The first thing you’ll probably notice is the “support rlp” menu item. As I
mentioned a few days ago at the old site, I’ve quit my web design job in order
to dedicate myself to writing in this and other forums. RLP is still free, but
if my writing has meant something to you and you want to donate to the cause, it
will be appreciated. I feel a little weird about this, but that’s life, as they
say.
Okay, what else is new here? You’ll notice a much better comment feature,
for one thing. If you know html you can format your comments, but even without
that knowledge the comments will look much nicer than the old ones. You can use paragraphs, unlike the old site where every comment was one
paragraph and very hard to read.
You’ll also notice that you can reply to someone else’s comment, starting a
conversation thread. Sometimes there were 100 comments at the old site with
people carrying on conversations or replying to a comment that was far above
theirs. These comment conversations are an important part of this blog; I hope
the new comments feature makes that easier for you.
Note: The old essays will still use the
old comment system. That way we don't lose the comments that were left back
then.
I guess the biggest new feature is the registration. If you want, you can
register and get a user name and password. You’ll have to provide a valid email
address, but I’m old school Internet. They get your email address from me when
they pry it out of my cold, dead laptop.
If you register, your name or nickname will appear on the blog when you are
online. You’ll be able to see who else is online at the same time. You can also
click on a user’s name and find comments that they have left in the past.
You can “lurk” to your heart’s content, but you’ll only be able to use the
chat room and some other features I’ll introduce in days ahead if you register.
This will make it harder for someone to drop in and be rude and anonymous. We’re
using the basic, Drupal chat room for now, but we may get a nicer one if it
turns out that people enjoy it.
I might send an occasional email to the people who register. I have
no specific plans for that, but it would only be rarely and to only announce
something new and important.
Another big change is the archive system. One weakness of the Radio blog
software is its awkward way of handling archived articles. You have to scroll
through a calendar clicking on dates and looking for old articles. I had to
manually repost each essay into an archive that you could search by title. I
only archived essays, so a lot of the day-to-day chat was left out.
In the new archive system, you can click “essays” to read my more serious
writing, or you can click “archive” and see everything ever written at RLP since
day one. I don’t know if anyone wants to do that, but at least it’s possible
now.
There is a "search" feature if you want
to find an article, but can't remember the title. Unfortunately, we're having a
hard time getting it to search the articles we imported from the old site.
Look for that to be working in the next few days.
What’s
coming in the near future? Here’s a peek ahead.
- Discussion forums that you can start yourself.
- Book reviews by a number of very smart people, movie reviews, and a
bookstore.
- A number of sub-blogs dealing with specific questions and maintained by
some excellent writers from the blogosphere and beyond. (Lectionary
commentary, photography, poetry, church/state issues, discussion of current
events and others.)
- I’m working on a release form that will allow me to publish (with
permission and changed names) some of the emails I’ve received at rlp. I’ll
call this sub-blog “Dear RLP.”
Without a doubt, the email correspondence I’ve had with people around the
world is the most touching part of Real Live Preacher for me. I’m looking
forward to sharing that with you.
Finally, later in the fall, I anticipate producing some audio files and
perhaps even a podcast. That’s in the early planning stages.
Whew, that’s a lot and a lot of work has gone into planning this. I haven’t
been alone in the process. Special thanks to Matt, Jeanene, Drew, Elizabeth, and
Tony.
And to you. Thanks for being with me on this journey.
rlp
