08-April-2012 Sunday Service

08-April-2012 Sunday Service

http://churchonhigherground.org/worship/sermons/files/2012/04/12-0408-01.flv

I have rolled out a new version of the Archive Search plugin on the website.  This version fixes some bugs that were in the previous release.  The most important issues that were fixed were:

• If you sorted the results table of a search on a field, you would lose all of the search criteria
• If you changed the search criteria, you would lose your sorting options.

The new version also implements a few new features in the back-end that make managing the plugin easier.

I’ve been busy editing video the past week.  My backlog grew as I got side tracked doing other things in February and March.  As of 4/12/2010, the backlog included the services for the weeks of 1/31/2010, 2/7, 2/21, 3/7, 3/14, 3/21, 3/28, 4/4 and 4/11.  Working as fast as I could last week, I managed to get the videos for 1/31, 2/7, and 2/21 up onto the website.  I feel good about that, but I effectively only gained 2 weeks on the backlog, as we just recorded service for 4/18 yesterday.

I’m going to try to get through everything for March 2010 this week.  Wish me luck!

With the start of the Catalyst Class and Friday Forum show, some changes have been made to the website.  These are intended to make it easy to find these videos and interact with the Church on Higher Ground community.

All of the pages discussed below can be found under “Webcasts” on the menu.

The Catalyst Class is about teaching and bringing up Christian leaders in the church.  You can find a live broadcast of each Catalyst class on the Catalyst Class Live page.  You can view the edited video for each class after the class is over by visiting the Catalyst Class Videos page, or you can search our archive of Catalyst videos on the Catalyst Class Archives page.  Finally, you can submit questions about anything you’ve seen in a Catalyst Class video to us by visiting our Catalyst Class Submit a Question page.  Please note that it will take about a week to publish the edited video of a Catalyst Class to the web site after the class has been completed.

Catalyst Class is held on the last Saturday of every month.  The next Catalyst Class will be held on Saturday, April 25, 2010, starting at about 9:30 AM.

We have begun production of Pastor Weber’s talk show, Friday Forum: The Christian Perspective.  New episodes will be published to the web site on Fridays.  You can view the episodes on our Friday Forum page. You can search our archive of Friday Forum episodes on the Friday Forum Archives page.  Finally, you can submit questions for Pastor Weber to answer in a future episode or a topic suggestion to us by visiting our Friday Forum Submit a Question page.

So check out the new features & please post your comments and suggestions!

It’s a brand new year and the Lord is moving in our church.  The outlook is sunny and bright, and I know this year will be better than 2009.  So let’s do an update on the video editing progress.

As of today, I have uploaded the video for 13-December-2009.  The title of the sermon is “The Fruit of Giving Thanks: Remembering the Lord Your God.”  I felt that this was a great message and one that I encourage you to view.

I still haven’t reduced the video editing backlog, and I’ve actually increased it.  I have one more video for a Sunday service to do for December of 2009, and then I have all three weeks for January.  I’m hoping to be up to be able to do the last Sunday for 2009 in the next couple of days, and then get all 4 weeks of January done in the next 2 weeks.  That will at least get me up to date, and I’ll still have all of the video from last summer to do.

There was no service the weekend of 20-December-2009.  There was a snow storm & the service was cancelled.  The next video to be uploaded will be for 27-December-2009, where the Prophetess Robyn Thom Rogers visited.  This was a very powerful visit & I will be getting this up onto the website in the next few days.

In my last post two weeks ago, I indicated I’d try to edit two videos a week in an attempt to reduce the size of the backlog of video waiting to be published.  Well, in the past two weeks, I’ve managed to edit & upload three videos.  I’ve only reduced the backlog by one week, but at least it has shrunk a little & not gotten bigger.

In the past two weeks, I have edited & uploaded video for 11/08/2009, 10/18/2009 , and 11/15/2009.  The backlog of videos that remain include 10/25/2009, 11/01/2009, and now 11/22/2009.  And those are just videos that were made in our new sanctuary.  I started to edit (but never finished) 6/28/2009, and then we have all of July, August, September, and 10/04/2009 from the old sanctuary in the backlog.  That’s 15 videos that are waiting attention.

Starting tomorrow, I will begin working on the video for 11/22/2009.  I hope to get the video editing done and uploaded by the end of Wednesday. Thursday is Thanksgiving & there won’t be any work done that day.  I’m unsure about Friday, but I hope to start working on the video for 10/25/2009 then.

Wish me luck!  Or better yet, say a prayer that I get through the backlog before 2012!

