Basic Software

The MSCC website uses standard coding and should be compatible with most popular web browsers, though in coding and testing, we primarily focus on compatibility with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. We actually really like Firefox.

Many of the multimedia peices use the Adobe Flash Plugin. Adobe Flash 8 is an application for developing rich content, user interfaces, and web applications, such as the ads and animations that you see on the front page. The Adobe Flash Player is a multiple-platform client. Web users must download and install the player in order to view and interact with Macromedia Flash content. Market research shows that 96% of internet users have some version of the Flash Player installed, and upgrading is quick and easy.

The Community Group Questions are being done in a format called PDF, Portable Document Format. If you've ever downloaded tax forms from the IRS, you'll be familiar with this. PDF documents require the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print. In the future we'll be implementing a Flash based document viewer called Flash Paper.

Sermon Audio

The sermon audio is in two places; a weekly one on the front page, fresh from Sunday and an archive of the last ten weeks. Each Monday the new sermon gets uploaded and the archive gets updated by bumping the tenth archive and moving the rest down the list making room for the current one on top. You have several options when it comes to listening to the sermon audio.

Streaming

Both the current sermon and the archives feature an embedded Flash based audio player that will allow you to stream the audio right from the page you're on. Broadband users should be able to hit play and go without interruptions. Modem users may want to pause the audio after hitting play to allow the sermon to buffer before continuing to listen.

Download

The second option is to download the audio file to your computer. You'll see this option in the Archive section of the media page. In the player, you'll see a small, white down arrow toward the right of the title. Clicking this will prompt you to download an mp3 of the sermon to your computer. An MP3 is a compressed audio file that you can play in many popular music players such as Windows Media Player, Apple iTunes and WinAmp. You also have the option of burning it to CD to be played in CD audio player, or transferred to a digital music device such as a cell phone, iPod or other mp3 player.

Podcast

Your third option is to subscribe to the Podcast version of the sermon. A Podcast is a syndicated audio feed, similar to a newsfeed, but instead of text, you subscribe to a media feed. When you are subscribed to it, every time it's updated, it gets downloaded to your computer automatically. You can subcribe 1 of 2 ways. If you have an independant RSS News Agreggator, right click on the link in the bottom of the front paged titled Audio RSS, which will give you the XML compliant URL to this feed. Option two; if you have Apples iTunes you can click on the iTunes Podcast Feed link at the bottom of the homepage and it should open the feed in iTunes. You may also manually search for the feed in iTunes or manually add the feed to iTunes. To do this, you right-click and copy the URL from the Audio RSS link at the bottom of the homepage, go to iTunes, Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and paste the address in there. voila!

Flash Ads

To keep you updated, we've included a set of Flash ads that will keep you updated with upcoming events, as well as new and interesting things going on with the website.