History of LCM's Web
Presence
1996, We Began with GeoCities (Now Yahoo/GeoCities)
Last Chance Ministries first developed a presence on the World
Wide Web (WWW) late in 1996. It was a one-page site that was hosted by GeoCities (later
Yahoo/GeoCities) and it supplied a brief introduction and a few links. It took a few days
to learn enough HTML just to create the one page by hand, and also took some time to learn
how to post it on the web. That trying experience did not inspire me to go any further
with web development at that time.
The main thrust of LCM at that time was fairly simple and limited in scope.
We desire to establish a web presence and make information and images readily
available to keep our friends and supporters informed so that they would be
better equipped as to how to pray for us.
However, in time I began to receive occasional e·mail from people who
had discovered the site and liked what they saw. It seems the simple one page site was
picked up by web-bots of some of the most popular search engines without my efforts!
Even so, the site was mostly neglected until the middle of 1999. At that time I was
the United States and recovering from illness, and I was blessed to obtain more powerful computer equipment and bundled software.
Later that year, a good friend, Andrew Berger, of Charles Town, West Virginia, also
provided me with Microsoft's excellent FrontPage 98 software package. I am greatly
indebted to Andy for his gracious gift which I have used extensively to develop LCM. The
more user-friendly web building software made site development more feasible.
During this same time, I was speaking to Keith Comstock, a friend that
attended Cross Lanes Bible Church, which is our home church, and was surprised
to learn that he and his brother, David, had founded their own company that
provided web hosting service,
Fenwick Technologies, Inc. He then informed me that he would give me some
space if I wanted build a website and host it. It looked to me that the Lord was
leading and providing me to get involved in a technology that I knew very little
to nothing about at that time.
Thus, and in fear and trembling, I ventured into the real of website
development for the purpose of extending our ministry to the world via the World
Wide Web, or the Internet. During this time I was recovering from a severe
stroke (April of 1999) and a subsequent broken leg (December of 2000) that
greatly limited my physical activities for the next few years.
2000,
LastChanceMinistries.com
Domain Purchased
In June of 2000 I obtain LCM's domain registration
(www.lastchanceministries.com), and soon began to fully develop the site. The
Comstocks initially supplied me with 25 MB of space. The site is now
undergoing continual development and expansion on a regular basis.
The purpose and my vision for the scope of LCM also increased at this time.
In addition to keeping our friends better informed, I saw a marvelous
opportunity to promote the teaching of God's word. I also saw an opportunity to
hopefully help the people to which the Lord has called us to minister by
promoting tourism, which benefits the economy and all here on the Island of
Carriacou, one of states in the nation of Grenada.
2003, LCM Increases Bandwidth and Storage
Space and Adds MP3 Audio Streaming Preaching and Teaching
In 2003 LCM went through another phase of expansion, mostly out of
necessity. I had to move my site from a server that has been provided for free
by a friend of mine that had his own Internet Provider company. However, early
in 2003, he sold most of his company and I had to find another server that was
very reasonable in cost and good in service (Authentic
Hosting -- $3.00 US per month for 300 megs of storage and 3 gigs of
bandwidth). This gave me much more space and available bandwidth.
The middle of 2003 I conducted a feasibility study, then I
purchased a relatively inexpensive digital recorder (Sony ICD-P17). I began
recording our services at Windward Bible Church here on Carriacou, Grenada, in
the Southern Caribbean of the West Indies. I also purchased a relatively
inexpensive media editor (Media
Center by J. River) that enabled me to edit the messages as needed, and also
produce and supply a musical intro and close with each message. Lastly, I use a
free application, MusicMatch
Jukebox to edit the tagging information (Title, contact information, etc.)
for each audio message. (I believe J. River's Media Center will do the same
things, but I have not yet taken the time to figure out how.)
Lastly, I set up a section on LCM to publish the audio messages in
the MP3 format. This section of LCM became fully functional in December of 2003.
(Click here if you wish to read more about
why, how, and the time required to post messages here on LCM.) Now, we have
a potential audience of literally billions!
The latter part of 2005, the world's leading search engine, Google,
reported that it has indexed over 8,000,000,000 (eight billion) web pages. Amazingly, if you
search for 'MP3 Sermons,' 'MP3 Bible Teaching,' MP3 Audio Messages,' etc, LCM
will be very near the top -- if not at the top -- of the results! I praise God
for all of this!
Since the MP3 Audio Section was picked up by the search engines,
my bandwidth usage has increased tremendously! As of January 2006, LCM is
getting 4,000+
visitors (those who remain at least one minute) and 9,000+ page
loads per month. Some internal stats show the page loads to be closer to
20,000 pre month. We also get 120,000
to 150,000 hits (those who begin to load a page but back out in
less than one minute). My internal stats on my primary server reported that the
hits are 25% to 30% more, but I figure that some of this is due to web-crawlers,
web-bots, spiders, and internal site traffic.
