Webmaster’s Notebook

Lights! Camera! Action!

This page documents all the improvements and changes to this site, in the order they happen.

by Donn Edwards


Updates happen frequently, with at least something new every week. This page helps regular vistors to see the new items they might otherwise miss.

Last updated: August 27, 2009:
August 27, 2009: Successfully moved ASP pages from Hetzner's Linux servers in Germany to www.webhost4life.com in the USA. I also discovered that Vineyard Music has been selling MP3 files for some time on their web site.
January 22, 2000: Now that life has returned to its normal boring state, I have finally found some time to catch up with all the outstanding issues on this site. Hopefullyt the changes will happen a bit faster again.
August 20, 1999: Finally! Some updates, albeit minor. Fixed up the links to VMG's http://www.vmg.com/new.htm page, which has the new releases and a song finder on the same page. This is a brilliant idea.
What happened to spare time? I don't know, but my personal life has changed for the better. Meet Tessa.
May 6, 1999: Updated links from http://www.vineyardmusic.com/ to the great new http://www.vmg.com/.
May 3, 1999: Minor changes and improvements, and a link to my personal home page.
April 23, 1999: Added 4 more album reviews, and changed the reviews listing to work chronologically. Also added a disclaimer about each review. Updated the VMG page to give more contact details and the URL of the UK web site.
April 22, 1999: Added a site search facility, but I’m not convinced it’s working yet.
April 5, 1999: Reworked the album reviews, and updated all the new EagleStar/MorningStar album listings.
April 4, 1999: Took a fresh look at the Vineyard Cafe series.
April 3, 1999: Redid the entire song index: by first line, author and song title. Fortunately this isn’t a manual process ;-)
April 2, 1999: Added more product announcements and (finally!) more album reviews.
April 1, 1999: Tidied up all kinds of stuff, including the links page (at last!) and added some product announcements.
March 29, 1999: Added the VMG songfinder search form to the Song Finder page, and simplified the ordering page. Also added some product announcements for the Revival and Healing albums.
March 28, 1999: Added four more sound files for Women In Worship and fixed up the words for the Why We Worship albums.
March 26, 1999: Updated some sound files for I Just Want To Thank You and Your Love Reaches Me. Coincidentally I discovered that ASCAP wants me to pay US$ 250 per year for royalties on the sound samples. The WWW is weird. Fixed up the Christmas albums listings. Your guess is as good as mine as why I would do this in March. Very weird.
March 22, 1999: Fixed up the redirect feature, and added in the site guide.
March 12, 1999: Updates for the Why We Worship Conference.
March 7, 1999: Tidied up song finder lyrics button, and added words to I Just Want To Thank You
March 3, 1999: More information about the SA Why We Worship Conference posted.
March 1, 1999: Added lyric search button to link with the VMG song finder
February 28, 1999: Added lyrics to Your Love Reaches Me album information.
February 15, 1999: Finally managed to finish the SA Conference information and biography pages.
February 7, 1999: Made updates to the New Releases page, and started work on the Why We Worship pages for the South African conference.
January 20, 1999: Made corrections to Carl Tuttle’s article Introduction to Worship, thanks to proofreading by Charles Svitlik.
January 11, 1999: Finished the AVC Philosophical and Theological statements.
January 5, 1999: Started work on the AVC Philosophical and Theological statements.
January 2, 1999: Fixed up the sound samples page to show which album the song is from.
December 24, 1998: Christmas message on main page.
December 16, 1998: Small programming changes and added in the Christian Banner Exchange.
December 14, 1998: I have been trying to move the mirror server to a site in the USA, in between massive programming projects and flu. Also finished the sleeve notes for the 4 MorningStar albums, and trying to track down Indie Vineyard albums.
November 22, 1998: Finalised the survey for VMG and updated the New Releases page.
November 14, 1998: Added in the Intimacy album details, as well as some other cosmetic changes. Also added the VCF Anaheim “A Celebration of Worship” 20th Anniversary Commemorative album. I’m also finalising a survey for VMG.
November 7, 1998: Early morning report back on the Pulsate Worship Festival. More followed later in the day.
November 5, 1998: Seven new sound files, thanks to some fancy new software on my laptop.
November 3, 1998: Cosmetic changes to most pages, fixed up the dates of some of the worship update articles.
November 1, 1998: Continued updating SA album information on the database, and started typing out an amazing article by Carl Tuttle on worship.
October 26, 1998: Wrote an article about Making Worship Shine by doing the OHP duties properly.
October 24, 1998: Added the content to the South African page, as well as an article about Silent Worship. Also tried to ensure that all generated HTML code is in lower case. Had a go at doing all three Christmas albums. Also tried getting all the Change My Heart Oh God stuff organised. These pages are still under construction.
October 23, 1998: Spent three hours at the office opitimizing the graphics that appear in the buttons and stuff. The main pages load a few seconds quicker now.
October 21, 1998: Added in Come, Now Is The Time To Worship album, plus clarification about the availability of the album.
October 20, 1998: Added some South African albums: Canned Fish, God Sessions, Evan Schoombie, Praise Africa.
October 12, 1998: Attempted to remove all major HTML errors from the main pages.
October 10, 1998: Added more articles to the Worship Update pages.
October 9, 1998: Added all song words for Live From London and put the extra notes and words below the copyright notice.
October 4, 1998: Added all the album details for I Love Your Ways and I Just Want To Thank You. Also added some info on the NCMI guys. Also reorganised the songbook pages for TFH albums.
October 3, 1998: Fixed up some missing files on the main site, and added the Midi Jukebox and some extra MIDI files. Also added the RealAudio 5.0 icon to the sound page, even though I prefer the Windows Media Player. Also added a Worship Update page, and the programming to keep the complete list of articles up to date.
October 2, 1998: The main site took on the new look, even though there were a few pages still under construction. I received valuable feedback from Keith Giles, Dave Hackbarth, Joe Randeen and Costa Mitchell.
September 24, 1998: Live from London is truly awesome! It’s got hints of ‘The Committments’ brass sound, not to mention a bass riff like ’Deliriou?’. So between listening to all the new music, I fixed up all the Song Finder pages, and got the Discography pages back into shape. So now we’re down to only 14 pages under construction.
September 23, 1998: Winds of Worship #12, TFH #35 and TFH #6 and several other albums arrived today. Thanks a million to Keith Giles at VMG. Viva VMG, viva! So not only was I dancing around the room, I kept updating all the new pages for the new-look web site. The Vineyard Cafe coffee mug is huge it kept me up all night on a single cup of coffee. At this rate I’ll die of caffiene overdose %-)
September 20, 1998: Made changes to the main function points of the site, and got the opening page to work.
September 17, 1998: Tested some more pages and got the review links to work.
September 16, 1998: Finalised the Why This Web Site and Beginner’s Guide to Vineyard Music.
September 14, 1998: Uploaded a whole load of new sound files sent from VMG.
September 6, 1998: Recent discussions with Joe Randeen and Keith Giles have resulted in big changes, the most noticeable is a new look and feel for this site, and a new name, to reflect a better focus and sense of purpose.


