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A Large Project Stalled and Restarted
I write short inspirational readings for my church. My main focus in writing them has been to have content for our website. As I have told my church’s board members, you have to give people a reason to come back to a website and that reason is content. Design and navigation are only important as negatives if they take away from the content by making it difficult to find or read.
There are two strategies for content. The first is to have frequently changing information, such as is done by The Drudge Report. The second strategy is to build a huge database of useful information as a resource, such that people cannot consume it all in one sitting and have a reason to come back. Our church calendar and schedule sort of pursue the first strategy of change, although it’s slow enough change to bring people back only once per week or once per month. My inspirational readings pursue the second strategy. The goal is to build up hundreds of them to address different situations and emotional needs. We currently have 128 on our website.
I have shared many of these on Ricochet before. At one point, I was writing about five per day. It’s very difficult to keep at that pace since one finds that they become very repetitive. The Bible, when one boils it down, really only has a handful of messages. So, the project slowed down.
There were also other issues as well. When I started the project, I was writing them in Word, then I would hand code them into web pages from a template. Eventually, I added tables and reports in the database I use to generate other parts of our website, such as our schedule. However, I had the original 80 or 90 that were not in the database, and the database was going to give me an easy way to generate menus for them, not only by date added but also to be able to categorize them by topic.
Finding the time to put all of these entries into the database to allow the indexing took awhile, especially since we were also working on redesigning the website, which could cause rework. Well, the website redesign is done enough. The readings have all been loaded into the database, and I am now in the catbird seat where I just write a new one in the database and press a few buttons to run reports and load them out to the website, and new readings are on the website and the menus updated. The whole thing, from idea to appearance on the menus and on our New Additions block on the homepage, can take as little as 15 minutes. It’s a sweet set-up.
So, why am I telling you, other than bragging? Now that I do have the Topic Menu and over 100 readings, it has become the resource I wanted in the first place. I am continuing to add more, as I added two today (Freedom and Attention). If you or someone you know would like a lift, I invite you to visit and read.
Obviously, it is a Unity Church. We are part of the New Thought Movement from the mid- to late-19th Century. If you are part of another denomination, you might find some of the readings odd or even objectionable. Just move on to another and find what is good for you.
Blessings!
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I don’t know that I would be able to put together more than a handful of inspirational messages.
Most of them would be variations on the theme “Strive to be less of a tool today as you were yesterday.”
Yep. As I said, when boiled down, the Bible really only has a handful of messages at most:
* The Bible puts it much more nicely in several ways and several times. Such as “Fear not!”
For those of you who somehow missed @arahant‘s messages, they are wonderful. I used many of them to share with my meditation group and we would discuss one every week for several months. I think they are so lovely because they reflect his spiritual depth and commitment. Congratulations on getting the website the way you planned it!! And thanks.
Hmmn, for some reason, the site is not coming up anymore. I suspect I know why. If it’s not back up soon, I may have to intervene…on a holiday when nobody is at the church, etc.
Edit: Whew. It’s back up. Was just a glitch rather than what I thought.
The apostles faced occasional obstacles in spreading the word 2,000 years ago, but at least they didn’t have to deal with, um, whatever you describe above. The course of Christianity could have been changed. I can just see Paul throwing his MacBook Air out of his tent at 2:30am screaming obscenities about SQL coding. We could have lost half the New Testament.
I went there about 1/2 hour ago, and it was fine. Somehow I messed it up ;-)
It is back up, so I don’t have to hunt you down. 😉
This is the sort of movie I want to see.
And on the seventh day God got a 404 error, gave up and went back to bed. But the coding angels stayed up all night to get The Word back on line. When God awoke on the 8th day the The Word was reconnected and it was good.
God then gathered up the dust of the earth and breathed life into it and created man. For man he gave a garden of Internet and told him to partake of everything except the tree of pornography. But man was lonely and that’s where the trouble usually starts…
Laughing so hard here. I’m telling you, this would be a great movie.
John Cleese would play Paul. Owen Wilson as Jesus?
Sorry. This thread may get away from us…
It may be rolling downward quickly, but I’m laughing all the way.
Side trip to India for Tech Support?
That was St. Thomas.
That’s a wonderful achievement. I like that subtle highlighting was used to draw the eye to the subject titles.
It is hard to design a website for a committee. Very hard. :-)
You ain’t just whistling Dixie, Sister!
These are great summaries! I think there’s more, sure, but . . . well, I don’t want to get into a big theology talk at Ricochet right now. And those are great!
‘Hant, so glad this labor of faith, hope, and love is maturing. Well done you!
‘S what I’ve always loved about you ‘Hant: you’re a giver.