Let us start this report bringing you up to date on how our SSL technology adventure has worked out for us so far. If you have read our last update, you will know there were issues with moving to a full SSL compatible website. Our report for this year on the issue is good, all our third party content contributors have moved to SSL, with the exception of one. Because of a single hold out, we were lead to the difficult decision to removing that content, with one exception, and that is the “Trivia Bible Quiz” feature. Our reciprocal links page is still with mixed content, do to the images coming to us unsecure. But I can say about 95% of our website is secure now, and those few pages that still have mixed content, the issue still remains with photos tied to outside content coming from non-SSL locations. These type issues will take time for everyone involved to resolve their own issues, as time and money becomes available to them.
SSL has evolved over the past year and our web-host provider can now offer us a FREE version of SSL, that we can work with. I am not going to go into the different versions or types of SSL, but I will say I am happy with our choices.
Because of the need to remove unsecure content from our site, we have replaced those features with new ones, such as Ravi Zacharias and Focus on the Family pod casts located on our home page, along with changing our news source on the right panel. We have moved our ads around to be less intrusive and made some changes on our right side panel. We updated our ministry links feature by including a podcast format for the links, and the topics chosen, we think will be most beneficial for those looking to do ministry. We updated our reciprocal links directory to look and be a little more modern and simpler to use, even though we could not fix the images to be more secure in nature. Don’t get the wrong impression, the page is safe for your browser, but like any thing on the internet there is always potential for someone to hack their way into our site, thus, effecting you and your visit here. That is why the industry is pushing for full SSL handshaking worldwide. However, until everyone on the Internet moves to this technology, all websites that use third party content, as we do, will always have some risk to being hacked.
Other updates to our site have been the change from making our encyclopedia into a glossary-formatted feature. This has improved the feature with better pop-up windows, explaining word usage definitions and Scripture passage quotes. We hope you take advantage of this feature by running your mouse over the words highlighted, which will cause a pop-up window, providing you information on that word. If the window does not give you all there is on that word or Scripture passage, you can click on the word, which will take you to a page with full readability. When you are done, just click the red button on that page and it will return you to exactly where you were on the page you came from. It dose not get any easier then that.
We have updated our magazine plugin, bringing a little more organization to that feature, along with adding a few more articles; we also added a new category of “Christian Museums and Placed to Visit” under our “Educational Index” link on the top menu bar. Our “Store Resources” feature has also been upgraded, for a better experience, along with some added music selections I particularly enjoy, and I hope you will as well, if you are into that style of music.
Other changes made have been the changing out of our “AddThis” feature by using a new plugin not tied to third party players. Our new “Share it with someone” feature is restricted to the server we use for our site, which provides less cookie use and provides us a more secure environment. Finally, we reinstalled a plugin that hopefully will make those viewing our site through their Smart Phones a little better experience.
I believe that is it for this year’s updates, and thanks for stopping by!