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August 23, 1998: The mail program went weird on the GIA server, so I have changed the error detection routines. Also got a copy of Vineyard Cafe: Mercy. It just goes to show that worship can also be fun.
August 16, 1998: Added a Trivial Pursuit page. Also added the 3 Vineyard Collection albums.
August 11, 1998: Updated the What’s New page to include the first product information from Keith Giles at VMG. Also fixed up some monumental blunders that should never have been uploaded in the first place.
August 10, 1998: Devised the Retail Outlets page. Also started work on a more complete songbook listing.
August 8, 1998: Finished the Beginner’s Guide to Vineyard Music, and fixed up numerous glitches to the indexes. Decided to put a picture of the songbook in place of the "we can’t show you the words" message on songs. Also added in the Acoustic Worship and Vineyard Cafe series, albeit incomplete.
July 26, 1998: Generated an index for the Volume Songbooks 1 to 8. GIA is having problems with their server again, so I can’t log on to post the many changes that have been made in the last 2 weeks.
July 21, 1998: Posted some graphics for the Songbooks. They aren’t visible yet, but it won’t be long now. Moved this page to its new location.
July 18, 1998: Started work on the Songbooks database, and found multiple inconsistencies in the database. As a result of these errors, I will have to re-post just about all the album and song pages.
July 17, 1998: Updated the information in the New Releases page. Also continued updating information on the Acoustic worship albums, as well as Change My Heart Oh God and Why We Worship #2.
July 5, 1998: Corrections to the New Releases page and uploaded a new graphic for Winds of Worship 11. Some of my attempts at improving the ASP pages went horribly wrong, but I had it fixed within an hour or so. Started working on the Acoustic Worship series stuff.
July 4, 1998: In between power failures at CHiPS and ongoing flakiness at GIA, I finally managed to get both sites stable (for now).
June 29, 1998: Set up the Chips web site as a backup. Just in time, because they disabled it yesterday. ISPs need to learn about zero defect.
June 27, 1998: The web site has been down for over 24 hours, so I started moving it back to CHiPS until further notice. When GIA gets their ducks in a row, I’ll listen.
June 22, 1998: Finished writing the Why this Web Site article.
June 21, 1998: Started working on using Private variables in the ASP scripts to make things run faster.
June 18, 1998: GIA is still having problems with a very flaky server. I changed the "buttons" graphic to include the "Unofficial Web Site" tag.
June 17, 1998: GIA eventually managed to fix the problem with http://music.vineyard.org/. Now we just need the correct password and the ASP Mail component to work.
June 16, 1998: I discovered that VMG has removed this site from their links page. And they did it on my birthday, too! And without even so much as a word of explanation, in spite of repeated e-mail messages to their webmaster. So we are now the “unofficial” Vineyard Music web site, even though the site has been operational since early 1996, albeit in a slightly different form. At that stage the URL was http://www.nn.independent.co.za/~donn/vine/