2004, Due to Demand, LCM Doubles Space and
Bandwidth
In 2004, I had to increase my storage space and bandwidth allotment
to keep up with the new traffic and space needed due to the MP3 audio section
that has been growing. My server cost increased to $20.00 per month for 2 Gigs
of storage and 20 Gigs of bandwidth. I also upgraded my digital audio recording
quality by upgrading to the Sony ICD-ST25 digital recorder. I plan to began
posting messages that will have been sampled at 16kbps, which will sound much
better that those sampled at 11kbps.
2006, LCM Moves to GoDaddy Hosting to Increase Ministry Capabilities by
Increasing Bandwidth, Space, and Downtime
Early in 2006 six, I have
began using GoDaddy as my web-hosting provider. It is
much more dependable and
economical. I have contacted their customer support by phone many times
for various reasons, and I have always gotten through in minutes. Each time the
support personnel knew their job, and they were polite and patient. More
importantly, they also solved my problems. My transfer from Authentic
Hosting to GoDaddy was
completed by May 1, 2006.
Click here for my in-depth review of my experience with GoDaddy thus far.
With GoDaddy, I now have 50 Gigs of storage and 500 Gigs of monthly bandwidth,
which costs about $7.00 per month! With this new capacity I hope to begin
offering the entire Bible in MP3 format for downloading, and perhaps even some
video streaming and downloads for some specific Bible teaching.
Implementation of Google Adsense
Click here to report an inappropriate ad.
2006, LCM Adds
Google Adsense to
cut Operating Costs
Early, in 2006, I also added Google Adsense to hopefully offset the
cost of maintaining my servers and four domains. This is why visitors will see
three to four ads just under the navigation bar at the top of each page, and
also four to eight ads located in the right shared border of each page.
As of April of 2006, Google Adsense is generating enough to cover
my cost. I am hoping to break even by the end of the year. Google Adsense
enables Google's ad-server to place ads on my pages. The ads are supposed to be
based upon the content of each page and suited to visitors based upon their IP
address. Thus, the ads may be different for visitors from different countries,
and even for different regions within the larger countries. It is a simple and
effortless way for websites to generate revenue and provide information and
links that could be of interest and benefit for each visitor. Each time a
visitor click on Google's ads on any website, that click will generate income
for the website, ranging from a few cents to a few dollars for each click.
Google has a firm and clear policy that prohibits ads that direct
visitors to websites that promote any of the following, and much more:
-
Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
-
Pornography, adult, or mature content
-
Gambling or casino-related content
-
Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol
-
Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products
-
Sales or promotion of prescription drugs
You visit this page to learn more,
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies
Thus, a visitor to LCM should never see ads promoting any of the
above content. However, there are a few drawbacks to the Adsense program. One
current problem is not having absolute and full control over ads that
appear on your website. Essentially, I can block any ads that I may consider
competitive or offense to my visitors. However, I currently have no way of
knowing ahead of time what ads will appear on each page for all visitors coming
from various regions of the world. But, once I see an ad, or someone reports an
ad to me they believe to be inappropriate, I can then block the ad based upon
its URL (i.e., web) address. That is why I ask for visitors to please
take the time to click on the links that will enable them to contact me via
e·mail to report the ad. I need both the name of the
page on my website where they saw the ad and also the URL address of the website
to which visitors are directed.
June of 2007 LCM Removed Google
Adsense Ads Due to Problems We Could Not Control
On June 19, 2007, I removed the Google Adsense ads from LCM's website.
Initially, it was a good source of income to make it possible to keep LCM
running. However, in time it became more and more problematic to use because
Google does not allow full control over ads by a website publisher.
It became impossible for me to know just what ads were being placed on what
pages for all visitors from all over the world. As I understand it, this is due
to Google's ad server not just using the content of the pages on which the ads
are posted to determine what ads to display, but it also uses the IP address for
each visitor. That means that ads on the same page will likely vary from visitor
to visit based upon a visitors location! I also suspect that the Google toolbar
that many use, including myself, also provides feedback to Google on any pages
you visit so that its ad server can provide ads that would likely be more of
interest to the visitor. This can be good at times for may visitors, however, it
made it impossible for me to know just what ads were going to be placed on any
pages on LCM for visitors at anytime. Even using the Google Adsense Preview Tool
would not solve this problem because it cannot make my computer look as though I
am visiting from other parts of each country from all over the world.
