I’m old enough to remember three channels on our black-and-white TV, which was topped with rabbit ears. Those were the days when neighbors naughtily listened in to conversations on the “party line,” and the length of a long-distance phone call had to be carefully measured using the second hand on a wind-up clock.
I’ve also lived through the evolution of the typewriter, from manual to electric — only to be replaced by the computer keyboard, my first keystrokes producing dramatic white lettering on the black background of DOS. Then came operating systems that made computers more versatile, all the while shedding both pounds and cable attachments until you could hold one — literally — in the palm of your hand, as we do our iPhones and Blackberries.
Did I mention the years when all those vinyl LPs were replaced by the 8-track, the cassette, and the CD, while movie reels were overthrown by the VCR and the DVD? Now, audio and video content can be downloaded wirelessly onto a hard drive with greater quality and clarity than ever before, making all those “collections” that line the walls of your den and basement candidates for the next yard sale
Dwarfing the changes described above is the virtual reality of the Internet itself, the place where many of us now do much of our reading, thinking, shopping, browsing, listening, watching, talking — and just goofing off.
So much personal interaction takes place in this virtual space that last week the USCCB issued its “Social Media Guidelines,” which contains, interestingly, something of a warning to those employed by the Church: “Personal sites of church personnel should also reflect Catholic values.” This is a prudent warning. The kind of content Catholics publish on the Internet is necessarily going to reflect on the Church we represent.
In our own efforts to do a better job serving the Church, InsideCatholic has today launched what might be called its Version 3.0. You will see it is fully fitted with all the social media interfaces you could possibly want, while the functionality of the columns, articles, and blog and video posts are both more attractive and easier to access.
By creating a stronger interface for social networking, InsideCatholic will be helping, as the bishops put it, to “use social media to encourage respect, dialogue, and honest relationships — in other words, “true friendship” (43rd World Communications Day message, 2009).” When crisis Magazine went fully digital and became InsideCatholic in September 2007, the decision was prompted by the growing importance of the Internet as a source of information and personal interaction.
The direction of the Internet is increasingly trending toward interaction and interface, while the amount of information available has become nearly overwhelming. Social media allows users to select their favorite content and spread it exponentially in any direction they choose. This makes every reader a potential partner in our effort of evangelization.
The board and staff of the Morley Publishing Group, which owns and operates InsideCatholic.com, were committed to building a new brand on the Internet both for evangelization and, as the bishops phrase it, “to consider the Church’s role in providing a Christian perspective on digital literacy.”
“Digital literacy” is an excellent phrase for what I think InsideCatholic has come to represent for those — Catholic or otherwise — who visit our site regularly. We strive to provide not only accurate and well-presented content but also a space in which people can interact with intelligence and cordiality.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Brian, Margaret, and Christina aren’t already envisioning what Version 4.0 will look like. But for now I want to thank them for making this version a reality. I’m sure that one day, we’ll all look back at the first versions of our site in much the same way I remember the rabbit ears on the family TV. Technology is always moving, and Catholics need to keep up.
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Beautiful job upgrading. The picture is bittersweet—–I yearn for the days of rabbit ears, 3 channels and peace and quiet.
Deal, I like the upgrade. You guys missed one important feature: a mobile version of the site. This is fairly easy to implement using css… Mention it to your web dev team. God bless.
Hi Carson,
That’s actually next on our list. We have a mobile version installed, but don’t want to turn it on until we’re finished troubleshooting and styling it. It’s coming, though…
…but still runs just as slow as the old site. Bet it’s on the old server – which has still got rabbit ears.
Carson, I am all about being mobile
Hi James,
Actually, we have a dedicated server. Our problem is that the site is a monster. We built it realizing that it would be slow initially, but will be spending the next few months optimizing it.
Hi Deal,
OK, on the plus side the new design is pleasing to the eye.
On the “potentially” negative side I am disappointed to see the new emphasis on “social media”. I view social media as a facile distraction to real, thoughtful commentary and discussion. Since Inside Catholic has long been my favorite place to find thoughtful essays and discussion I certainly hope this does not become the first step in a long decline in real content. So many sites have fallen into this “must be ‘relevant’” trap!
Also – a glitch noted: the RSS feed to my “MyCatholic” homepage is broken.
Good luck on the new endeavor.
Maypo
I appreciate the push ahead, however I am very distracted by the lack of serifs. It does make it hard to visually lock in the page. I’m sure kerning and serifs were hotly debated, so I would like to know your thoughts on that decision.
Too many bells and whistles, too much hunting around for the good stuff. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken.
Only a joke.
My biggest problem is that all the articles I have bookmarked have to be rediscovered. Even taking the /Joomla/ out doesn’t solve it. Heigh Ho…
But seriously, the reason they were bookmarked in the first place is because it’s a great site! So, no complaints here!
Rabbit ears work just fine on my digital TV. I don’t need that new-fangled cable or satellite stuff.
Hi JuanXavier,
Thanks for the question. There wasn’t much debate about it. After 25 years of serif fonts in the magazine and three online (Georgia, 11pt) we were tired of it, and actually find this easier on the eye. A lot of it comes down to personal preference, of course, so there will always be a good number who reasonably disagree. I prefer serif fonts when reading print, and san serifs when reading on a screen. That seems to be a popular opinion, but it certainly isn’t the only one.
