New Websites for OnlineBibles.net

Hello friends. You might have already noticed the changes I've made, but I've just finished doing all that I could for ONLINEBIBLES.NET — for now. As a reminder, OnlineBibles.net is my future writing and publishing ministry, and I'm not going to launch it for some years yet, until I am ready and has the resources. For now and in the near future, all that I'm going to do are preparations.

Behind the scenes, and in the light of the fact that I'll now be working for both my freelance writing business and my future online ministry, I've restructured and reorganized my websites in my web host — letting go especially of the things I no longer need, and creating the things I do need.

Here are the things you should know:

First, because Swordsman of the Word is now part of OnlineBibles.net, I'm retiring its original domain at swordsmanoftheword.com. For a couple of reasons: It's not really a good domain name (unpopular, too long, and hard to type), and it carries a lot of emotional baggage for me. Discarding it would bring me freedom and an enormous relief. Instead, I'm going to making a new beginning for Swordsman of the Word.

Note: I had already unpublished most of what I'd written for Swordsman of the Word when I closed it down ten months ago. What remain are the news/updates I made. When the domain expires, those too will be lost to the public. Starting with a clean slate — this is what I really have in mind.

Second, the three major web addresses of OnlineBibles.net are now on standby — live and "guarded" by temporary websites, which will be replaced by the real websites when OnlineBibles.net is launched. They are:

  • www.onlinebibles.net – the main website, home of my Bible studies and devotions
  • swordsman.onlinebibles.net – the new address for Swordsman of the Word, home of my personal essays about living out God's Word
  • library.onlinebibles.net – the website that will contain all the biblical resources I'll publish; presently hosting the WEB, ASV, & KJV Bibles from eBible.org.

There might be other secondary websites in the future, for example, a community forums site, and an ecommerce site for ebooks. Their existence, of course, will depend on whether or not there will be reasonable demands for them.

Third, I've already decided that I will use Drupal CMS for the main website and for Swordsman of the Word. You can read more about this in my blog post, The beginning of my Drupal journey. The library website, because it will only display static (unchanging) content, is most likely to be a static site (like it is now), generated by Hugo and other tools like Pandoc.

And fourth, I've created two extras: a blog and a website using Blogger and Google Sites, respectively. The first one, the updates blog — this blog — is for ministry news and development. Follow this if you want to stay updated with the things I do for OnlineBibles.net. The second one, the documents site, is where I will draft my vision and other documents for OnlineBibles.net.

Now, these two extras are powered by Google. Free to use perhaps, but not really without cost, especially to my rights to privacy and free speech. I had thought about self-hosting them like I do with the three others, using perhaps WordPress, but I just don't want to deal with their maintenance and cost. After all, I won't be very active in using them, and all that I'm going to write about are my preparations. Better to use Google this time. The other three are all static sites, just a bunch of HTML pages and their assets sitting on the server. There are neither PHP nor database, and the cost of hosting them is very low.

And so these are the new websites for OnlineBibles.net — three on standby, and two in use for my updates and documents. In the coming days I will start filling up their pages, particularly the About pages.

Again, if you want to stay updated, follow this blog, either by bookmarking it or by subscribing to its RSS feed.