This is not likely a problem, and perhaps even beneficial, to most commercial
and non-Christian websites. However, I was embarrassed when I discovered that
Google had posted ads for some dating services on some of my pages! As far as
could tell, they were done in good taste as far as those type of websites go,
but this was well outside of the thrust and goals for LCM.
I also had numerous ads placed by other groups that were down right offensive to
me, including websites that promoted New Age philosophies and spiritual
thinking, witchcraft, Kabalistic views, Islamic teaching, etc. Some of these ads
actually led to websites that denounce and attack the teaching found on LCM!
I would block offensive ads anytime I would become aware of them being placed on
LCM. Unfortunately, I could not block a "type" of ads, but only the specific URL
(i.e., "universal resource locator" or web address) of the website
to which each ad linked. As a result, new ads would eventually show up or the
old ones would simple change their web address so that my blocks would not catch
them in the future.
I even had some cases where ads led to two or three websites that promote one
individual and his work -- and many Christians suspect that this person could be
the antichrist! I frankly do not believe this person is or will be the
antichrist, but I believe that he or someone like him could one day become the
antichrist. In any case, his stated philosophies and activities are certainly
antichristian from a biblical perspective and fall within the biblical teachings
of some things predicted about the coming antichrist. Please do not write me
and ask me who this person is because I am not going to increase his ranking in
the search engines by providing links to his websites or his name here on LCM. I
will deal with this in another area of LCM that is more appropriate.
Lastly, I was troubled by the fact that I could not tell just what ads were
clicked through and produced income. As of the writing of this section in June
of 2007, Google does not produce anything to let a publisher know just what ads
were clicked on, what pages on a website those ads were clicked, and how much
income each ad produced. I find it hard to believe that Google could not provide
this information to publishers if they wanted to do so, especially for those
that have and are using Google Analytics website monitoring as I am.
It was issues as stated above that finally led me to stop precipitating in the
Google Adsense program as I had been. I hope that many other perspective
Christian website publishers that may be thinking of using Google will be so
advised. I hope that in the future Google will rework its ad program so that
more like minded Christians will be comfortable and confident in using their
powerful service in the future.
In the mean time am very thankful that the Lord has provided someone who has
graciously begun to support the LCM website ministry completely. Praise the Lord
for His faithfulness!
Status of LCM's Five
Domains
As of June of 2007, I still have the primary domain of
www.lastchanceministries.com,
and also,
www.windwardbiblechurch.org, which points to the Windward Bible Church
section of LCM on my primary domain hosting service now at GoDaddy. I also continue to maintain a copy of my site on on another server for free at
www.lastchanceministries.org. I
hope to maintain the copied site as
long as I can so that people can get to us even if our main server is down.
Early in
2006, I also procured
www.lastchanceministries.net when I acquired my new server. It is
now forwarded to my primary domain. In June od 2006 we also registered
www.carriacou.info which points directly
to the section of LCM that provides googols of information about our lovely
island home of Carriacou, Grenada, which is located in the warm, lovely, and
tropical Southern Caribbean of the West Indies.
What is truly remarkable and most meaningful to me, and makes it so
worthwhile, is the number of visitors that come to LCM from Muslim and Communist
countries that are looking for audio messages to which they can listen or
download. I it is not necessary to mention any county by name here, but there
are very large numbers of people in the world that live in such places.
We get visitors from every country that allows its constituents to connect to
the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, many of these people often do not own a
Bible and cannot hear the gospel even if they desire to do so. For this reason,
we do not make our web-stats viewable by the general public. Visitors to any
section of Last Chance Ministries need not fear that someone from their
government can view our stats and track their visits back to the computers they
used to visit our site.
As many would understand, people in such countries could be literally putting their
lives on the line by merely listening to Bible teaching in any form. Thus, it is not
likely that they are willing to leave any kind of financial trail in purchasing
MP3 Sermons as many sites offer. Nor would many -- if any -- be willing to
supply an e·mail address that would give them access to listening to sermons on
some of the more popular and more used sites that make this requirement. So, I
believe we are helping to fill a very big hole here, as is likely the case with
some other sites.
I especially desire the prayers of you that are believers for those dear ones
that seem so hungry for the simple teaching of God's Word. Please pray for their
safety, salvation, and growth. Pray also for me. It has become evident that the
Enemy is not happy with what we are doing these days by God's marvelous grace,
direction, provision, and with the wisdom He grants.
For those interested, I have provided a section entitled What We Believe that should answer any questions you may have about
our doctrine, missionary work, LCM, and other areas of ministry.
The Webmaster, Walter Robinson II
Updated June 19, 2007
Revised:
March 18, 2008.
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