Archive
Early Lent Notes
As those of you who check my other blog will already know, my computer has finally given up the ghost meaning that error corrections may take a little longer than usual. I did download an ftp client for my phone yesterday evening. I hope to spend some time with it today and figure out how to upload and download files to the breviary site. One of the changes I need to make is including a link to the Litany page fom the main page. There’s a mobile version of the Great Litany here and a desktop version of it here. Also, Psalm 95 is currently set as the standard invitatory for Lent as opposed to the Venite–that’s a feature, not a bug. However, I will work on including an option so that you can go back to the Venite if desired.
Thank you all!!
The response from the renewal appeal has been very good. Together we raised enough funds to secure the domains and hosting for the next three years! Thank you very much to all who gave.
While the breviary started as my hobby, I experience it now as a community project. It continues and improves through your suggestions, ideas, and—of course—corrections. Thank you for being part of it with me!
Back-end Migration
I just talked to my hosting folks. They were checking in to see how things were going; I noted that sometimes performance in the morning is sluggish. After looking into it they agreed and said that migrating me to a different box, a Linux box, would increase the speeds quite a bit. So–they’re doing that. It shouldn’t break anything, but if the breviary becomes unaccountably unavailable that will be why.
It’s set to happen within the next 24 hours or so—we’ll see what happens…
Renewal Appeal
The birthday of the Breviary is coming up soon.
For people, this means cake, ice cream, embarrassing stories, and photos of your hair from the ’80’s. For websites, it means renewing domain registrations and hosting plans and such.
Currently the breviary is limping along on a month-to-month hosting plan. My hope is to do a long-term set of renewals to kick the can as far down the road as possible. Thus, I’m launching a modest appeal for donations to keep things running smoothly.
If the breviary is of value to you, please consider making a donation to help defray its expenses.
(Of course, if you’ve already donated recently, please disregard!)
Use Trends
I believe in internet privacy so I don’t use tracking cookies or anything like that on the breviary. I do not now and will not in the future use anything to identify users—that’s not the point of the site.
However, I do need to know what settings and options are being used the most to make sure that I’m putting effort towards and tending to issues that affect the breviary and its users.
Here’s the breakdown of breviary use starting from 1 PM on 9/8/11 until now, the last entry being logged at 4AM on 10/8/11.
Total breviary uses: 3,521
Breakdown by Office:
- Morning Prayer: 1,720
- Noon Prayer: 245
- Evening Prayer: 1,229
- Compline: 327
Those who save their options with cookies, those who use a page that auto-pre-sets their options, vs. those who use the “pre-set” options:
- cookies: 1387
- Pre-set page: 814
- pre-sets: 1320
- bare-bones: 583
- house use: 250
- high church: 226
- amplified: 167
- old school: 51
- basic prayer book: 43
Breakdown by Rite:
- Rite I: 1316
- Rite II: 2205
Breakdown by kalendar:
- BCP: 1194
- HWHM: 860
- OJN: 577
- House: 497
- Current Roman: 184
- Anglican Missal: 57
- Knott Missal: 57
- Exciting Holiness (COE): 55
- OHC: 40
Breakdown by page:
- Regular: 2625
- OJN: 444
- BSG: 390
- office: 39
- mobile: 20
- test: 3
I could break it down further based on analysis of the cookies, but I’m not interested in doing that right now. Looking across the cookies, the system currently contains 242 unique cookies with none having more that 64 visits. The lack of significant clustering around specific cookies indicates two positives to me: 1) the pre-sets are well chosen and have good appeal; 2) people really do look for a wide variety in their Office options.
On a side-note, just looking at this file has helped me solve a major issue with the cookies. One of the values was inserting a word instead of a value. Brian—reselect the same options and try again; your options ought to work now!
Interestingly, if you compare hits-per-week to average-Sunday-attendence (probably not a fair comparison for a number of reasons) this completely unsupported and unregulated e-ministry is consistently one of the top 3 parishes of my diocese…!
Votive Progress
For those wondering, the votives are in progress but have been put on the back-burner due to a variety of life-complications (most work related…).
However, I wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten and that work is under way. I’m starting on the Offices for the Dead. The links within the pages don’t work yet but this will give you a sense of what’s coming:
Post-Vacation Update
I’m back after a couple weeks of vacation. I had hopes that I’d be able to get some database fixes in during that time but technology limitations prevented that from happening.
I did get some interesting reading done which bore some interesting fruit that we’ll get to in a bit.
The main things on the docket are:
- correction of the antiphon issues that Caelius pointed out and
- getting an initial set of votives up.
Future Features Poll
I’ve added a new page to discuss some of the future directions that the breviary could go in, and to solicit your input on where you’d like to see it develop.
Web Host Sabotage
After going to all of that trouble to fix things, attempts to reach the breviary result only in a message stating: “The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.”
I swear this one’s not my fault!
It seems to be happening at the level of the web host. I’m beginning to get rather unhappy with my web host and may have to seek other alternatives if this persists. I’ve opened a support ticket with them and we’ll see how long it takes to get service.
(I’ll note too that my decision to move the blog to a WordPress hosted site has just been vindicated…)
St. Bede's Breviary Blog 