The New ChristianOrigins.com "Beta Access"

[Peter Kirby]

I'm proud to present the new ChristianOrigins.com website (@BiblioblogNews). I'd be happy if you could check it out.

It's now a Bible-related news site, focusing on the latest blog posts. Slogan, "All the Biblioblogs Fit to Link." I will be in the process of moving the old posts and essays once stored there to the http://peterkirby.com domain. Here's what the new site looks like:



1 - The menu provides several category options. For example, if you only want to browse recent 'biblical criticism' and 'radical criticism', avoiding the blogs classified as 'biblical commentary' or the comments, you can do that, just by clicking around those two categories.

2 - The default view presents a reverse chronological timeline of everything. Extremely handy for when you're bored and have a couple minutes to check the web on your phone. This forum is integrated right into those results. (There is some light filtering to hide, e.g., extremely short messages.)

3 - This is the Biblioblog Web Search, also known as the Blogosphere Search, originally presented at http://bcharchive.org. Very convenient and powerful. A wonderful way to cut straight through to actual scholarly articles and books, available free online

4 - This is the daily digest newsletter, which is sent only once per day. It has the headlines for the previous day, sorted by rank with social signals.

5 - This links to some of the recent daily digests. If you scroll down, there are other sidebar widgets for navigating around.

6 - You can scroll through just the news headlines by clicking on "News Headlines." Very good way to get caught up fast. There are no comments in this section, and several of the 'biblical commentary' blog posts do not make the daily top 20, so you get a good overview of the posts with substance.

7 - You can always access the categories from the top of the screen menu, but they are also accessible from each post. It's also a reminder of what category a post belongs to.

What do the categories mean? They refer to the source of the posts. I had to choose a scheme. It's basically arbitrary, but I chose:

Biblical Criticism -- Defined by being focused on the ancient texts or history, frequently presenting original opinions and insight on them.
Biblical Commentary -- Defined by a lower focus on the same, either with more tangential topics or more product and book reviews.
Radical Criticism -- Defined by an eagerness to discuss issues at the root of the historical project of Christian origins.
Comments and Forums -- Defined by being replies on blogs or forums.

Here's what a daily digest looks like.

http://christianorigins.com/2015/06/24/ ... 23rd-2015/



The ordering of the posts is non-arbitrary. A proprietary blend of social analytics and domain expertise is fed into the algorithm to generate the list.

So far, the features are basically two:

• Automatic, categorized feeds (view on the web, or subscribe to all posts [not comments] with Twitter @BiblioblogNews).
• Automatic, ordered-list daily digests (view on the web, or subscribe on the site to have them delivered to your e-mail).

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or anything, please let me know!

[Stuart]

I found it not terribly useful. Although I liked the Sponge Bob tormenting Paul cartoon (three stars).

The basic problem is that you build it on feed including the forums, so its an avalanche of unrelated material and forces you to search for anything. It's effectively mimicking AP feed.

Simply going to this forum, or your blog, or even google search for a topic gives more context. You need to trim the information available to a consumable amount, and more focused. In this case more is not better.

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks for this.

I could exclude comments and forums from the default homepage.

Then you don't have to go to the categories in order to exclude them; you'd have to go to the comments/forums category in order to include it.

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks for this.

I could exclude comments and forums from the default homepage.

Then you don't have to go to the categories in order to exclude them; you'd have to go to the comments/forums category in order to include it.

I've removed "Comments and Forums" from the homepage view. Please let me know what you think now.

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

better

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks.

If anyone else thinks of something (could be some entirely new feature), please let me know.

[Peter Kirby]

If you need a point of comparison, this is the closest website in purpose to mine:

The Biblioblog Reference Library
http://www.bibliobloglibrary.com/

They do some things differently (no filters at all, no categories, no daily digest, no e-mail newsletter, no Twitter, different blog list [missing some of my favorites, like -ahem- Peter Kirby and Vridar ... and Stuart's and Kunigunde's], different display format)... also, they DO import the tags from the source blog (I was thinking more along the lines of scanning the text and auto-tagging, for more consistency between blogs) and they DO have a list of posts for each blog (seems redundant) and they DO have thumbnail pics (grayscaled), which is nice...

Personally I like their display format. It's neat and compact. Not sure how or whether I should replicate it, though, since they are 'the competition', as it were. But maybe looking at a site like this gives you ideas.

Here's another indirect competitor, with a different focus:

Atlantides: Feed Aggregators for Ancient Studies
http://planet.atlantides.org/

Thanks for taking a look!

http://christianorigins.com/

[Peter Kirby]

I've filtered comments&forums out of the calendar widget, out of the daily archives, and out of the monthly archives too. They're now visible primarily through category and tag listings (though tags haven't been implemented yet). Since the calendar becomes much more useful this way, I've nudged it closer to the top of the sidebar.

I've also upped the blog posts per page from 20 to 60. This approximates the total number of posts per day, which is much more intuitive/useful, IMO. (Which also means that browsing a particular day in history means getting all the posts on that day, most of the time.)

Let me know if you have any comments:

http://christianorigins.com/

[Peter Kirby]

I will admit that I wanted to raise awareness about the forum. Hopefully some here will mention the forum elsewhere on the webs.

[Peter Kirby]

Sure, ok. Speaking of, had a chance to check out the new website? What do you think?

I know -- I didn't mean to come across as suggesting anything like that. Was only using your comment as a springboard to my own afterthought -- which no doubt is not original, either, and not intended to imply anything amiss with your own words. Just responding as in a conversation....