Last Sunday’s Gospel about the man with many possessions got me thinking about my inordinate affection for my Palm Tungsten T3 PDA…its solid feel in my hands, the way it glides open just so…and the, um, where was I? Oh yes, material possessions. Catholic webmasters especially need to ground ourselves everyday in Christ because of the ever-present distractions of the technology we rely on. So put your PDA to good use by syncing to the top two Catholic mobile sites:

1. Sacred Space – Daily reflections from the Irish Jesuits
2. Mobile Gabriel – Daily Scripture readings and reflections plus saints of the day

Try them out and link to them on your site. And if you have time for a third site, there’s always St. Charles Borromobile from my own parish of St. Charles Borromeo in Arlington, Virginia.

What sites would you add to the list?

PhotoJojo explains how taking one photo every day for a year can help you see your life in a whole new way (Project 365). Why not try this by posting daily pictures of your own parish community on your church website? Sure, it’s a big commitment to get a new photo every day for your site—but think about the payoff: an historical record of your parish and an intriguing introduction for prospective parishioners. Find some ambitious seniors or schoolkids who can help daily. You can record not only the holy days and major events where you might typically have a lot of pics, but also the day-to-day activities and special moments that help define your community.

And display these photos on your church site with style by adding zoomability or an Ajaxy timeline.

With all the mobile announcements today (the new Treo 680, Google’s mobile maps and Mossberg’s review of the Sony Reader), let’s look at how to make a mobile version of your church website. In just a few steps you can reach out to those parishioners using PDAs, Avantgo or browsing on a smart phone.

Design It

1. Pick a short URL. Your parishioners may be typing it in on a mini-keyboard or a phone pad. Yoursite.org/pda or /togo or even /m are good choices. /smartphoneversion isn’t.

2.Start with a blank web page. It can have a .html extension, .php or whatever it is you use on the rest of your site. Add the following meta tag in the head of your code:

<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">

3. Keep the formatting short and plain to work with small screens. Avoid tables. Use default fonts and don’t try to set point sizes or fiddle much with the style since you won’t have much control over the rendering on small devices.

4. Don’t eat up a lot of space with navigation on all the pages. Have your main content on the PDA home page as a bulleted navigation list and let parishioners use their back buttons to get around.

Add Existing Content

This isn’t going to be your main gateway so find content you already have on your main church site, such as:

• Main contacts
• Driving directions
• Mass schedule
• Maybe even a subway map

That’s your set-it-and-forget-it content. If you can do weekly updates, try:

• Sunday bulletins (plain text, not PDF!)
• Homilies
• Major events

You can cut-and-paste those in to the same pages as updates become available. Or you can use an include-statement to pull in your content from a database or other source. On the St. Charles Borromobile site, for example, homilies are pulled from the same file used for the printer-friendly version on the main site, which requires only one line of code to change.

Make a Date

One last thing—include a “last updated” note on the PDA home page. Our users have commented this lets them know whether they need to refresh/resync or not.

UPDATED December 11, 2006
Include your parish’s phone number on your mobile homepage since most phone-based browsers will automatically turn telephone numbers into clickable links. It’s a great option for visitors who, already having a phone in their hands, may want more information.

One of the most visited sections of my parish’s web site, www.StCharlesChurch.org, is the DIY house blessing. Even if you don’t have a priest on hand, you can self-bless your own place following these guidelines from the US Bishops. I posted the instructions and prayers it in 2002 and four years later it consistently shows up in the top 5 of our most visited pages.

To make the blessing resonate with our young, urban community, I included references to ‘roommates’ and ‘friends’ in the original description. Turns out I missed a category. A terrific article in Sunday’s Washington Post about blessing dorm rooms at Catholic University prompted me to amend the description today to include ‘dorm rooms.’

As Fr. Donald Planty used to say when performing such a prayer, “Let’s bless the hell out of this house.”