Announcement 1: Biblioblogs Top 50

Hey readers, I have two big announcements for you. First, after many many months of not being on the list, I am back on the Top 50 Biblioblogs for the month of May! Apparently, I moved from number 127 to number 19 on the list! You can check out the list here: Top 50 Biblioblogs. The blog states:

A blog is included in the rankings if it contains substantial content related to biblical studies or closely related fields, evidences a scholarly approach to biblical studies (not requiring academic qualifications, but excluding blogs with mainly homiletic or devotional content, unscholarly approaches, or a primarily theological focus), and is currently active and posting.

You can read more about the technical process of how blogs are ranked on the technical bits (aka about) page.

Announcement 2: New Translation Project

The second announcement has to do with a new project I’m working on: The Katagraphais Translation Project. Basically, this isn’t much different than clicking on the translation tab above. So why am I doing it? As I translate more and more of the Bible, several things are growing persistently annoying. One issue is how to manage the main translation page with all the chapters that I add and link too. For every book of the bible I need a main page, and then a page for every chapter, which only adds to the amount of pages I have to keep up with in my wordpress dashboard, plus keeping track of making sure they all have the correct “parent” pages (if you don’t use wordpress, don’t worry about what I just said). By dedicating a whole section of my site apart from wordpress to it, it makes it much easier and simple to deal with navigation and files. Another issue is design. As I put translations up on wordpress, it’s hard to get the text to do what I want. Sure, I could edit the css¹ files and everything, but I have several themes installed for this site. That would mean finding all the css files for each theme and editing them all, and frankly I don’t want to put forth the effort. So by moving the translations, I’m able to work out the design I want in one single css file. Basically, to put all that into english, this new project will allow me to continue putting up my translations in a way that is easier to control and keep track of.

Also, note that it is in “beta.” This means that it is an initial and incomplete version. Unfortunately, Google’s use of the perpetual beta in its products has transformed our thinking of what beta means. This site, though it doesn’t have much function apart from the translations itself, is not fully function. This isn’t “Gmail beta.” I have a lot of kinks to work out, particularly on issues of navigation. The address linked above will not be its permanent address. It is temporary until I have the site functioning well enough to fully release. So, enjoy the sneak preview (Genesis 1, Jonah 1 and 2, and Philemon are all up at the moment), and please leave some feedback with what you might suggest!