Latter-day Village Square

Why does the Internet have to be so hard?

I may have reached the point where my brain functionality has reached a peak with respect to what it takes to master the internet.  To tell you how I reached the conclusion, I have to go back a few days.

Recently our dedicated web server saw in increase in attacks from malicious internet sources. They could be the Russian Mafia, Romanian teenage cyber-thugs, or just a rogue internet thief looking to score some personal data.  Whatever the source, the attacks were giving our old security setup fits.  (NOTE: If you don’t believe your computer is under attack when it is connected to the internet, you are WRONG.  Look at your software firewall log and you will be SHOCKED at everyone trying to compromise your computer. Imagine how much harder they try to get into known internet web servers.)

We experienced this once before; our Linux web server was compromised, however, no personal data was stolen or damaged; the perps simply used it to send out gobs of spam.  At that time we elected to place our dedicated web server behind a hardware firewall, a device that filters and traps only allowed internet traffic through to the actual server machine itself.  This really helped, but even then we had configuration issues in getting all of the services to run correctly behind the firewall.

So dejavu all over again; we asked our data center staff to ‘harden’ our web server to increase data security.  Linux servers by default only have login password security; some have software firewalls running at installation, ours does not.  Hardening increases web server data integrity by decreasing the ways and methods of getting to that data. This protects the system from hostile network traffic, Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, and security breeches. It includes many steps that we will not outline here; why give you enemies your game plan?  The hardening was done by our data center staff, but was not 100% error free the first run through.

I am only going to list here two problems we encountered along with their results. I do this to inform our users about times they were not able to take full advantage of our services. Of course we would have preferred a 100% error free procedure, but the long-term server hardening benefits we gained will far outweigh these short term disruptions.

1.      After a reboot, the server did not load the correct IP information. Internet traffic getting through our firewall did not reach the server as it did not have the correct configuration. This resulted in a several hour ‘outage’ very early Friday morning. After I reported this to the data center, they fixed the problem and all of our web sites were again operational.

2.      Email service for latter-dayvillage.com was down beginning at this same time.  New security measures meant that name addresses (DNS) information for LDV’s email server was not updated properly. This is really a good thing, meaning a hacker should be able to maliciously change these settings.  It took our data center staff a while to pinpoint and fix the problem (I provide mail server log information).  Late Friday afternoon our assigned system administrator realized what the problem was and fixed it.  Email service into LDV, including our email lists, was down for about eight hours on Friday.

There. Debra and I are feeling much more confident in our system security, and I have much more faith in our data center staff; they were very responsive and provided the information I needed to understand this upgrade process and its effects.

Yes, the internet is hard sometimes; harder than you would think to run an internet business. We are learning and getting better at it every day!

FYI: if you would like some technical details on Linux server hardening, see this list for an idea of the changes required.

July 2008 Sharing Times

New July Sharing Times have been added to the Primary KB. The July Friend is on lds.org in pdf format. This month I included some visuals, scripture word strips, a conference talk and a song chart that are mentioned in the Friend list of ideas, as well as the Friend articles mentioned.

New Primary MANUAL

There is a new Nursery Manual! Behold Your Little Ones. It is listed as a nursery manual, and I do wonder if we will be getting additional new Primary manuals soon. You can see it online at the Church Distribution website.

~~*2009*~~
So far I have not seen or heard mention of the 2009 Children’s Sacrament Meeting Presentation and Sharing Time Guide arriving in wards - if you get yours, please PLEASE let me know as soon as possible!

PIONEER DAY

The current Village Download Depot Club collection is a beautiful Pioneer collection by our wonderful photographer Courtney White.

And we have a beautiful pioneer art collection in our store,
with matching stickers.

More great Pioneer Day ideas can be found in our Primary KB.

VISITING TEACHING

In case you didn’t know, there is a free Relief Society membership at LDV
- and each month I design a Visiting Teaching Bookmark. You can get the July bookmark now.

NEW SONG

I wrote a new song! "What Would Jesus Do?" and with the help of my friend Jennifer Lerud, who did a lovely piano arrangement of it - I will be able to add it to the Primary Music KB next month!

We are now adding the last set of seminary lesson plans from MarGene Von Forell. If you are unfamiliar with MarGene and her lesson plans, visit her bio page here. MarGene’s years of teaching experience, coupled with her vast collection of quotes, stories, games, and activities, provide seminary teachers with many valuable teaching tools.

Coordinated with the current teacher’s manual, she adds additional teaching opportunities to any lesson. Where applicable, she includes resources collected by her father, a career full-time Seminary/Institute teacher (now retired). Every teacher should read her MarGene Von Forell’s New Testament Summer Preparation Outline and New Testament’s First Lesson; get the year started off right with the correct preparation, classroom organization, and student management strategies.

We intend of completing the addition of MarGene’s New Testament lessons by the end of October. Watch the New Articles list to see where we are.

We now have an ALL NEW version of the highly popular Scripture Rock series for the New Testament. Set to more modern, rock oriented music, this product can also help your students quickly and permanently memorize (every tried get a tune out of your head, music REALLY helps with memorization) the mastery verses.