Hi James,
Sorry about that. We’re going to be redirecting all the old links over the next couple month, so they should be restored soon. We decided to change from our old garbled Joomla links to search-engine friendly semantic links. That killed all our external links, but it was unavoidable. We’ll fix it, but again, apologies.
Your comment is twice as fun when read in an Ol’ Prospector Voice.
Joking, of course. The old site wasn’t broken, but was desperately stunted. I’m not sure we’ll agree on this one, but I do hope you’ll keep reading.
Does the “Tweets” tab deserve such a prominent place? On some pages it can overlap the margins, and block some text on the page if the window is fairly narrow (see: http://www.insidecatholic.com/hamrick/#tb).
Also, I have trouble selecting a story from the fancy display on the homepage. I’ll click the story on the right, it changes the image, but then it quickly cycles to the next image, so I end up opening the wrong story. Suggestion: cycle images a bit slower. And let us open the story’s page by clicking or double-clicking its name in the right column of the display.
Thanks. Oh, but the site does look nice!
When Crisis was disseminated via paper & ink, you couldn’t interact with Deal H. and Brian S-P… Fun!
Juan Xavier, if you are using Firefox, go to Tools -> Options and choose the Content tab. Click the Advanced button under Fonts and Colors and uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts” Now you can read in Palace Script MT if you so desire. Unfortunately, I don’t know of anything that is site specific, but there may be a GreaseMonkey script for it.
The “Your Comments” scroll is very nice. Hopefully it will be applied to every page. However, I’m used to “Your Comments” on other websites displaying only the comments made by the particular user logged in.
Hi Nathan,
The Tweetboard flag puts itself there automatically — we didn’t choose the position. We’ll try it out for a while, and see how people like it. This is a test month.
I slowed down the cycler, so there should be enough time now. Thanks for the catch.
Hi Carson,
I’m not sure all our readers would consider that a positive effect.
1) Can the “tweets” tab/button/thingy be deleted form the page in my particular browser?
2) Printing is now hosed. I used to be able to click on a “Print” button and get a minimalist view of content and comments only – then print that for my files. Now you click the “Printer” icon under the article, it pops the standard print dialog and what I get is the first page then one blank page – that is it. Plus the first page is filled with all the navigation adornments – which is useless on printed media and just wastes paper.
Since this seems to be the thread for suggesting improvements, I would suggest the headers should be smaller. The huge blue font just seems too big and more like a social site than a news site. (All the fonts seem a tad too large for me, but I understand that we have an older generation that may like it that way.)
Also, I miss the ability to quote someone by name. On the other hand, it is nice to be able to enter links and images directly in the post!
I must admit, I find the new format overwhelming visually. Long lists of titles and columns all over the page — it creates quite a jumble…..
I agree on some of this. The tag cloud seems unnecessary – and wrong. I was wondering why Estonia was so big. There is only one article for it, whereas Science is tiny and has 18 articles.
The Top Stories also seem to be similarly unordered or in an order I cannot discern.
The Your Comments only appears to include blog comments and not article comments.
Having helped roll out a site like this (theophiles.org), I know that users were our primary beta testers and provided the best feedback, so I’m hoping that what we add can be helpful to you.
Thanks to all for the constructive suggestions. I can’t promise we’ll institute all of them, but we’ll certainly use some.
Hi Joshua,
The Top Stories section covers the most popular articles by clicks over the preceding 6 weeks. We’ll probably shorten that time frame to keep the list changing, but that’s how it’s ordered.
The tag cloud is supposed to run by clicks — the more clicks, the bigger the tag. But it’s hard to imagine “Estonia” being one of our more popular subjects, so I’ll have to check into that.
I will pass along one more: I really miss the short biographical sketch after every article. It helps the reader quickly gain a little context on the writer. Especially (obviously) useful for an unfamiliar name or even a vaguely familiar name. Lends itself to an “ah-ha!” moment when you recall who they are.
I like the new style! I was wondering though if you can add the time on the posts as well! It kind of helps! Also, are we going to be able to log in or create an account?
We’re not ignoring your comments, just extremely busy. Sorry for the silence.
We eliminated the biographical sketches because you can now get a lot more info by clicking on the author’s name in the article. That will take you to his/her full IC author page, with bio, photos, links to other articles (on and off the site), favorites, etc. We’re still filling that section of the site out, but in a few months it will be quite robust.
For example, here’s Deal’s page: http://www.insidecatholic.com/hudson/
If you use Firefox, it can. The free add-on called “No-Script” will turn it off, and any other Java-based widgets you run into online.
I’ll have our programmer look into this. Sounds like a bug.
We’re spending August in beta, so we can catch all these things before the fall election season heats up.
I missed this one. You’ll be happy to know that we intend to use social media to disseminate our material more broadly, and not to reshape the material itself. That won’t change.
The image insert feature in the comments box poses a considerable risk.. For example:
Dearest Deal, It seems you left facebook!?
Is everything ok?
Blessings old friend to you and yours!!!
trulie, julie/treasure
Took me a couple of days to figure out what was really bothering me about the new site, but now I’ve figured it out. You’ve switched to a sans serif font in the body of the articles — much harder to read. The serif in fonts like Times New Roman helps the eye stay on the line and reads quicker and easier (why it’s so popular in print). The new, plain font is harder to read in long blocks of text like an article, in my opinion.