What’s Been Going On?

March 16, 2003
We’re working toward the site design we envision for the project as a whole. The left sidebar now reflects the major category divisions of the site. The stylesheet is still built into the page, which we’ll strip out as soon as we reach a stable perspective on what we want the styles to be.

We don’t have any writings or MP3s available for download yet, but that’s where they’ll go when we get them. Maybe Susie and Dorothea and Trevor and I can choose a short sample document to mark up, record, and publish, as a test case.

Dorothea is working at teaching us what we need to understand about XML in order responsibly to begin our publishing work. Don’t blame her if we don’t do well enough.

We’re negotiating with a conference organizer to web-publish the proceedings of an international gathering of scholars next year.

We seem to have found a lawyer who’ll help us construct our licensing boilerplate pro bono; I’m not holding my breath, but I will cheer once we get that squared away.

March 13, 2003
Trevor’s design for the Disseminary header is now final; we spent an afternoon together moving elements around, and finally arrived at the header above. Unless someone comes up with a topper, we’re set.

We’ve also chosen a typeface, FontFont’s Scala, which we chose because it wasn’t an obvious standard, because it holds up well at small and large sizes, because it wouldn’t break our budget, and because it gave us both delight. We had been casting about for a typeface for weeks, each of us in turn naming a personal favorite and the other politely saying, “Mm hmm,” not ever arriving at a common choice. One day Trevor was scheduled to preach at a Mass at which I was presiding, and as we prepared in the sacristy we looked at the pulpit Bible together. We both recognized in the Bible’s typeface the design we’d been looking for, and Scala it was.

Trevor chose our official color —green — with #336600 being our principal web-safe shade.

February 25, 2003
Trevor and I got the good news this afternoon that Prof. Wes Avram of Yale Divinity School will lead one of our Disseminary seminars, on “Spirituality and Technology.” We had been hoping for this; the topic seems a natural for us, and Wes is a brilliant scholar of these questions. We’ll have more details in a while; we are still, after all, trying to pick out the web hosting service we’ll use. But this is a great first step for us, and we can’t wait to turn Wes loose with the seminar as soon as we line up the fixings.
We’re still waiting on our legal advice. I’ll follow up with a couple more alternatives.

Shades of Green

February 21, 2003
This week, we began working on elements of the configuration of the Disseminary web pages, and names of participants we’d like to rope into leading off our articles and seminars. We’ still pinning down the whos and whens. We’re still waiting to hear from the learned and generous counselor who may turn out to be our lawyer. On the positive side, we’ve made some initial design decisions.

February 14, 2003
Funding for the Disseminary came through today. Right away, we began putting together the resources for our transforming flanking maneuver in theological education. We even have a prospective lawyer to set up our intellectual-property arrangements.