Category Archives: Blog administration

Blog administration, Sustainable living

Waking up, and page for tiny links

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Well, I didn’t think it would be three years before I would write here again. Most of my writing (about Universalism and church administration) is at revscottwells.com, but honestly I’ve not said much there either. Did the pandemic do that much to me? The collapse of Unitarian Universalist institutions and churches generally? Middle age? Perhaps.

But I do write, but for mainly myself and a private audience, and so I thought I would try to make this blog a true web log and start logging some of my miscellaneous links, thoughts and tidbits here. Even if nobody else reads it, I can use this blog as a commonplace. (Wikipedia)

One page that I have been working on lately is on a pubnix (public access UNIX-now-Linux shell) account, which scratches a lot of nostalgic itches and speaks to my concerns about sustainability in the larger sense, and with computing in particular. The page itself is whisper-light and speedy to load; that’s on purpose. It’s also links to other useful sites that are also very light. Not just a demonstration project, but a useful one: the wifi and mobile connection on a train can be thin and spotty. And this was a concern when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico (Wikipedia) in 2017, leaving the people without grid power and easy communication. Having grown up in hurricane zones, you have to plan for failure and plan to make do.

Feel free to use it, link to it or imitate it for your own low-bandwith needs.

Low-bandwidth links

Blog administration

Moving the ministry to RevScottWells.com

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From here on, the focus of my writing ministry will be at RevScottWells.com, and that is

  1. interpreting Universalist Christianity for today, particularly in practical and popular ways, and
  2. identifying and developing methods to operate churches and other ministries more efficiently and economically, including worship and leadership development,

plus short notices and news as appropriate.

An archive of my writing, to date, will be mirrored at BoyintheBands.com, which will continue with miscellaneous religion news, pop culture and opinion. UniversalistChristian.org will continue as a documents archive, and will grow slowly to support my work at RevScottWells.com.

The name “Boy in the bands” started as wordplay on the stage play and film The Boys in the Band, and the Geneva bands I wear when preaching. The play doesn’t match my experience as a gay man (and never has), I’m hardly a boy, and I only preach occasionally (though I do still wear bands) so even if the name ever made sence as a public persona, it doesn’t now.

Changing domains means a hit to readership, but in time that heals. That said, I’d appreciate you reading my blog here, and sharing the word.

Thanks.

Crossposted at RevScottWells.com

Blog administration, Ubuntu Linux, Universalism, Universalist history

Transcription workflow notes

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So, it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post, but I’ve not been inactive. And since I have the day off today, I thought I’d catch you up. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be putting up two chapters from the 1946 Parish Practice in Universalist Churches as text; I’ve previously posted it as a scanned PDF.

I want to discuss my workflow. I can do the odd report, but I’d like to see more Universalist and other documents transcribed, and to have typographic errors discovered and corrected. I shouldn’t be the bottleneck.

In the past — going back twenty years or so — I would photocopy a book, carefully crop it into a single column, rephotocopy these onto letter size and take them to a central computer center where they would be processed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I’d get a file back, and then edit it.  Later, I would use a flatbed scanner at home and OCR software at home, but some documents required the images being edited to one column. These processes were very time consuming. Sometimes, transcribing by keyboard was more efficient!

Image capture and OCR software have improved markedly. Today, instead of scanning, I take a picture with my phone, and use a graphical front-end to powerful OCR software to process the text. It’s not always clean — a second snap and process is sometimes necessary — but the improvement over twenty years ago is striking.

In particular, on my Ubuntu Linux (14.04 LTR) machine, I use YAGF — “Yet Another Graphical Front-end for cuneiform and tesseract OCR engines” with the tesseract engine.

Blog administration, Esperanto

Changing the character set, or trying to

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So, my blog is old enough that the character set is all goofy. Translation, when I try to write something in Esperanto with circumflexes, I get question marks or oddments in their place.

Example: ĉiutaga preĝejo. This will not do. This blog needs to display in UTF-8, but doesn’t. And converting the database is not risk free.

This notice is in case I ruin my blog for a few hours or a few days.

Blog administration, Universalism

UniversalistChurch.net reclaimed

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Short update: I lost my oldest domain — universalistchurch.net — because I don’t have the email addresses I used to register it years ago. I feared I might have to transition to universalistchristian.net, but lo! I got the original domain this week. Whew! (I transferred it to a new owner: me.)

Universalistchurch.net reads as universalistchristian.net now — both addresses work — and in time I hope to move the content to a simpler, faster platform. And maybe add more documents!

Blog administration, Universalism

Long live UniversalistChristian.net

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Well, I can’t seem to reclaim the universalistchurch.net domain, despite my repeated appeals to the registrar. (I don’t have access to either email address with which I registered it aeons ago.)

But I own universalistchristian.net, so after some tinkering I’ve moved the site dedicated to the “Christian hope in the final restoration of all souls, and those who believe it” there. It’s largely historical and liturgical material.

But this episode has shown me the limits of WordPress for what should be a simple site, so I plan on converting it (with all the text) to a simpler, easier-to-maintain and (I hope) faster loading platform like Pelican. And now that I have a functioning site, I can try.

 

Blog administration, Universalism

Interested in Universalist scholarship?

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So, I may pivot towards longer form, evergreen writing; at this phase, everyday short blogging is too much work and not terribly rewarding. I particular, I want to write Universalist theology and other works demonstrating scholarship.

So, a request. Who out there would be willing to review ideas? And what would you like to see addressed? I’m still working through this.