The listing of Masses for the week has been updated. I am still working on getting pages functioning again. Thank you.

Thank you for visiting the Saint Andrew Daily Missal website. If you have been to this site before, then you should have noticed at least two things right away. First, this site has not changed much for several months. Second, what you are seeing now is a total change from what was here before.

First, I must apologize to the very few people who access this site. I know there are some people who do visit, and to the precious few who come here I am sorry for the lack of progress on this site for most of 2011. I have been busy, but I have also been remiss.

The other matter concerns the site itself. I am now in the process of completely rebuilding the missal site. As before, work will be incremental but it will continue, I promise. So, why am I rebuilding the whole site from scratch? Very simply, I wanted to go back and undo some of the choices I made originally when I first started to put the missal site together.

I originally created the site using Microsoft's .Net technology. At the time, that was largely all I knew how to use. .Net is a proprietary toolset that I have enjoyed using, but I also have found Microsoft's tools to be clunky, heavy and too resource hogging. I have found other tool sets that, for me, work better. I wanted something light, flexible and open source. I wanted something, also, that was more cross-platform and standards compliant.

To that end, I am going to rebuild the St. Andrew Daily Missal using PHP and MySQL. Both of these are free, open source tools that I like better and find more pleasant to work with. Not being encumbered by Microsoft's EULA is also a benefit. PHP is free!!!

I also want to rebuild the site in such a way that, hopefully, it will be more accessible to smaller form factor devices. Yes, that means tablets. And, possibly phones. I've seen what the old site looked like on a small form factor (i.e., phones) and it was atrocious. Displayed on a tablet likely wasn't much better.

The old site was just too "busy" looking, there were so many buttons and links on the main page (not to mention that little calendar thing) that displaying the page on a small screen was just not workable. There was no way to show all that user interface garbage in any intelligible way. I personally came to believe that even on a large desktop monitor, the site just looked "crowded" (that's another word I'll use for "busy"). I didn't like it anymore.

There is also an aesthetic consideration. When I created the old site, I really tried hard to mimic the "look and feel" of the physical hand missal as re-printed by St. Bonaventure Publications. I worked hard to make some of those pages really look like the actual book. Not meaning to boast, but I think I did a pretty good job of it too, at least in a few places.

But later I wanted to make the Mass texts and other prayers available as printer friendly versions too. Here is where some of the early problems started to crop up. None of them were necessarily site killers, but they did create something of a challenge for me.

Making the site so slavishly close to the fonts, typeset, spacing, etc., of the book meant that making available printable versions would require maintaining at least two versions of css styling for pretty much everything on the entire site. Again, that by itself isn't a site killer. I could live with it, I guess. But it's just more maintenance worry I didn't want. I need this site to be simple to keep up. Between school and work, I have little time as it is.

There are other issues. I need a simpler means to adding Mass propers. I want to use more standard file types. I want the site to be as clean and easy to up-keep as it can be.

If most of this means nothing to you, that's fine. The technical details will probably bore most people. I hesistated to even include this much. But I thought I owed at least some explanation.

Oh, and one more bit of explanation. I was really sick and tired of seeing "The First Sunday of Advent" all the time. And I think some of the guests were too. I got a few emails about it. I never really had a Mass text assigned for each day of the year, though that's still my ultimate goal. So, to keep the site from crashing when a user selected a day for which no Mass had yet been assigned, I simply told the site to show the default, the First Sunday in Advent.

At the time, I thought it was a really cool, clever solution to the problem of what happens when you click on some date and no Mass has been assigned to it yet, just show the first Mass for the liturgical year. If you don't know what a "null reference exception" is, consider yourself lucky. I guess it's the programmer's equivalent to a dentist's seeing the inside of everyone's mouth. Your better of not knowing.

So my clever solution turned out to function really well, but it also became an eye-sore. We all got sick of seeing that same Mass text pop up all the time. So from now on, the main page will be just a listing of the Masses for the current week, including last and next Sunday. This is the pattern used for the bulletins at my traditional parish and it seems to work pretty well.

In the future, if a Mass is ready to be viewed and printed, the name will be a link. If not, it will just be text. But the name will be there, so you can at least see what Mass will be said that day, even if the text isn't ready yet. Clicking a link, if it's there, should take you to the text for the Mass, all ready to print, or just read on your monitor or tablet. Hopefully the text will be legible even on a smart phone. I'll see what I can do.

It also occurrs to me this note is getting long. I'll stop here, since I've already tried your patience enough. Again, thanks for stopping by. Keep looking at this page. I'll just make it my blog and post news about updates to the site. Once again, I am sorry for the lack of progress since at least March. But, the site is free (for you). Keep me in a couple of your prayers that I get it done!