A Blogiversary and an Upgrade

Two years ago, my friend and pastor Bob got me into this blogging thing. I had been toying with the idea for some time, and finally did it. The main idea was not an "online journal," but rather an easily-updated website to publish some articles I had written on various topics and had earlier published on a more traditional website design.

As you can see, The Schooley Files is in the process of an upgrade. While blogging is much easier than hand-coding html in order to create web pages, the thing I never liked about it was the linear format: essentially you have a single chain of articles, rather than the traditional website that has an initial portal to a topically-organized set of articles. Links and category groupings help this issue out to some extent, but there can be a sense of incongruity if you try to cover more serious issues and then back off and do something more casual. There's also the sense that blog posts, by their very nature, are not supposed to be very long.

For this reason, I've expanded The Schooley Files to include three separate blogs with different functions, easily accessible from one another, to make a more fully-defined website. I'm also (finally) placing the site under its own domain name.

The Schooley Files Studies is intended for longer articles than I would want to put on the main blog; in its early stages, it will be a venue for me to consolidate articles that I had split off into bite-sized chunks for the main blog. We'll begin today with "A Positive Case for Arminianism," the original title I had for what I had broken into two posts (still both massively long for a typical blog) entitled "Why I Am Not a Calvinist (With Apologies to Bertrand Russell)," Parts 1 and 2. I realize that a computer screen is not always the best medium for reading long documents; it is for this reason that some time ago, I made changes to the code of all the Schooley Files blogs that make them printer-friendly. You can use your browser's "print preview" function to check out how articles will look.

The Schooley Files Audio is intended for audio files, both sermons and songs. Today we'll begin with a message I gave on Nicodemus's visit to Jesus in John 3, entitled "Nick at Nite." I hope it will be a blessing.

I'll tip my hand here: I was also going to include a "creative" blog for fiction and poetry. I had written some stuff in college that I thought was reasonably good and might be worth publishing in this format. Then I actually went back to the stuff I'd written and revisited it. No. No no no. Maybe someday, with new stuff, but, no. I see now that there's a reason why I've tended toward expository writing, even though fiction was my first love in my youth and into adulthood. Trust me. I'm doing you a favor.

The present blog will continue as sort of the "front page" of the site; it will continue pretty much as it has been, a blend of personal observations and short studies, some of which will be brought together and published on the Studies page. While I toyed with the idea of a static "front page" for the site, it seems to me that that method has become passe; people just end up bypassing the front page for the content that they want. So this blog will hopefully be updated on a regular basis, and perhaps a little traffic will travel to the other pages.

So that's it. SchooleyFiles 2.0. I hope you like it.