LDS Scripture Rock New Testament comes in two varieties

1. Regular CD. The CD contains 25 tracks of the scriptures set to rock/modern music.
2. Karaoke DVD/CD. This set includes the music CD and a bonus karaoke-style playable DVD with background picture & scrolling text so you can sing the lyrics to the music. A real winner.

Both of the LDS Scripture Rock products have volume discounts, for more savings.

ALL of our Music Products have playable music clips on their product page; just click the links toward the page bottom and the sample will open and play on your computer. This lets you sample the music style and content to help choose the best approach for your class. But order NOW so you can get a head start and have all 25 passages memorized before the school year starts. This is a tremendous advantage you will have; you can play Stump the Teacher or SM Stump the Chump.

Sing the Scriptures scripture mastery tunes for the New Testament are now available as a download. Purchase these catchy tunes already ripped into the popular MP3 format. Burn them to a CD, copy them to your MP3 player, or play them directly from your computer. Get them instantly and a savings vs. the CD product. No shipping charges and the price is lower!

Order now for yourself and have the 25 scriptures all memorized before your students!

Of course you can also . The cost is higher and shipping is also added, but you do get the CD, which gives you maximum flexibility as to what you can do with the music. Order now.

For some time now, we have not been able to get our knowledgebases indexed by the major search engines. Due to our membership management system, which restricts access to our subscription areas, anyone or anything (e.g., a search engine-indexing spider) without a login password cannot view the knowledgebase content. That software company tried to provide a programmatic fix, but it has never really worked. With no access to the article pages, the major search engines do not know of all the wonderful content we have available.

As we became increasingly aware of the importance of keywords and search engine placement as part of our site marketing efforts, I finally worked out a solution. Our membership system has a protection method designed specifically for PHP files, which powers our knowledgebases. I finally figured in during one night of tossing and turning over this issue, that I had enough PHP troubleshooting (very different from actually writing code) experience to give the method a go.

I was finally able to make the change work, although there is one hiccup. The first time a registered member visits a newly configured knowledgebase (KB; e.g., Seminary, Primary, Primary Music, Sampler) they will see an obscure error message. This is due to the new handling of the information in their login cookie. If the member hits backup and tries the article link again, they should get a good response. I have not been able to find a solution for this; however, the workaround is easy enough to figure out; Go back, retry.

The result of this change is that non-registered users can traverse the category trees of the KBs mentioned above, where they can view up to 400 characters of the article contents. Previously, they could not even see the KB home page. These same article previews (almost 7000 counting all KBs) should now eventually appear in the major search engines, increasing our visibility and search page ranking accordingly.

Today, April 1 (this is NOT a joke) we switched to a new online store and shopping cart system based on Zen Cart, a popular open source product. After an exhaustive search we determined that Zen Cart’s flexibility, extensibility, and feature set made it our best choice, even better than some system was evaluated that cost thousands of dollars. One of our main criteria was the ability to support and even expand our drop- ship and download sales capability. We believe Zen Cart fills the bill.

NOTE: the new cart system requires that every shopper create an account. Rather than integrate this cart with our membership management system and create a login for all of our members, we chose to keep them separate. Why? Simple, we have many store customers that never register for our other site features. We felt it was not necessary for them to create a full site membership simply to shop in our store.

However, creating a store account does have some advantages over our old cart system:

1. Customers can log into their store account and check that status of any order.
2. Customer who purchase download products can login and re-download a product, up to five times or for 14 days, whichever comes first.
3. We will offer account holders special discounts and can transfer gift certificate values to their store account.

Some additional Zen Cart benefits.

• Better classification of products. We revamped the store category system to make it easer for shoppers to find what they need. You can find most products using more than one category.
• A list of Artists / Brands allows shoppers easy viewing all of the products that we offer for a particular vendor.
• We display specials and reduced items on the main page, in the side boxes, and with every category page displayed. We are committed to aggressive pricing and this new interface allows shoppers to more easily find our bargains.
• Email lists – we can inform you of specials and discounts based on your purchase history. We promise not to constantly fill your email inbox, and you can always unsubscribe.
• Gift Certificates - we will be offering gift certificates, which we believe will expand our sales opportunities.
• Permanent Cart - Any products added to your online cart remain there until you remove them, or check them out.
• Address Book - We can now deliver your products to another address other than yours! This is perfect to send birthday gifts direct to the birthday-person themselves.
• Order History - View your history of purchases that you have made with us.
• Products Reviews - Share your opinions on products with our other customers.

Finally, we will be expanding our product lines by adding more and more manufacturers. There are also many other Amazon like features (e.g. others bought this and similar items, purchase items together and save) we will be adding as soon as we have the cart tweaked for maximum performance.

I hope you take a look around.

http://latter-dayvillage.com/store/

Warning, this is still a work in progress, so you may see missing images and a few warts/knots here and there. Do not hesitate to write us about your impressions and with any questions you may have.

