With new academic year due to begin in the next few weeks I thought it would be good to update my visitors on recent and forthcoming developments across the “Theology on the Web” websites.
File Formats for Articles
Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different formats for the articles I upload. Since I began in 2001 I’ve scanned, OCR’d and then proof-read all the articles that I’ve placed online. This produces very clear text and very small file sizes, but it does have the disadvantage of being very time consuming as well as introducing typos.
The situation is at present that I have a full-time job in a Christian charity, a wife and three little boys, so website work must be confined to my lunch hour or late evenings. Although I received over a million visitors each year only 4 of these support the work regularly on a monthly basis. The two advertisers who paid for space on the websites have decided not to renew this year. All this means is that while I still hope to do this work full-time on the sites at some point there is no prospect of this in the near future on the basis of current funding levels. If you would like to support the development of the sites I suggest a number of ways of doing so here.
This has led me to change the format of the articles I upload to scanned PDF’s with OCR’d text. These retain the original layout, can be searched, cut and pasted and appear in search engines. They can be produced very quickly (I could scan and place online an entire book in a few hours) but the file size is around 15-20 times larger a word-processed version. A few people have complained about this change, but I would rather have the material available now rather in several years time (if ever) even if the format does not please everyone.
New (old!) Journals Online
I have recently completed the entire 11 volumes of the Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society and will be integrating the articles into my site in the next few weeks. Vox Evangelica (which I began working on in 2006) should be complete by the end of next week. I have recently completed a table of contents for the Theological Students Fellowship (TSF) Bulletin (UK) and a number of these articles are now online. Anvil journal recently allowed me to publish around 27 of its articles and these are appearing as permissions from the authors are received. I am now working on a table of contents for Themelios (1962-1974) when it was published by IFES. I hope to be able to place many of these articles online as well in due course in partnership with Tyndale House and the Gospel Coalition.
Missiology Website
Due to my present workload the launch of this site has been put back until sometime next year.
That’s all for now. Remember to subscribe to the site feeds to received the latest news. Thanks for visiting!
