Dec 2010
Goodbye Colophon, Hello iBenedictines
30/December/2010 Filed in: Jottings
This will be the last entry in Colophon. For a long time we have been concerned about the unwieldiness of our web site, much of which is attributable to the blog, which has grown like Topsey and caused no end of problems. At some stage the RSS feed became corrupted (easily done), and while it works in Webkit browsers like Safari, it is useless elsewhere. We've also been wanting to introduce new material and drop some which seemed to us rather tired, as well as developing a site which looks good on mobile devices.
It is difficult to devote time to one's own site when clients are clamouring for attention to theirs; so the makeover has taken much longer than we had hoped. From tomorrow, however, there will be a new blog on the block: iBenedictines, which you will find at www.ibenedictines.org. (British users may find themselves adding a .uk to the domain name, but don't worry, that will get you there as well.)
Colophon won't die because we've come to feel an affection for this unruly child of our monastic brainpans. It has been incorporated as an archive into the revamped web site which, D. V., we shall be launching at the week-end. It will take a while to check that all the interior links to images and audio files are working as they should, but the permalinks and structure will be unchanged, so anything you've bookmarked should still be "findable". That's the theory, anyway.
iBenedictines will also be available on this site as well as at its standalone address.
We are going to wait a fortnight or so before launching the mobile version of the web site because we are sure to find little hiccups along the way. If it works as it should, we'll be able to detect how you are accessing the web site and automatically direct you to the desktop or mobile version without your having to do anything.
This is not the recommended way to relaunch a web site but the sealing wax and string approach does have its advantages, though you might find it difficult to convince Digitalnun of that at the moment. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing as one can, not as one can't. And if that sounds remarkably like Dom John Chapman's advice on prayer, the coincidence is entirely intentional.
It is difficult to devote time to one's own site when clients are clamouring for attention to theirs; so the makeover has taken much longer than we had hoped. From tomorrow, however, there will be a new blog on the block: iBenedictines, which you will find at www.ibenedictines.org. (British users may find themselves adding a .uk to the domain name, but don't worry, that will get you there as well.)
Colophon won't die because we've come to feel an affection for this unruly child of our monastic brainpans. It has been incorporated as an archive into the revamped web site which, D. V., we shall be launching at the week-end. It will take a while to check that all the interior links to images and audio files are working as they should, but the permalinks and structure will be unchanged, so anything you've bookmarked should still be "findable". That's the theory, anyway.
iBenedictines will also be available on this site as well as at its standalone address.
We are going to wait a fortnight or so before launching the mobile version of the web site because we are sure to find little hiccups along the way. If it works as it should, we'll be able to detect how you are accessing the web site and automatically direct you to the desktop or mobile version without your having to do anything.
This is not the recommended way to relaunch a web site but the sealing wax and string approach does have its advantages, though you might find it difficult to convince Digitalnun of that at the moment. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing as one can, not as one can't. And if that sounds remarkably like Dom John Chapman's advice on prayer, the coincidence is entirely intentional.