Our church moved into a new sanctuary in October.  The new sanctuary is the auditorium at Broadview Middle School.  We are renting it and hold our Sunday Service there.  This week, I have published the video for the first service we held in the auditorium on 11-October-2009.  You can see that video here.

As you know, I have a backlog of video to edit.  Actually, we have been in the new auditorium for a total of 5 services so far & I’ve only gotten one video edited & online.  This is in addition to the last 15 weeks of services that were held in our old sanctuary that went unedited while I was building this website.

So I’ve formulated a plan to catch up on all this old video.  Each week, I’m going to work on the current week’s video & one from the backlog.  That’s two (2) weeks of video I’m going to edit & post each week.  I’m going to start with the most recent stuff first, then go back to June 28 & work forward.  It should take me 20 weeks to get through all of the backlog, about 5 months.  But it needs to be done.

So this week, in addition to the video for the 11th of October, I posted video for 21-June-2009. You can view this video here. This was video that I had finished editing earlier & just had neglected to post to the web site.

Wish me luck!  I need to keep up this 2 videos a week pace and keep up to date with my other responsibilities.  And the Holidays are almost here.  It’s going to be a busy 5 months.

The development work for this website has been completed now for over a month.  Just about everything is working as designed, though there are parts that have to be built yet.  I’m taking a break from that development now to catch up on a number of things.

What kind of things?  Well, some of it is personal.  I was guilty of not paying attention to everything I should have paid attention to while building this site.  I’m not going to discuss these things, but working on them.

I’ve also been guilty of letting the video editing for this site languish.  I know that a big part of why people come to this site is to see the sermons from the previous Sunday, so this particular oversight is especially egregious.

So over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be catching up on all of the videos that are waiting to be processed.  I’m going to start with the videos from our new sanctuary, as these are the most recent.  I don’t know when the other videos from the end of June, July, August, September & the first week of October will get done.  But we’ll try.

The last problem with the Archive Search plugin has been resolved & it’s now running happily on the Sermons forum.  And I’ve been able to upload a video of a service directly onto our website & embed it in a post in the Sermons forum.  So everything on the website that needed to be operational before the move to the new Sanctuary is operational.  Praise the Lord!

I’m also happy to report that the spam filtering software for WordPress is working.  It intercepted a number of spam comment postings on the Sermons forum.  I looked at those & deleted them. I am indeed quite impressed with the efficiency & thoroughness of that anti-spam software’s abilities to identify spam & quarantine it.

There are still a few things that need to be built, but they will have to wait at this point until after we’re settled into the new sanctuary.  And I have a backlog of video to edit & get up on the site that I have to get through first.

Lastly, I’m happy to report that Pastor Weber has started her own blog!  It’s called “View From the Pulpit” and can be found under the Underground menu, or you can click here to go to her blog.  Be sure to subscribe to her RSS feed!

Yes, I’ve finished the development work on the Archive Search plugin.  Running it on the local copy of the web site I keep on my MacBook, everything works great & looks even better.  I am extremely happy that everything works as intended, and I owe that to God.  I couldn’t have done it in the amount of time it took if it weren’t for Him.  Though there was a 4 week period of traveling down the wrong road for which I have no one to blame but myself.

So I uploaded the plugin code to the church’s web site & I started creating posts for the sermons.  I even linked each post to the YouTube video for the existing sermons on that site.  I may replace them down the road with content hosted on our site.  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  I have a backlog of videos to edit for June through last Sunday, and that backlog will shrink only so quickly.

I had four sermons loaded at one point, so I decided to test everything as it was then.  The search portion worked fine, returning the four rows in the Sermons blog.  The code still had some bugs and other issues at this point, so I went back to fixing those.  Then I added more posts for more sermons.  And something strange happened.

What worked with 4 posts wouldn’t work with 9 posts.  If you go to the Sermons page today, you’ll see all 13 or 14 sermons that are on YouTube are there.  But if you go to the Sermon Archives page, you’ll see that it can’t find any sermons at all.

Warning:  Technical content follows!  I looked into this & found that the query the plugin generates to search the database has an issue.  Without getting into any detail, the query the plugin created needs to perform 8 joins on the same table to gather the information to display.  Each post has at least 8 rows for it in the “postmeta” table.  For 9 posts, that’s 8 x 9 or 72 rows.  Then the query does 8 joins, so that’s 72 x 72 x 72 x 72 x 72 x 72 x 72 or over 10 trillion rows.  There is a limit in MySQL on the number of rows that a query can process, and it’s a lot less than that.

So I need to find another way to generate the search results.  This is going to take some research & then some coding.  I hope to get it fixed quickly, but for now, I’ve got video to edit.  And research to do.