Welcome to the brand new InsideCatholic! Almost exactly three years ago, we launched the initial version of the site. While we’re proud of that effort, it was very much a first step.
This is our second.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily
As Deal mentioned in his morning column, we’ve designed this next iteration of IC to take full advantage of social networking, and will soon expand it to mobile devices as well. Not only that, but over the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing several exciting new Web features, including regular mini-documentaries and interview shows. We’ve also added the wildly popular Tweetboard — a kind of micro-forum that allows you to follow our writers’ Twitter accounts… and interact with them if you have your own. You’ll want to check that throughout the day. And did we mention our new writers and bloggers? Expect a few surprises…
Yes, we have big — and longterm — plans.
Of course, at the moment, InsideCatholic is bit of a construction zone. We’re still fixing errors and hooking up the features, some of which could only be addressed once the site was live. That’s the nature of any launch — you know there will be problems, but you hope to minimize them, and in time, eliminate them entirely.
That’s our intention, but it’s going to take a little time. And so, two announcements:
- We’ll be making a lot of bug fixes and style improvements over the next few weeks, so this is not the finished product. (In techie terms, we’re going to spend August in beta.)
- We have over five thousand feature articles on the site, and several times that number in blog posts. Many of the older pieces in the archives are still unformatted, or are credited to the wrong authors (this is a result of importing huge databases — columns don’t always match up). We’re going to be working feverishly to get all the old stories corrected and looking as good as the rest of the site.
In other words, Patience is our favorite virtue at the moment.
Do enjoy the site — there’s a lot here already, and even the older material has been given a new face. This is the first day in the second life of InsideCatholic.