Part 4: the present and the future

This is my final retrospective post on where deinde has been, where it is, and where it is going.

The Present

I must first say that I'm very happy with the response of the new deinde site. I made the decision earlier this year that I needed to move away from Wordpress, I just didn't feel like learning how to mod a new platform, and I wanted more flexibility in handling the increasing amount of resources on the site. So I made the switch just a few weeks ago now, using the awesome Rapidweaver website creator. The traffic to deinde has increased significantly since I made the change (according to Google Analytics) which is a good sign too! About the only thing I regret (though it couldn't be helped) is that I had to change the blog feed yet again. As with any feed change, you are bound to lose a few readers who forget or don't bother to update their feed.

The biggest reason for the change out of all the resources were for the Bookmarks in Biblical Studies. You see, I've been keeping good tabs on the internet for a few years. Not only did I do this for my own benefit, but for my students and colleagues as well. And in the back of my mind I always wanted to make my own bookmarks gateway with a bit of a different approach. The problem, basically, is that I could never find the right platform- the available software or online options never matched the ideal in my mind. At first I thought it was going to be Delicious, then I thought it would be Ma.gnolia. In fact, there was a point when I really thought Ma.gnolia would be the right option. I talked to Mark Goodacre about this even being an option for NT Gateway. But during the course of discussion, which I think was helpful for all, Ma.Gnolia's limitation became obvious for me. Mark Goodacre, with the help of Logos, eventually revamped the NTGateway. As for me, I was still sitting on a great collection of bookmarks with descriptions and tags, etc. Enter Diigo. Diigo in my opinion is the best of the best when it comes to a social bookmarking system. I finally found a home for my bookmarks. But I wanted to present my links on deinde in an attractive way, based on tags. This was the big reason I went with the Rapidweaver site- and I'm very happy with the final product. Each link is tagged with one or more tags, has a brief description, and if I actually annotate the page, those are linked as well. Three other advantages to my Diigo system: 1) My diigo bookmarklet runs right in Safari, making the addition of a bookmark to my Diigo collection a snap. 2) Because of the setup, I NEVER need to alter the gateway site- Diigo just feeds the new bookmarks to the site. 3) Diigo creates a feed whenever I add a new bookmark which I crosspost both on this blog and on a bookmarks feed here. I have, I think, a very good yet simple system for me to manage, yet delivers a lot of features and power. About the only downside is that it takes a few extra seconds for the gateway page to load. But considering the fact that this is a ONE PAGE comprehensive gateway, the wait is worth it :-)

One final "present" item, and that is a new blog I call the Journal Alerts blog. I haven't had much time to work on this yet, but if/when I get the chance to work on it more I think its usefulness will increase. Basically, I'm tying together some abilities of Google Reader and blogger to try and aggregate any and all alerts for biblical studies journals. If it all works out, this would be the one stop shop for keeping current on new journal articles.

The Future

I've got some exciting things (at least for me!) in store for 2009. In addition to keeping the Bookmarks, Web Search, and Blog search up to date, and continuing my usual penetrating analysis and commentary on the deinde blog, I will be doing a big upgrade to my Greek multimedia flashcards, as well as unveil Hebrew multimedia flashcards. These would have been out in 2008, but once again I am having to wait for software to catch up with me :-) But here it is in a nutshell- I will be using Mental Case as the new Mac software option and continue with MemoryLifter for PC. The package will come with ALL Greek words from the NT- tagged by root, frequency, and textbook chapters. The Hebrew package will be similar, but may be a bit longer in coming. I'm looking forward to these! So some time in 2009 a "Hebrew" menu item will be making an appearance on deinde.

Beyond that? Well I have another big idea brewing- actually it has been germinating for many years at deinde. I have thought about and decided that I will indeed blog about it to see if I get any positive reaction. Perhaps it is unrealistic and that will help me put it to rest. So stay tuned for my discussion on a possible future open source index for biblical studies :-)