If anyone desires notifications of when new content is added to the site, then all additions will now be posted live on our Twitter feed (link also in footer of page). To get alerts you need to download the mobile app, follow our page, and then turn on notifications for it.
The site is now using a new web host. The last one was pretty rubbish, so hopefully there will be far less periods where the site is 'down' in future. It already seems noticeably faster to use, which is an added benefit. There may be the odd thing not working that has crept in through this so please alert me if you notice anything.
Thanks!
The Search Page is back up again .. for those who hadn't noticed it's been down a while.
Neatened up the Bookshelf page and added the ability for users to add text only 'articles' .. would be good to get more of these on the site.
Some of you have already noticed that the 'mybrethren' website has been down for a while; I have managed to get in contact with the webmaster of the site .. He told me that he was not in a position to continue the maintainence of the project, and hadn't been able to find anyone else interested in taking it over, but he has very kindly given me a full copy of it and allowed me to integrate any parts of it into this one. Now obviously large portions of that site perpetrated views that many of my regular users might be uncomfortable with, but among that there were many items of valuable historical interest, particlularly related to individuals that it would be good to incorporate. I need to work out the best way of doing this still but I imagine the pages will need a lot of reformatting, so if anyone has time to help out with that, please let me know.
The Berean Call currently have a special offer on, and you can download en electronic version of Paul Wilkinson's "Understanding Christian Zionism" for free .. see linke below, I don't know how long this offer will be on for.
https://thebereancall.com/products/understanding-christian-zionism
Thought might be worth giving regular visitors a heads-up on how the website is being used.
The first graph shows the average daily number of different visitors we have. The spikes are caused by certain occasions when somebody might share a page on Facebook, so you get a sudden rush of new visits. The dip in 2016 was when the web-host was essentially unavilable for a few weeks.
The second graph of unique daily page views shows the same pattern. It is slighly less useful as although usually my own visits in working on the site are excluded, for certain periods that hasn't been the case, so that has made the data slightly less reliable.
So at the moment we get about 50 different visitors each day, that includeds the regulars and those just on one off Google searches, and if content is being added, can be 500+ page views. So seems there is still a good interest in this material and Brethren History research in general. Hope that encourages everyone who has contributed via adding info, or commetns etc, that it is all being read!
You might a few small design tweaks this morning, imo a little bit neater now .. properly due a more major redesign sometime soon!
Now there's a link at the top of each Person page so that anyone can upload a scanned book, pamphlet, Google books download etc. It will then appear on the Bookshelf page, and under that person too.
With long term aim of getting more community sourced information on the site, users can now edit details on 'People' eg, date of births, biographical information etc, and it functions a bit like a wiki. All changes are backed up so no damage can be done! You have to be logged in just because otherwise clearly anybody or robot could come along and hijack it.
Next step is going to be hopefully ability to put some family trees up, as there is a lot of interesting things found on sites like Ancestry that I'm unable to reproduce here at the moment.
Sorry the website was down for almost three weeks recently. This was due again to the hosting provider (Arvixe) who are truly awful, and I wasn't even able to access the files during this period to move it elsewhere. Hopefully in the next month or two I will be able to move to a new web-host so these problems should go away!
Manuscript page updated to show transcripts that are still incomplete or non-existant.
Sorry the website has been down again the last two days. These problems are with the hosting company and not much I can do about it. Sadly just signed another 12 months, but I think next year will switch to someone else.
A new idea I am undertaking is to have a collection of the hymns in the 1978 Spiritual Songs, being sung. I have several hundred of these recordings, which hopefully should appear over the next few months. The few I have uploaded so far can be found here.
The registration/login functionality which had been stopping working bit by bit over the last year has now been upgraded with the latest ways of doing these things, so hopefully it should live on like this a few years now without me having to touch it again. If you are already registered it will probably ask you to reauthorize the application but it 'should' remember you with a bit of luck .. if not and you can no longer access stuff, then let drop me an email.
Possibly I might one day make most the website 'Members only' as with all the pdfs available etc there is a lot of bandwidth taken up by robots and other things auto-downloading stuff. Hopefully come autumn, I will find time for some big updates on here.
Tom
Six volumes of The Barley Cake, 50 volumes of The Believers' Magazine, and The Golden Lamp available, and fully searchable from the Search page.
Have added 45 old volumes of The Northern Witness (later The Witness) periodical. All fully searchable from the Search page.
See here
The website now has a Search page, found under the Site menu on the Homepage, or just by going direct to http://www.brethrenarchive.org/search .
It is google-like so can use quoted queries, ie. "plymouth brethren" to look for specific phrases, and also I think wildcards (*) should work too.
The good thing is that it will search inside PDFs and other content .. however it only works on PDFs that have been OCR'd and this was not a priority of mine so far in developing the website. So at the moment basically any PDF that has been downloaded from Google (e.g. the hymn books and some stuff on the archive page) is searchable, but hopefully I will be able to extend the range of this to most the other material shortly.
Please report any bugs or suggestions here!
Tom
A Seasonal Special for (registered) users of the website; just uploaded a three page copy of correspondence between R.C. Chapman, H.W. Soltau, and B.W. Newton from May 1847, with transcript.
Just added three beautiful old Meetings Lists!
If your login has stopped working, it is because of an upgrade a few weeks ago ..; email me and i'll fix it.
The website has a new design which works on mobiles / tablets as well as larger displays!
One of the most annoying things on websites (I find) is when they want you to have your own username and password, as with all the others you have to remember, you are soon likely to forget it. Anyway, I have now linked up my site with the OpenId scheme, which means you can now login with your Google, Yahoo, Hotmail or Facebook login details, so you don't need a separate username and password anymore. The old ones still work, but the new system will make things easier. All details on the login page.
Tom
Have spent the last few days rewriting some of the code for the site to make things a bit cleaner and more stable. All the images and PDF's should work smoothly for the Archive Items now, so hopefully that is an improvement. I have recently discovered some excellent free software that processes the scans and levels things out etc; I notice some of the earlier scans are a bit poor and need this treatment, but that will have to wait for another day. Now have done this, can get back to the scanning! Please let me know if you see any errors / mistakes, etc.
Tom
