Saturday 27 January 2007

January 2007

New this month - blogging!
New mercies, each returning day,
Hover around us while we pray;
New perils past, new sins forgiven,
New thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.
Thanks to John Keble for reminding us of the unfailing love of God throughout all the changing scenes of our life. This month there are a few changing scenes at Claves Regni, as we try to drag ourselves kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. (Note: if a computer can pull itself up by its own bootstraps, surely a web-production team can drag itself forward?)

For a little over ten years I have developed and maintained Claves Regni, the "on-line magazine of St Peter's Church, Nottingham". This was quite a novelty back in July 1996, but since then the world has changed - many more people have access to the internet, and blogging and interactivity are all the rage. So this month we introduce blogging to Claves Regni. Most new pages added to the site will be in the form of blogs, on which you may comment. If the author is on-line (s)he may well reply to your pertinent and witty observations.

For the time being at least, the blogs are hosted on blogger.com rather than on our main site. You will have to find your way back to the main site, either by using the "back" button on your browser, or using the links on the right side of the page.

In the real world the scenes are changing even faster. Back in December 2002 the two parishes of St Peter's and All Saints' were united, and in April 2006 the PCCs of St Peter's & All Saints' and of St Mary the Virgin agreed to unite to form a Nottingham City Centre Group of Churches. This is not a way of saving money, nor yet an experiment to see how many churches Andrew Deuchar can look after without falling over, but is an exciting venture (it says here) to strengthen our ability to work with each other and with other churches in Nottingham, to develop mission in our city centre.

One of the interesting tasks is finding a more pithy name than "Nottingham City Centre Group of Churches" to describe the soon-to-be unified parish. Discussions are taking place at the highest level, thesauri are being pored over and chins stroked in an extremely thoughtful fashion. If you have any good suggestions for a name, why not let us know by commenting on this blog?

Further changes are in the pipeline for Claves Regni which is going to merge with the St Mary's site, and be completely restructured and expanded to describe all three churches and our life together. It has become obvious that one person cannot develop and maintain such a site alone, and so I am starting to share the awesome power and responsibility of the post of webmaster with other, younger and wiser heads than mine. Step forward, Ioan Reed-Aspley and Peter Siepmann!

It's been a while since there was an update to the site, mea culpa, so this month we are dealing with some of the backlog. Stephen Morris writes movingly on pilgrimage and clutter, Andrew Deuchar submits some more thoughtful sermons and addresses, while Clarence Rickards provides a comprehensive review of the Gospel according to John. We also recall a long-serving Church Architect and Warden, a WW2 veteran reflects on Remembrance Sunday, Philip Collin reports (belatedly) on the St Peter's Choir tour of Ireland last year, and Ioan brings news of a dramatic arrest at St Mary's even longer ago. I hope you will want to read at least some of these articles and then comment on them. Do let us know what you think.

Michael Leuty

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good afternoon. I hope the changes to the site prove to be an improvement; certainly the ability to comment (a "right of reply") is a good feature.

However I'm not convinced everyone will be able to work out how to do it; it's taken me a while. Perhaps this article or the main site would benefit from some guidance on how to use the "blogging" facility, for the benefit of any who like me haven't used this format before.

The site seems to have gained some links (e.g. to "Atom" and Google) which are not self explanatory. I haven't yet found a way of seeing an index of all the "blog"-style articles available. And I can't find a way of sizing the blog part of the screen to be a bit wider - I see the text as a very narrow and long column on my screen, needing lots of scrolling.

Finally I'm not sure whether there's an edit facility to modify one's own comments; if it turns out that I'm missing a trick or just plain ignorant, do these comments of mine remain published for all time and eternity?

Anonymous said...

I've found a topic index facility now. Click on tiny arrows by the dates underneath pictures of churches in the right hand column with a grey background. Haven't found a way of editing previous comments though.

If an article is written to explain how to use the blog facility then feel free to delete these 2 comments of mine (if that's within the powers of the webmaster).