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Articles and books added in January

In the month of January I added 44 articles/essays to the database. The includes the individual chapters of the books "Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet" and "Mediating Religion". Let me first list the 6 recently published articles:

  • A Summary of the Findings of the Study: Assessing the Impact of Online Courses on the Spiritual Formation of Adult Students - Mary Lowe
  • Has God Gone Global? Religion, Language, and Globalization - Annabelle Mooney, Nikolas Coupland
  • Tweet if You ? Jesus: Spiritual Identity & Community in the Digital Reformation - Elizabeth Drescher
  • Using Technology for Ministry: Trends, Principles, and Applications - Alfredo Vergel
  • Virtual Churches, Participatory Culture, and Secularization - Stefan Gelfgren
  • Visualization of the Taiwanese Buddhism web based on social network analysis - Chia- Hao Chang, Hsin-Chih Chen, Jia-Jane Shuai

Books added to the site

I added the following 20 books to this site this week. I also rearranged the Books menu of the site to follow these subsections.

Site update: from Wordpress to Drupal

If you visited this site in the past you may have noticed that it looked different. Yesterday I not only switched the site's design, but also its underlying architecture. I originally opened the site last July using Wordpress a blogging engine. As I added a list of articles and books to the site I realized that I need a more robust content management system, that can handle that kind of content too. I chose Drupal and have been building the site for the last two weeks. This is my first more-or-less full-fledged Drupal site, so I am still working out the kinks. (I had built a basic Drupal site in the past, but that contained no customization beyond applying a downloaded theme.)

Let me point out some of the features of this new site. On the left you will find links to our Twitter account and Facebook page, the list of last ten blog entries, the list of categories within our blog, a monthly archive and a list of blogs/sites that related to religion online. Every past blog entry is available, via monthly breakdown, from the Blog menu on top. The Books menu currently includes the list of Academic books and a single link to the rest, but this will shortly change. Clicking on the "Books" menu/button will take you to the full list of books. Every version of the list includes the title, author(s), date of publication, categories and links where you can find the same book elsewhere on the web. You can view list of books of a certain category by clicking on the category's name. Clicking the Articles button lead you to the list of articles on the topic of religion on the internet. The list can be sorted by title, date of publication and date I added them to the site. If an abstract is available you can find that at the individual article's page, along with the link to the article itself on the web. I also want to point out that we have a new logo (top left) and an internal search option (top right.)

There are lots of things I wanted to add to this site, both content and feature wise. The former includes transferring the remaining 20 or so articles that I didn't from the spreadsheet at Google.Docs where I stored them up till now, adding more books, adding book reviews and making a page for each author. I also want to add a Facebook "like" button, integrate Twitter, make the site more visually appealing.

The Field of Religious Studies

This post will be slightly off from my usual topic of religion on the internet. But I just read an article (and two more it referred to) that stuck an emotional chord. The original articles was Mark Hulsether's Studying Religion is Suddenly Popular at Religion Dispatches.

You can "like" my posts now

I added the option to "like" the posts and pages of this blog via the popular Facebook application. Using the same button you can share the URL and comment on it on your own Facebook wall. I also edited the options for the "AddThis" box at the bottom of the posts. Instead of listing a dozen services, it only has the following seven: Twitter, Email, Google, Delicious, Blogger, MySpace, Digg. You cans till use all the the other services AddThis links to by clicking the box.

Articles

As I am collecting scholarly articles on the topic of online religion to read I realize that I will need a system to organize them. For now I created a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs. Right now I have 53 articles listed in them. My plan is that I will read one by one the 41 that is available to me and post my reactions, observation about each. I will probably keep adding articles to the list though. For now I am quite omnivorous and want to read everything I can find on the topic. Later I might narrow my appetite. A note on the Google Docs version. The document has many columns such as title, authors, publication date, source, URL, availability, my blog URL (if it exists) date added to the spreadsheet and abstract. In the version I am working on it is is easy to sort by any of these. However others could sort it only if I share it with the whole world, but that would mean anyone could edit it. I am not ready for that. Instead I published it as a webpage and also made the CSV version available. If you download this latter and open it with your spreadsheet software that you can sort it anyway you want. At a (much) later point when I create a website dedicated to this topic there will be a simple webpage version of the list that anyone would be able to sort without having to download a file. Finally, in order that I could find the list fast I added it as a webpage to this site. At the top of the page, right at the About: button from now on you will see a link to the page. I hope eventually it can be useful for others. For now it only has the most recent articles and some of the classics.

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