June 15, 1998: You still can’t see this site if you tried http://music.vineyard.org/. I have added in the God’s Country album, and an Album Finder page.
June 9, 1998: You finally get to see this site in its updated form, after only 3 weeks of dilly-dallying and foot-dragging by GIA. Thanks to Natalie for all her hard work.
June 7, 1998: Finished the Vintage Vineyard series, as well as the Why We Worship series. Also added in Live in Australia to the Winds of Worship pages. Updated the index to use the compilation albums where available.
June 6, 1998: Reorganised the opening pages, and continued work on some introductory information and comment.
June 5, 1998: In the absence of actually getting anything to work at GIA, I started re-working the content, and adding further pages.
June 2, 1998: A few more last minute adjustments before transferring the worship.co.za domain across. Also changed the Church Copyright Licence page to look less like a licence for this site.
May 30, 1998: Moved most of the site from the Chips server to Global’s Merlin server. This was probably the most stupid decision I ever made. They have screwed up just about everything that could be screwed up, starting with the DNS entries on May 22, and continuing through early June with transferring the www.music.vineyard.org and www.worship.co.za entries. It then took a week to get a virtual domain for testing purposes, and it was summarily removed a few days later. Fortunately I managed to get the testing finished. On Friday 5th June the www.music.vineyard.org URL was redirected to point at the new server, and it didn’t work for the entire weekend. Worship.co.za began working on 9th June.
May 19, 1998: Added in “More Love, More Power”, a double-CD set.
May 16, 1998: Added in “You Shelter Me”, number 34 in the Touching the Father’s Heart series. Made admin improvements to the login registration program, and fixed the Church Copyright Licence message.
April 27, 1998: Started working on a revamped front end. Also added in support for MIDI files (only one at this stage) but will add in more once the sire moves to its new ISP. Updated the combination albums with correct song times, CDDB^TM signatures, and sanitized credits. What happened to all the dedication scriptures?
April 18, 1998: Fixed the combination albums. Added in the Link Exchange banners, and made them rotate with the SA Hyperlink and Music Hyperlink stuff.
April 17, 1998: Added the combination albums to Touching the Father’s Heart page. Adjusted song index a bit.
April 14, 1998: Completed updates to TFH from Unto The King (#1) to We Exalt Your Name (#3). Also updated the Song Indexes accordingly. There are now words to 56 Vineyard albums on the site.
April 13, 1998: Worked on database aspects of combinaton albums, and updated TFH from Holiness Unto The Lord (#4) to You are In Control (#33). Also updated the Song Indexes accordingly.
April 10, 1998: Further refinements to the ordering facility, including new graphics and changes to my database program.
April 9, 1998: Started experimenting with the CDNOW and Music of the Vineyard ordering facility. The CDNOW one earns me ‘Cosmic Connection’ brownie points, but I think the Greeley one is going to be cheaper for US residents. VMG is also experimenting with on-line ordering, so this could get interesting.
April 8, 1998: Posted Nick Scebba’s review of “Hallelujah Glory”, still one of the best TFH albums ever.
April 4, 1998: Disabled the on-line words facility until Mercy/Vineyard Publishing has decided on my application to publish the words without infringing their copyright.
April 3, 1998: Typed in the words for “I Bow Down” and “Throne of Grace”, and received NortelX’s review of “Winds of Worship 10: Live from New England”. Also had a note from Brock Shinen at VMG about copyright. Now if only the good folks at VMG in Anaheim would send me some information ...
March 30, 1998: Updated Song Finder to include the first line of the chorus as well as the opening line of the song, since some songs are more well known by their choruses.
March 28, 1998: Typed in the words for “Devoted To You” and received Nick Scebba’s review of “I Love Loving You”.
March 23, 1998: Typed in the words for “Send Your Spirit” and “Seek Righteousness”.
March 21, 1998: Typed in the words for “Great Is Your Mercy” and “Glory and Honour”.
March 19, 1998: Added the words for “You Are God” and “I Love Loving You”.
March 17, 1998: Touching the Father’s Heart #33, “You are In Control”.
March 14, 1998: Worked on more HTML formatting issues, and added in all the words for Forever .... Also added in a mention of the On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA) which seems to be useful for private guitar study, and changed the password mailing facility a bit.
March 9, 1998: Fixed up some more formatting problems, included Forever ... in the Album Reviews section. Included SA albums in the index generation stuff.
March 4, 1998: Designed a banner for the Music Hyperlink server.
March 3, 1998: Wrote a review of the Forever ... album.
March 2, 1998: Posted first details of the “Praise Africa” Forever ... album, within a few hours of the official launch.
February 25, 1998: Fixed up most obvious formatting problems on the Touching the Father’s Heart, Winds of Worship and Songs of the Vineyard series pages. Also changed the way the visited link colours display.
February 24, 1998: Started supporting a great, fast, lightweight browser called Opera 3.1. But it’ll take a while before all the pages start looking right ...
February 21, 1998: John Panner’s article The Truth About John Wimber, Nedstat Page Visits counter, and the Vineyard Music Group press release about the death of Chris Wimber. Also improved the mail program for people trying to see the words on-line. Included all the icons at the bottom of every page to improve page access speeds.
February 15, 1998: Partial listing of Winds of Worship Live in Sweden, and update of the words of Everlasting Grace, Light The Fire Again and Winds of Worship Live from Arnhem Holland.
February 14, 1998: Uploaded new sound samples for You Are God, and I Love Loving You
February 7, 1998: Added partial listing of You Are God (TFH #31), and a fill-in form for the on-line words facility, and extended the programming of songs to include the Church Copyright Licence number where available. Filled in some more details on the older Songs of the Vineyard series, and redid all the song pages. Also noted the passing of Chris Wimber.
February 6, 1998: Registered the http://www.praise.co.za/ domain, since this site will be expanding to include both praise and worship music. It would seem that the VCF Greeley site is always the most up to date, because I could order TFH #33 there even before I could get a copy of TFH #32 in South Africa. We are always between 6 weeks and 6 months behind.
January 18, 1998: Did more programming on the CDDB^TM support, and updated pages where the CD is on the database. Started registering WRC subscribers. Cancelled notice of Why We Worship conference
January 3, 1998: Joined the Music Hyperbanner link exchange, and started preparations for supporting the CDDB^TM database format.
December 29, 1997: Announced the On-Line Words facility, and changed the words display facility. Added in song information on Spirit of the Sovereign Lord.
December 28, 1997: Added in song information on For Your Mercy, Blessed Be The Name, and Before You Now. Uploaded some missing sound files.
December 27, 1997: Fixed up missing info on Holy is the Lord and Faithful Father.
December 24, 1997: Recorded some RealAudio tracks at Action Ads for Receive Our Praise and I Will Lift My Hands, but I can’t upload them yet for technical reasons. Also scanned in the cover for the TFH Sneak Preview and uploaded it and the sound samples.
December 13, 1997: Put the older design front page back, and split it into a welcome section and a browser information section.
November 25, 1997: Re-worked the songfinder to make the index files a bit smaller, and more usable. Found some articles from the Los Angeles Times about the death of John Wimber and the memorial service. Also included a tribute to John written by Alexander Venter, my pastor. Copied the announcement from the Anaheim Vineyard page and the AVC page, and included the long-overdue article about Vineyard Worship.
November 18, 1997: Changed front page to announce John Wimber’s death.
November 2, 1997: As part of development towards on-line ordering, I have created an exhaustive list of all the product codes.
November 1, 1997: Changed to the "iso-8859-1" character set, to support decent quote marks in a more standard way. Also listed all the Reviewed albums on the reviews page. Updated the welcome page and worked on improving the navigation a bit more.
October 5, 1997: Added in the ordering page to make it clearer where to get the music from. Also numerous programming changes and the registering of “www.worship.co.za” domain. Updated song information on Winds of Worship albums 1, 2 and 3
August 30, 1997: Reworked Song Finder system, including the first line of song page. Converted song words to Windows-1252 character set, which allows for ‘decent’ open and closed “quotes”. This only works well with Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher. A lot of the development work for this site happens in MS Access, not in HTML, because all the song data is stored in an Access database. Also updated the somewhat confusing Links and Resources pages to make them clearer and more relevant. Also fixed up all the words for Winds of Worship 6, 7 and 8. Found in interesting error in the sleeve notes of Winds of Worship 1.
August 28, 1997: Introduced Trebuchet MS font to words pages, and changed some of the footer information. Also centralised the INCLUDE files.
August 27, 1997: Introduced Windows character set, moved site to CHiPS Internet Access and fixed up some long overdue links.

