small ritual

pub photoblog

just added a new photoblog on the left here - photos taken in the pub after gracelet tonight.

small ritual sites tied together

there's now a menu to get you into the small ritual 5 site on the current index page, and i've done some graphic tying together which has definitely improved the sr5 site. i quite like it again.

still working on the firefox problem though. the links are there, just not visible, so it's a bit of a lucky dip.

a prisoner of my own legacy :)

in answer to jonny's comment, the old stuff is all still there, so any direct links are not broken. there's just no way from the new front end [small ritual 6] to the stripy-menu stuff [small ritual 5] yet.

in fact the sr5 site started out looking and working very much like the new sr6 version. but the main menu using words was too long to do horizontally, so it had to become vertical. then i had a neat stripy submenu system so you could see all the site content at once. but that didn't work, because a submenu with 24 entries runs off the bottom of the browser window and you can't scroll to get it. so the submenus had to become the section menu pages. but that makes for clumsy navigation in each section, hence the previous/next buttons. etc etc. in short there's just too damn much content, and the old stuff swamps the new.

and i'd realised that my original categories from the old orange-menu site sr4 were too fixed, hence the section 3/4/5 etc structure and the code-only menus, so i could move stuff around and retitle it easily if i thought it was in the wrong place. that doesn't help if you want stable links, but i want a movable thinking space.

i guess i need to find a way of tying sr5 and sr6 together. in effect one is image-based and the other text-based. one is a current working space and the other is archival. maybe those distinctions will sharpen.

vaux urban mass photos

i'm really pleased with the photos of vaux's urban mass a couple of sundays ago. it was seriously dark. so dark that kester had to use his phone as a torch to read the liturgy. so dark i had to switch the camera to manual focus. so dark i couldn't see to manually focus. the exposures are 4 or 5 seconds, hand held. and the images are straight out of the camera, except for some minor cropping. i couldn't believe it.

a new new small ritual

there's a new new smallritual site, or at least the beginnings of one. i wanted to change medium. i was tired of all the writing, all the maintaining of old stuff. i want to work much more with images; and working with images gives me more pleasure than words right now. and i've felt - for a long time - that this thing needs to be much more about images, and yet we still get trapped in words and explanations. i wanted better typography on windows machines. i thought some of my photos looked better at a larger size. and i have many images that i like but have never found a particular reason to use.

so. the new site will fill up slowly as i do things. and when it's full, things will be removed when i want to add more. and maybe they'll come back later if i feel like it. the tan-coloured strip along the bottom will carry links to connected pages, like a story field or hypercard stack. there's only a 'home' page because the h looked right in the menu strip. i considered making the index page number 3, or 23, and might still do it. you'll have to feel your way around. some of the old material will return in the new format. i've got one eye on these pages as flyers, or book pages.

incidentally the number 31 has nothing to do with months. it was just the number of numbers i could get on a prototype version of the site. and i liked the idea.

tune in chill out publishers

here's the website for the publishers:

christianeducation.org.uk

and the page to order 'tune in chill out' is here

tune in chill out

was just adding 'Tune In Chill Out' by Jenny Baker & Moya Ratnayake to the alternativeworship.org booklist. it's a really good book [and CD-ROM] about contemplative prayer practices that would be appreciated by many adults and not just the youthworkers at whom it's nominally aimed. funny how the marketing categories of christian publishing [and the church generally] operate - so much stuff derived from alt worship/emerging church ends up being tagged 'youthwork' when a 'new adult spirituality' category is so obviously needed.

'Tune In Chill Out' is currently hard to get hold of without going direct to the publishers - it's not on Amazon for instance. but it did sell out at greenbelt this year.