of putting our pastor's sermons out there, but the idea quickly foundered because there didn't appear to be any interest in doing this.

A few weeks ago, one of the church's board approached me asking about doing this, but also asked if would be possible to turn it into a podcast. I was intrigued by the idea and said I'd see how possible that would be, but one thing I would want to know is the kind of limitations we have, so I asked for the bytespace their web hosting company is allocating to them as well as the bandwidth they have available.

There are some very good reasons for knowing this ahead of time. The bytespace is more basically the disk space and would tell me how big the files could be, and how many could be uploaded at any given time. We might get away with 5 or 6, or there might only be room for 2. Who knew? The bandwidth lets me know how much can be transferred out per month, so I could figure out how many times each file could be transferred. It seems minor, but if you only have enough bandwidth to transfer, say, 3 files 10 times, then that wouldn't work well for a podcast, since that would mean only 3 people would get the messages.

Well, this board member said he'd find out. A couple weeks later, he brought it up again, and by then I'd researched it, and knew exactly how it would work, so I said I'd just need a file of the sermon and I would work with it to get it going. I was shown that the file was saved weekly as it was recorded so it was as simple as trasnferring it. Well, that was easy, but I would need my flash drive to get it, and I didn't have it that week. I asked about the bytespace and bandwidth, and he hadn't found that out. I said I needed to know that.

Over the next week, the Queen took my flash drive up there to save the file, and it wasn't until that Sunday till I got to it. No bytespace or bandwidth yet, but I worked with the file anyway. Turns out their server blocks rss files, which is the feed file used by iTunes to file the podcast, so I ended up sticking that file on my own site. That worked, so it's still there. I sent an email to the pastor, the secretary, and the board member who asked about it asking them to have a look and that I was still testing it to make sure it behaved. I also threw out that I still wanted that info I'd been asking for so the site doesn't crash as a result of what we're doing.

Well, it wasn't two days before we got a letter informing us of the state of the church, etc., and he blurbed at the end that "we are now podcasting the sermons." As flattered as I was that they had that level of confidence, I also shook my head hoping and praying that the server would not get overwhelmed. I went ahead and submitted the link to iTunes, and was pleased to find it searchable by Sunday. It worked like a charm.

On Sunday, I told our pastor about it being out there for general consumption as well as throwing some geek-speak his way that he didn't understand. And for our first week podcasting the sermons, they had technical difficulties in the booth and didn't record this week's sermons. Fabulous.

I asked pastor if he had maybe a one week sermon, and he offered his 5 week series to post out there. I shrugged. It's his church and podcast, so I'll do what he wants. Part 1 of that 5 part series is out there now. And can you guess what else I asked for? Yup, he said he'd check on it.

So on Monday, the secretary called the Queen and asked if the work we'd been doing on the website would cause her email to not work. My heart sank. "Oh, crap," thought I, "We overshot the bandwidth." I tried to get onto the site via the Internet, and on my first try, I couldn't. "This page cannot be displayed."

Not looking good, I thought. I refreshed. It came up. I breathed a sigh of relief and said they may have been having some sort of server problem that caused the issue and the secretary should call them. Oh and while she's talking to them...

What answer did I get? The company will call when they go over, andthe secretary said they'll just buy more bandwidth when/if that happens. Cue rolling of the eyes. All right. Again, it's their site. I'll just keep doing what they tell me.