July 11, 1997: Updated series page for Winds of Worship and included more data and reviews in the series.
July 9, 1997: Added in new series page for Winds of Worship.
June 27, 1997: Improved the song navigation buttons and finally eliminated JScript error when you get an apostrophe. Updated the song list by Author (still not 100% correct) and the song list by Title. Not all the links work yet. VMG refused permission to publish the copyrighted lyrics. Not that I blame them, but we had to ask. Plan B is to figure out how to charge for royalties when people read the lyrics.
June 16, 1997: Implemented the song navigation buttons and the OnMouseOver commands, and eliminated JScript error when you get an apostrophe. Also touched up on the display of the Touching the Father’s Heart main page.
June 13, 1997: Got the copyright notice, reviews and song extras to work properly. Applied to VMG for permission to publish the song words. Started recording additional RealAudio files. Experimented with some song navigation buttons and OnMouseOver commands using Winds of Worship #7
May 29, 1997: Tested ASP pages for Winds of Worship live from Langley BC.
May 29, 1997: Updated ASP pages for Receive Our Praise and I Will Lift My Hands and Jesus Lead On.
May 14, 1997: Tested new ASP pages for Touching the Father’s Heart series. Also tried a mechanism for displaying all the song words to selected viewers only.
April 2, 1997: Much discussion with VMG as a result of their new web site. Removed the old Vineyard Music Group logo almost entirely from the site.

