Reproach of Men

The formatting of the hymns have been seriously upgraded and changed. The layout is now fixed-width even for standards compliant browsers as this particular type of document seems to do best in a fixed-width layout.

You can access any one of the hymns currently on the website through the Hymns and Music page. Or, you can go directly to one of the hymns I like very much:

Abba Father, We Approach Thee
O For a Shout of Joy
I Am Standing On the Word of God
I Send the Joys of Earth Away

I could add more, but there is no point in putting the entire list on the blog. Please enjoy the hymns and let me know what you think of the new format.

I have built a new website for Faith Baptist Church in Harrison, Arkansas. You are invited to go there and take a look. Your comments are also welcome.

The URL is www.fbch-ar.org

I was holding off announcing its launch until an issue with the domain name pointing was resolved, but I do not believe that will be an issue.

Enjoy the site.

One little note: Due to the type of domain redirection (stealth), the pages will not validate. The validator will attempt to validate the frame the page sits in and not the page. It will fail every time.

Update: I finally migrated everything over to the new platform and moved the Domain www.fbch-ar.org to its rightful account and everything is pointed correctly and working. thank the LORD for small miracles. The stealth redirection is no longer in effect.

What a day. Ten hours worth of changing the underlying code of all the mainpages to make a more readable layout that is both robust and easier to update. All this was done to prep for the addition of several new pages that are dedicated to the rest of the ministry.

Now, all I have to do is update the code behind the existing article pages and update the Spanish and German websites and it will all look and function the way it is supposed to. Unfortunately, today’s endeavor was also an interesting struggle with the effects of the browser wars. I originally designed the pages to look good in Opera, and then tested them in Firefox and IE 6. What looked good and worked in Opera, fell apart in IE 6 and didn’t quite function in Firefox. I had to go back and revise some of the code for Firefox and (of course) have an entirely different stylesheet for IE 6. I even looked at it in Safari after the changes, and it looked pretty good there as well.

Now, I know there are folks out there who will look at the site and comment that it is a simple site as far as design is concerned. However, accessibility is the primary aim of this site, with aesthetics not so much a concern. There are two reasons for this:

First, when visitors come to the website, if they are tickled with “eye candy” they will not take the content seriously. Moreover, those who are interested only in having something novel to look at are not really interested in where they stand with the LORD God. My interest is the state of the soul of the visitor. My desire is to see those who do not know the LORD come to know Him, and those who do know the LORD personally; see them grow in the knowledge of the LORD Who saved them.

Second, My Lord and Savior was not “attractive,” and neither was the tabernacle that represented His work to come. Rather, in Isaiah it plainly states that “he hath no form nor comeliness that we should desire him.” Moreover, the tabernacle of the Old Testament was not at all attractive. In fact, it was covered with badger skins with all the beauty of it only seen on the inside (which is the way it is with Christ). Even so, the design of this site should focus the visitor on its content and the subject of that content – the Lord Jesus Christ.

With that, I pray that the new coding makes visiting the site more of a blessing.

Due to many interruptions I have been unable to update the website as much as I would have liked over the last few months.  However, I have finally begun to revamp the way the main pages are coded and am in the process of a major rework of the Statement of Faith page.  The rework of the page will include the addition of a brand new article titled Liberty of the Conscience (which is a very old Baptist doctrine) and a resequencing of the articles themselves.

This rework is in preparation for additional articles to the website, before recoding would become a major headache. The end goal is for all of the website to be coded in XHTML and CSS.

Finally, all 24 articles of the Statement of Faith (Declaración de Fe) are posted with the passages from the Scripture. The difficulty of this portion of the Spanish website lay in the fact that there is not a right Spanish Bible. A simple check of the number of verse passages that have the word modificado (modified) after the Scripture reference illustrate this point rather well. The verses in the Spanish Bible (Casiodoro de Reina en 1569) had to be changed to match the 1611 King James Version, 1769 Edition. Otherwise, the Statement of Faith would have been unworkable in Spanish as the verses would not have matched the synopsis.

I have added a custom error page for 404 errors (page not found) and finally created form e-mails for contacts and website error reporting.

This should make the site considerably more user-friendly.

I have added article pages 5, 6, and 7 with the verses to the Statement of Faith and updated the sitemap to reflect the changes.

Lately the Spanish website has taken most of my time.  However, spottederleute.org is not far behind.

I am also revamping how the footnotes are done so that pop-up windows will no longer be needed.  I hope to have it done fairly soon.

I have added 6 new hymns to the hymns page. They are:

How Hurtful was the Choice of Lot
The Love of God
Lord Thy Word Abideth
At the Name of Jesus
A Clean Heart
Abba Father, We Approach Thee

I have also corrected an error in the code of ”Holy and Reverend is His Name” which allowed the midi file to start twice.  It sounds considerably better having only one instance of the midi file running.

The article “Of Angels and Men” on oprobiodeloshombres.org now has all the footnotes in Spanish.  Also, both reproachofmen.org and oprobiodeloshombres.org have links to spottderleute.org.

I should have El Mandimiento Imposible (“The Impossible Command”) and “Qué Hay de mal La Pasión” (“Why I Will Not See the Passion”) formatted in HTML and posted on oprobiodeloshombres.org before the end of Saturday.

I have added a new page to the blog portion of the website in preparation for the change to a Content Management System for the website. I have been working on several themes in preparation of changing several sites and am also working on moving content from the static (HTML and XHTML) pages to a dynamic (PHP and MySQL) database driven website. This will ultimately allow me to focus more time on content, and less on coding and markup of the pages. One of the first benefits of this can be seen on the new Audio – Lessons and Preaching page. The page has the traditional hypertext links to the MP3 files, PLUS it has an embedded media player that you can simply click on and it will automatically begin playing the file.

I will still maintain the old static pages and copy content to those pages for the older browsers. But, I will not “dress them up” and spend incredible amounts of time on them. That stated, enjoy the new page – there are several lessons and messages there already.

Audio – Lessons and Preaching

In Christ,

Paul W. Davis