Ironically, my blog and website come back from the dead and the server which they're on has a rare simultaneous fatal failure of their RAID array. Subsequently, for the last 24 hours the site has been totally down. For the most part this is a decent host, they have strange names for their boxes... HT was once on "zwingli" and I'm on "calvin". How neither of us were lucky enough to get on their "luther" box I do not know. :) Anyhow, everything is back up and running - which is good news!

I get a lot of e-mails about sanctus.org which for several years ran as an online calendar for the Historic Lectionary of the Lutheran Church. I first developed what I called the Historic Lectionary Online Project while in college. It was during a week of intensive courses after the official semester was completed during my Freshman year. When my dorm buddies and I weren't busily trying to pray the Octaves (this was before I started dating my wife) I was trying to automate the process of picking out the daily lections we used. If that wasn't geeked-out enough, I kept expanding it and eventually put it up online for everyone to use. For years it ran fine without any problems.

Back in September the service which I had been using for years to gather up the texts for the readings started blocking access to their service. I suspect they felt I was in violation of their terms of use, or they thought that the crawler which gathered the readings was some type of spam bot. Subsequently, down went sanctus.org. It was unfortunate and unexpected. Initially I began looking into quick fixes, but couldn't find any. I did in due time find an alternative method for gathering up the readings, but the new method required new code, and new code required time - of which I've just not had.

I was forced to put santus.org on hold, unable to spend the time necessary to redevelop the reading retrieval system and so it just sat there. It's not that I don't want to bring the site back up, trust me I do, it's just a lack of time and resources to do so.

There are some preliminary plans in the work for sanctus.org, they involve a re-write and then opening up the source code to the general public so that other Lutheran PHP programmer's can take advantage of the work I've done in their own implementations. My intention is in the next month or so to begin fleshing out the skeleton of a new calendar site for displaying the lectionary. Once that's done I'll have to reassess what the goals for the service itself are. I'm honestly unsure if I will continue the e-mail services I've previously run. As I do work and move forward with getting it back up I will post here, so keep an eye out for updates.

On Ash Wednesday we at Higher Things took down our site in the wee hours of the night and began an update we've been working on for several months now. If you stopped by you saw our joke, "We've given up graphics and fancy websites for Lent". Then, the next night rolled out a total face-lift for the organization's website. Lots of restructuring and a whole lot of house-cleaning produced the new Higher Things website.

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I have not blogged since August of 2006, that was well over a year ago and up until today my website had been quite deserted. That last post was made shortly after Sara and I moved to Pennsylvania, just North of Pittsburgh in a little town called Cabot. Since then I have been busily working to make a living. My disappearance from the blog scene had several reasons, of which I will not bore you by exploring. With needing to move to a new web host I decided it was perhaps time to resurrect my blog from the depths of browser-cache. Nothing snazzy or exciting, just some thoughts from time to time about life, programming and perhaps even a drop of theology here and there.