I had the server maintenance all worked out for very early this morning. Our data center staff was going to install a secondary hard drive in our server to give us more backup room. We are selling so many digital downloads that the hard drive space required for the site on the web server has grown exponentially. We now have over 10GB of files in Latter-dayvillage.com alone. All of the sites running on our server, e.g. our personal sites and some others we host, are backed up nightly to a separate location on the hard drive. From there, they are backed up to a secure disk storage array in the data center. But those 10GB of files are so much larger than we ever anticipated, that we decided to install a secondary hard drive just for backup.

After the data center staff installed the new hard drive, they started up the server again, around 3 am Mountain Time this morning, but did not check to see if the web services were running, only if the box could be pinged and accessed via secure shell. Later this afternoon, I pointed out to the tech I was chatting with that the box was a web server, how could they do maintenance and not ensure that it fulfilled its main purpose? I have not received an answer for that one yet. This is the first time our data center staff has really let us down; however, the problem would not have been as bad had I checked everything earlier.

Why didn’t I check the server earlier this morning? Well I had my own problems where at home. I live in lovely wind-swept Wyoming. We had another cold snap last night, the wind chill was down to -13 and our building pipes froze again for the second time this winter. I heard water running hard at from somewhere outside out apartment at 7:45am. We had very low water pressure and water was coming into our kitchen (we live on the ground floor right next to the utilities closet. It also came into the room where I have all of my computer gear, soaking the carpets and making a general mess of things. At 4:30pm now we still have no water.

So I must admit I was not even thinking about the server. Finally someone sent me a text message asking if the site was down, when I discovered the problem.

I certainly apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused. It is not something we planned or could even imagine. Now where is the bottled water we stored…

You may have noticed a slight change in the site design. Last night and early today I implemented a change in the menu system that displays our main top drop down (horizontal is the correct term) menus.  I first developed the menus using a JavaScript-based software component that plugged into our Adobe Dreamweaver development environment.  Then we upgraded to Adobe’s CS3 development system, which includes a very similar menu system called Spry.  I started to look at the differences between the two systems, finally determining that the Spry system would speed up our page load times, meaning our pages would be more responsive.  Spry also does not use an image background, meaning few graphic files have to be loaded, adding to its speed and responsiveness. Now our top banner is the same brown color as the rest of our boxes and such.  Finally, I felt more confident that the Spry menus would solve some of our compatibility problems:

• Menus looked and operated differently with our knowledgebase software.
• I had to do some kludgy patching of our blog software to get the old menus to even work and they still looked out of sorts with the rest of the presentation.

The SPRY menus seemed to solve all of that, at least in the test pages I did.

Well let me tell you, I should have tested more.  Updating the site menus means that I must cut/paste our page header (the logo, building images, and menus at the top, including any left side navigation or right-side advertisement areas) and the page footer (banner ads, Google tracking code, and bottom of the page links) into ten different software components:

1. Support Desk
2. Support Knowledgebase (Kb)
3. Forums / image gallery (they share the same theme code)
4. aMember (our membership management system)
5. Sampler Kb
6. Primary Music Kb
7. Primary Kb
8. Seminary Kb
9. Shopping Cart
10. Other static pages, like our home page.

Of course I usually get half way through the list and run into a problem. Last night was no different.  The new menu JavaScript code did not want to play nicely with the Smarty template system used by our Kb software. So that meant that four different parts were all broken. Fortunately, the Smarty system is open source software, which in many cases means better support and documentation than purchased software. This is not always the case, but a widely used system like Smarty had more than enough information; I found a solution and soon had the menus NOT blowing up the Kb software.

Finally, may I please tell you how much I HATE Internet Explorer (IE). More hacks and workarounds have to be used simply because Microsoft makes its own standards, expecting everyone else to just march along behind them. Our new menus looked dreadful when viewed with Internet Explorer.  I normally use Firefox, which is more secure, more feature-rich, extensible, and faster.  I only use IE to test login problems.  However, this time I didn’t test the menus in IE very well. They looked DREADFUL, like something hacked together by an amateur like me.  Again, back to the Dreamweaver Spry support systems, where I found only a single reference to the blotchy and misaligned display I was seeing.  A Spry update was suggested.

After I installed the update and compared the new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file with the old one, I was able to experiment with some of their updated CSS adjustments and get the menus to work equally as well in Firefox and IE.  Yeah!  Finally success, but achieved at the cost of sleep deprivation.  Sometimes with my head down I can work a problem for hours and lose track of time.  So sometime after my wife and son left for work, I finally felt the site was stable enough that I could nap.

So, there you have it; a day in the life, or since I work mostly the graveyard shift, should I say, night in the life of a web developer. Now where’s my pillow?

Tis the season for updates. Many of our site component licenses renew at this time of year, so it’s an ideal time to make sure the software is current. With all of the security concerns these days, keeping software up to date is a must.

We recently updated our:

• Shopping Cart
• Photo/clipart gallery
• Forums
• Knowledgebases

If you have not taken the time to visit/use our image/clipart gallery, there are over 4000 images/photos and clipart selections available for your use. All that’s required is a free membership registration. Of course any of our paid memberships also include access to this resource.

NOTE: a huge portion of the clipart available came from the open source clipart library, which I (Tim) spent many hours converting from the open source .svg format to the more usable (for Windows) .jpg format.