The 1.1 WP rollout will involve custom fields holding stuff like Who and Where the sermon was preached and on What Passage or in What Series. I’d love to generate archives based on a “series” of, say, 1 Corinthians sermons. That way, I won’t have to kludge together tables by hand like I had to do with this one:

http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/news/2005/07/1cor-outline/

I’m targeting the end of August to get this out the door, so stay tuned for the full writeup (probably over Labor Day weekend).

Yeah, I killed commenting on a lot of entries. I haven’t done it since we migrated to WP, but with MovableType, it was a must to avoid getting saturated with spam.

Regarding “stories,” ultimately I hope to make the Village Church site a creative outlet for any of our congregants by hosting blogs (or aggregating — because many people already have them); posting what I’ve been calling “worship artifacts” such as music, photography and artwork; and, of course, hosting the sermons (currently in MP3, possibly also in text at some point). I’ve got a 1-page roadmap that I’ve been passing around to anyone that might be interested and already my pastor is excited about “GooglEvangelism.” I should post that roadmap up here sometime.

It would be nice to have more help, though. The Village Church site is pretty low on the totem pole of priorities, so whatever happens with the site gets done in my spare time.

I’ll be taking my laptop on vacation with me because getting this stuff done *is* like a vacation for me. I’ve got a local copy of WP running (and MySQL, Apache, PHP, etc) on the Mac, so I can make all the template changes I need and then upload to the production site. We love Apple.

I tried to post a comment on an old post (http://www.kennsarah.net/2003/09/25/more-thoughts-on-web-community/), but understandably, you had comments closed (don’t you hate comment and trackback spam?)

That post was almost 2 years ago, but I am embarking upon a little research to see how I might do something with helping to implement blogs and RSS for online church community…and have been starting to re-read some history of the Church of the Saviour as a worthy candidate , since they have been a model for me not only as church, but also in their style of narrative as the writings of Elizabeth O’Connor so wondrously capture. I have posted several times about them and her books of late on my blog in the past weeks. I really determined to take a much more theological bent on my blog than the political dissent I was epxpressing (which was BECAUSE of my theological concerns, but after the election, I determined to focus on what the church needs to be rather than all my criticisms of the Religious Right)

I started reading Bonhoefer, and along the way, Stanley Hauerwas, who wrote a book dealing with Bonhoefer (Performing the Faith), and I’m now reading Bonhoefer’s biogrpahy, after reading several of Hauerwas’s writings. Both Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas are very strongly ecclesiologists, which I feel is needed , as always. Related to this, the blog and the possibilities it holds for the church ’s “telling of its story” is a tool that the church needs to take VERY seriously. I believe it is one of the best tools , if not THE best, to get people’s stories ‘out there’ as narrative.

I was so glad to see that you got employed again after your period of anxiety about that. Anyway, I just wanted to reconnect, and let you know I’m right there with you on this

Dale

Thanks for being faithful to your call, thereby blessing TVC so very, very much.

Just kidding. Things here are nice, I just can’t wait to catch up with y’all in a room full of people who are fluent (and gracious) enough to participate in a little advanced usage of the English language. Also cards, I really miss cards…

Wow. hand rolled is impressing. Almost a thing of the past.

My current goal is developing a site that uses subversion for management purposes, XML/XSLT (processed into XHTML server side, so i don’t have to worry about clients supporting XML properly), The XSLT will be generated from a templating system on the fly. (XSLT is limited, and has no notion of query string, cookies, and other things that allow pages and templates to work well).

A lot of this is working locally for testing purposes, but the code isn’t anywhere near stable enough to show off yet. Hopefully by the end of the month (or maybe the end of september) i’ll have the new version running my site.