I’ve been maintaining Magdalene.org for twelve years now.  Much of that time it has been very, very little maintenance has been involved, as in, I haven’t been as attentive as I should have been.  One of the reasons for that is that it’s not easy to maintain a website that is entirely hand-made.  And by hand-made I mean that I’ve written all of the markup for it, all of the content for it, and have created most of the images for it, with the exception of the redesign done by my brother-in-law in 2005.

When I started Magdalene.org, it was well before the advent of blogging software.  Now that I’m familiar with WordPress from blogging The Magdalene Review, I’m liking how easy it is to add and maintain content.  Everything is stored in a database and is easily findable via search.  Not so with my static Magdalene.org site, which, although a labor of love, is more labor than it really needs to be, which makes me love it less.

Thus I’m seriously considering a merge of Magdalene.org and The Magdalene Review into a single site with a new format.  The Magdalene Review will go away, and all of my Mary Magdalene blogging will be under the auspices of Magdalene.org.  All of the current Magdalene.org content would live there.  And the gallery, which is currently a monstrous nightmare to build and maintain (which is why it has gone unfinished for so long), will be relatively easy to set up and grow.

I think the time has come for a shift in thinking about the way I manage my sites.  Since it’s just me working on these projects, I need to reduce the amount of “manual labor” involved so that I can focus more on content than presentation.

Yes, I think I really like this idea.  I wish it would have occured to me before I engaged in a major site redesign, but there is still no time like the present to make improvements.

Long gone are the days when Magdalene.org was #1 on Google, but that’s okay. There are some great resources at the top of the heap these days, so I thought it was worth a post to talk a little bit about them. Here are the top 3, in order, as displayed on Google…

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Magdalene.org and The Magdalene Review (this blog) now have a Twitter identity! If you’d like updates on what’s happening with the site, the blog, and Mary Magdalene research in general, please follow magdaleneorg.

You never know, I might even give away some books once in awhile as the mood strikes…

Project Redesign is under way!

Curious what the brightened up Magdalene.org will look like? Why not take a look as we continue to develop it?

http://www.magdalene.org/new

Please keep in mind that many links may not work and the design may change slightly before it goes live, but it’s a good opportunity to preview our new look and feel.

Comments? I’d love to hear what you think!

Please send mail to comment [ a t ] magdalene [ d o t ] org.