Website
New comment system
I'm trying out a new commenting system over the next few days. Pros: It allows people to login with an Open ID or a Facebook account or twitter, etc. Cons: It doesn't recognize the drupal user accounts that some of you have. On the other hand, people seem to have a hard time with those. Sometimes if you hit home it logs you out. People constantly leaving comments and discovering they aren't logged in.
Anyway, I'll try this one and we'll see how it goes. Let me know what you think. Older comments show both systems to preserve the original comments.
If it's not good, I'll find something else.
rlp
My Archives
There is a real challenge finding everything I've written. In 2008 I started this site. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to pull the hundreds and hundreds of essays and blog posts over from the first and second blog sites. I'm slowly migrating them over.
There are also archives of my work at the Christian Century and The High Calling.
About this blog
My original Salon blog circa 2004I started Real Live Preacher in December of 2002 in the old Salon blog community, now virtually defunct. Salon hasn't allowed new blogs in years. You can still see the old statistics from the heyday of our old community. I was anonymous for the first 18 months or so. I was honored and fortunate to draw the attention of an acquisition editor for Eerdmans, and they published a book of my essays in 2004.
RLP came along fairly early in the blogging phenomenon. I began to attract some decent traffic. The comments became their own conversation as people argued and discussed things. It was a fun time.
As the years have passed, I've slowed down a bit. I write professionally now, so I don't have the same amount of energy as I did back then. And blogs have changed too. The days of dozens and dozens of comments on every post have passed. People read many more blogs now and are less inclined to stick around and comment. The advent of aggregator readers makes commenting even rarer. Or maybe the comments just ran their course here. Who knows?
But I'm still here. I still post at RLP a couple of times a week. I still have no real goals except to write as well as I can.
Gordon Atkinson - Real Live Preacher
RLP Subscriber Blog
Greetings RLP subscribers. This is my special section for you. Unlike the old site, I have a sub-blog for subscribers. If you are a subscriber and log in, you'll be able to pull up my blog entries for you. I'll post more personal things here, and some inside stuff. I'm working on a screenplay and I'll probably post parts of it for you to see.
There will be audio and video files posted only for you as well. And you've got access to my flickr account. You should see some photos in the menu. That and the subscriber menu only appear to you.
I so appreciate your financial support over the years. You guys made it possible for me to make half of my living as a writer.
This is a picture of me and some guys at my church who meet once a month for beer and guy talk, whatever that is. It's kind of a secret group we call "Brotherhood."
RSS feed change for Real Live Preacher - ReSubscribe!
Real Live Preacher has a new website and the RSS feed has changed.
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Site Upgrade News
Tim from Jethro here.
There have been numerous comments with questions about the new site and whats happening. Please keep them coming - especially if you notice broken things.
However to avoid wasting your time and duplication here is a list of the things we know about and are fixing - some from the comments!
RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are working on this site - but they are different from before. We suggest you change your subscription to the main feed. It is better then the rlp blog feed though you can choose that if you want. Gordon is mostly going to write under his rlp user name. However some content may be posted, e.g., images, audio, video etc., that is not a blog entry and will not be included in the blog feed. For a full list of feeds and to learn how to use them check out the sitemap. For those users who in the past were subscribed to the blog3 feed as mentioned in comments, we will look at the solution of mapping the feed over. However we would prefer they switched to the new feed. Unfortunately some of this can't be avoided. The feeds structure was different in the old version of Drupal. We think it is better now but of course change can be hard.
Subscribers blogs and subscriber content
Gordon and I are discussing just how and what to set up for subscribers. As he mentioned we want to offer subscribers additional content etc. We are just working out the best way of doing this. Feel free to comment with suggestions, ideas.
Audio Posts
We have added the ability to attach audio to a blog post so Gordon can add these into his writing. They will still exist as a separate entry and there is a feed for podcasts that can be subscribed to. This works in iTunes or any other Feed reader that you use for podcasts.
RLP Archives
We have only just got these working - took some time with DNS changes, importing the old database and setting it up to work in a sub folder. However there is a lot of stuff that is not linked up right yet. We will need to manually edit a bunch of links so that they point at the right place. Please be patient as we do this. We would love for you to point out to us broken links as you find them.
RLP Search
At the moment search is operational in both the current site, though there's not much to search on yet, and the archive site. however one search will not find content in the other etc. We are looking into this one.
Website Upgrade
Welcome to the new real live preacher site. I'm on a new server, and the dns will still be propagating for the next day or so. I'm so appreciative of the folks at www.JethroConsultants.com for helping with this migration. The old site was falling apart and beginning to break every few days.
A lot of things at the new site won't be working yet. I don't think the dns has changed in Australia, so the guys at Jethro can't make a lot of the final changes. The entire old site will be archived intact. That's going to mess up any links out there to specific essays, but there's no way to avoid that. And some of the links inside the archive may be broken. But you will definitely be able to get to all of my old writing there.
So for the next week or so, things will be coming online. Thanks for your patience!All of my subscriber's blogs will be listed here somehow, so watch for that.
We lost our user accounts, but I don't know if there is any reason to have them now. All they really allowed you to do was have your name on your comments. Well, you can do that now without registering. I'm checking with Jethro on that question.
I want to thank Tim Miller and the people at Jethro for their fantastic work. These guys have been great to work with. I'll write more about that later!
I'll Be Out Of Town
I'm leaving today to go to Grapevine, Texas (near Fort Worth) to attend the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, the yearly gathering of Baptists with whom I feel a connection and a kindred spirit. The CBF is made up almost entirely of ex-Southern Baptists who could not stomach that denomination's steady movement toward fundamentalism and their embrace of the unholy union of State and Religion advocated by the Religious Right in our country.
Sorry to be so "direct," but I feel rather strongly about these issues.
I'll be back Saturday. Take care.
rlp
All of my books are for sale though me. I've not had the energy or inclination to send them to Amazon or any other place.
Click here for purchase links at my new blog.