Playing truant and some thoughts on the new Catholica...

Dear friends,

Unfortunately I ran into a few problems last night in the re-coding of our website which has put me behind trying to also produce a commentary for today so I'm taking a raincheck on the commentary for today. I'm pleased to say that the problems have been relatively minor and have largely been resolved. The re-coding has now largely been completed on the main index and entry pages to the site and over time will be extended to all of the files in our now extensive archive.

REGARDING THE ADVERTISING: Catholica will earn income from referrals to the various advertisers who present themselves on this site via the Google identified advertisesments. Please feel free to use any of these links but please do NOT click them merely for the sake of trying to increase income to Catholica. This is both a moral/ethical issue as well as built into the terms of our commercial agreement with Google. Our agreement with Google can be cancelled if myself, or members, engage in practices designed to increase revenue by clicking on advertisements merely for the purpose of trying to increase revenue to the website publisher hosting the Google advertising. None of the foregoing is to discourage you from clicking on any link if you have a genuine interest in anything that might be advertised by the third parties. The selection of all the advertising takes place automatically and is selected by computer algorithms based on the content of the pages the advertising is displayed on. There is no human intervention, either by ourselves or Google in the selection of advertisements. We can request for advertisements from competitors, or what we discern as undesribable content for our website, to be excluded. There will be a period during which the Google software will better get to know our site and its content and the relevance of the advertising to the particular pages should increase over time. If you do happen to see advertisements that you feel are not appropriate to the mission and ethos of Catholica please do not hesitate to drop me a line. At this point I have not made any exclusions except for a general ban on explicit content.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS: As I mentioned in a post on the members' forum in recent days, as part of the revamp we are dropping the public tracker. For some time we have been more reliant on other non-public trackers which provide far more detailed analysis of what pages on this website people find of most interest. I am very pleased with the general growth that has characterised our endeavour from the beginning. In the ten and a half months of our existence we have attracted more visitors than some of the Archdiocesan websites around Australia have attracted in six years and more. These present technical developments at Catholica should, in time, increase our profile out in cyberspace. We still have one major further phase to implement — which is dependent on finding more capital to fund the development.

I find it somewhat ironic that for a long period in excess of ten years I endeavoured to develop something like Catholica within the institutional framework both through lay apostolates and at more formal levels. Even at the level of the lay apostolates it was an "impossible" task simply from the fear some individuals had of what people were going to be allowed and not allowed to say. One of those apostolates no longer even exists and the other struggles for relevance in the world. <Check out the changes to our website!>

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world,

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher