I haven’t blogged very faithfully lately, and you deserve to know why.

In addition to job-searching, I’ve been putting a fair amount of time and effort into the redesign of the New Wineskins site and transferring a lot of archival material from the current site to the new one. Right now I only need to move the “Living Jesus” and “Gospel of Mark” issues to be caught up.

And I’ve gone a little deeper into the archives in the other direction, too. On the current site, you can read articles as far back as the November-December, 2001 issue (themed “Postmodernism: Finding God in the Chaos”). On the new site, archived articles go back to the November-December, 1999 issue (themed “Resurrection Hope”) – another two years of back issues to catch up on!

It has been such a blessing to re-read these rich articles while keying them in for the archives. (I have a scanner/OCR program, but it’s more error-prone than I am – and I don’t always get to really read the articles when I use it; I end up proofreading the scanned text for errors instead of content!)

Quite a lot of those materials were transferred by Greg Taylor and Todd Austin before I started with the project, and just need a little “tidying up” in their source code. (Microsoft FrontPage adds a ton of unnecessary gobbledy-gook to HTML pages that just slows down the page build on your computer.)

On the new site – and this may not all be in place by the time the site launches this fall – I’m hoping to have all archived articles available by author and topic as well as by the issue / edition in which they originally appeared.

The topics section will be categorized under the main headings “Christ,” “Community,” “Culture” and “You” – sound familiar? I’m still designing the rollover graphics for the top banner of the site that will take you to them.

Also still to be done:

• A special template for the home page.

 

• Scanning and inserting graphics for many of the back issues in the archive

 

 

• There’s still a little tweaking to be done to the navigation, incorporating a handy feature of the new site’s content management system; it lets you add major links to the navigation area without having to adjust the templates. Okay, that’s pretty esoteric stuff for those of you who don’t dig into HTML source code, but it means that it will be easier for Greg or Todd or me to help you navigate the site.

 

I’m really looking forward to the September-October issue. I’m pretty sure that a blog post by David U is queued up for publication. If I’ve counted correctly, it will be issue number 60.

I have lots of other ideas for the site that I haven’t even had a chance to talk with Greg about – so I won’t go into them here and now.

I could tell you the temporary URL of the new site and theme of the issue – and it’s not that I’d have to kill you later; it’s just that it’d spoil the surprise for you!