January-May 1997: Why the big gap? Work pressure, mainly, and it has taken quite a while to get all the ASP stuff done, and putting all the data into an Access database.

January 2, 1997: Completed words for Refiner’s Fire, I Want To Know You, Give Him Praise, and No One But You.
December 31, 1996: Completed words for Glory, Draw Me Closer, and We Welcome You.
December 30, 1996: Completed words for Come Holy Spirit, and added in John Wimber’s introduction to the Songs of the Vineyard series.
December 27, 1996: Added in new artwork banner split up the welcome and home pages.
December 22, 1996: Completed words for Hosanna and You Are Here.
December 16, 1996: Started adding content and graphics to Songs of the Vineyard pages. Also started the Author, Title and First Line song references.
December 13, 1996: Split site into Vineyard Ministries Africa and Vineyard Music. Registered URLs. Thanks to Geoff Mandeville for the URLs.
December 6, 1996: Began experiments with RealAudio 3.0 sound files for better quality, quicker downloads.

November 29, 1996: Began "Touching the Father’s Heart" pages to design basic album format.
November 28, 1996: Construction began with all the graphics and page naviagtion buttons.


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Previous site (http://www.nn.independent.co.za/~donn/): records before this date are somewhat vague, but are the best I can recollect
May 1996: Added in the Christian Links for Africa pages, after discussion with Steve Hayes at Unisa.
January 27, 1996: Wrote a letter to Christian Living Today, suggesting a site for their back issues and so on.
January 21, 1996: Finalised the first few pages. At that stage the lastest album release was TFH #24 Blessed Be The Name
January 1, 1996: Wrote a letter to Costa Mitchell, my senior pastor and also head of Vineyard Ministries Africa, suggesting a web site and arranging a meeting. Prepared initial pages and demontrated it to them on the Church computer, using Netscape 1.1

[ EXTRA! Starting Point ]   [ New Releases ]

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Information on this page last updated 03/11/1998  All information provided on this page is copyright © 1996-2013 Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship. If you spot any errors, inaccuracies or other bloopers, please send an e-mail to Donn Edwards at vmu...@spamcop.net. Do not use this email address for any marketing purposes. Vineyard Music EXTRA!, the ‘fanzine’ of Vineyard praise and worship music, is independently produced. Also, please visit the Vineyard Music™ web site in the USA at http://www.vineyardmusic.com/

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