For those that didn't know... the Lutheran Lectionary Project is back, and for those that did... Today after work I finished up the importing of festivals as well as corrected a bunch of their parament colors and imported the last remaining scripture texts. In other words, take a look!

It's been a long time coming now that the project would return online. A lot has changed since it first appeared on the web, namely I've graduated from college, gotten married and moved to Pennsylvania with a real job and everything. That means I have a lot less time then I did five years ago, but lo and behold I've managed to squeeze some free time out to get the site back up. You'll notice, though, that the site looks a lot different. I've been working with a clean slate and trying to make the project as a whole more useful, hence the new look and layout. I'm very curious about feedback and suggestions, so if you have them please feel free to send them to me.

Lastly, this project as a whole is entirely a volunteer effort. In order to help me keep it up, both by maintenance and for server costs I'd like to encourage you to consider a donation to the project. Donations go toward deferring the monthly costs of a web server and bandwidth and are very much appreciated. You can use the PayPal button at the top of the sanctus.org to make donations today.

I thought some people might be interested in seeing a preview of the progress I've recently made on the Lutheran Lectionary Project. Below you can find a screen shot. Right now I have the new layout done and all of the Sundays and Week day readings working. What I don't have are all of the festival days and the ability to switch between translations completed. These are much small hurdles that just require some time cranking out structures for the new data storage.

If you're interested in the Lutheran Lectionary Project and want to help support getting it back online (and keeping it there), please consider making a donation to help support this project, funds are needed to host the project and for normal maintenance costs.

Those who know me by the work I did on sanctus.org are probably wondering where the progress on the re-write I mentioned back in February. Well, today I committed a little more source code for the project and updated my own projects page to include a link to the Google Code project page. This is where I am keeping the source code for the library I have been developing. Currently, the base loader and a set of calculators are there, the calculators determine how a particular lectionary behaves, ie. Historic, Michelmas, Three Year, etc. These calculators are supposed to determine the current Sunday of the Church year based upon a PHP DateTime object.

The library is far from complete, the calculators return a number correlating to the Sunday of the year - but right now you have no way of knowing what that Sunday of the year is. My next step is to develop a Sunday object with mapping, and setup a way so that the particular Sunday object in use can be changed and thus alternative mappings become available for different calculators.

As for sanctus.org, it's revival is based upon this library's completion. So, this is progress. It's taking me so long because, as I've said before, I'm no longer a full-time student with lots of free time, and between my commitments to work and my family I have very little spare time these days. It really stinks to grow up! If you're really anxious to get sanctus.org back up you either need to be patient, or you can always consider a PayPal donation - which does help development.

Stay tuned...

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.