Another week has gone by, and here’s what the tech team have been up to.
Replacing a microphone
Those of you listening in on the service last week can’t help but have noticed some sound glitches with the Vicar’s microphone. Technology can suffer from wear and tear the same as anything else, and in the case of the microphones we use for people who lead our services (they’re called lavalier microphones, but you might hear them called “lapel microphones” or “clip-on microphones”) this wear and tear accumulates relatively quickly compared to more static microphones, as they’re put on and taken off.
This wear and tear is what led to the failure of the microphone (or, more specifically, of the cable connecting it to the radio transmitter pack), so we’ve replaced it and made sure we have a spare on hand.
We’ve also added a microphone check to our pre-service checklist, to help us spot this kind of problem before it affects the quality of a service.
Removing some code and improving some privacy
We’ve done a review of how we monitor users behaviour on our website and what we then do with that information, and we’ve decided that we can remove our on-site analytics. That means no trackers, and no cookies.
The result is faster loading times (the code we used for analytics was one of the biggest bits of the site), and better privacy for visitors.
Community Centre wifi improvements
We’ve rearranged some of the wifi access points in our Community Centre to give us better coverage, and more importantly we’ve swapped from a wireless mesh network to using some of the internal wiring which we added during our refurbishment.
Using the wired network increases speed and robustness of the system, and we’ll be running some tests to see if we can make our guest wifi available to more people.
Nicer sharing on social media
We’ve added some new code to our webpages which gives social media (like Facebook and Twitter) an instruction to use a specific image and description for each of our pages. This means our lovely header images (we talked about these a bit before) are now used if you share our content, rather than a service having a stab and getting it wrong.