part 2: Deinde's morphs and expansions

In part one I talked about the origins of good old deinde, in this brief section I want to talk about some of the expansions and morphing that took place in the past few years.

Rather than doing a chronological account, I'll attack it on two fronts. The first is platforms and people. As I mentioned, it started with Paul Nikkel on the blog, and I slowly started chiming in more and more. As we continued on with the original system it slowly became clear that the discussion boards weren't really taking off. At the same time, the web search for biblical studies was pretty popular. Paul and I decided to change to a different platform to allow for more contributors to the deinde blog. While we were on the new platform we had Mark Cheeseman throw in a few posts, as well as JB Hood (who I hope will come on board again some time!)— but by this time I had become the main blogger. The platform we chose, which encouraged community editing and posting, wasn't the greatest for hosting other resources, and so we changed platforms again to Wordpress. It was while we were on Wordpress that I started adding more and more additional resources. During the Wordpress time, do to the ebb and flow of life, Paul had less and less time to contribute and deinde essentially became a one man show— kind of like a pool shark that needs a backer (me being the pool shark and Paul being the backer :-)

Next, early resources. The first real resource we had was a search specifically for biblical studies. The next expansion came with the biblical studies glossary, which we created very early on. This 'quick and dirty' glossary continues to be our most visited page on deinde, and one that I continue to expand even today.

After our move to the second platform and the introduction of Google's custom search engines, I took over the Biblical studies search. This was a natural thing for me to do, as I had really started to keep good track on resources on the internet (more on this later). This led me to expand and create two more searches, the journals search and the biblioblogs search. I continue to be very proud of the Deinde Web Search, and it is used pretty frequently. (One of the first things I do for my students is introduce them to the Deinde web search). The biblioblogs search also continues to be popular as well.

The next resource page, my unicode for Mac tutorial, is another page that is visited frequently. This tutorial grew out of a series of posts I wrote on unicode implementation and reflects my well-known emphasis on technology in biblical studies.

That's long enough for now. I'll do two more posts after this: (3) expansion of resources, and (4) current status and future prospects.