The Weekly Bracha is a series of posts highlighting the good blog posts in the Messianic blogosphere each week. It’s been going strong for a year now.
A few months back I mentioned that I wanted improve the Weekly Bracha: move it to its own website, build a community around it.
To that end, I’ve been busy!
I’ve been doing a few mockups of what I want the new website to look like. Been doing a bit of coding as well to play out some ideas on the web. Here’s my current thinking:
In the picture above you see 2 of 5 categories:
- Popular: top clicked from any category, ordered by date. Blogs with many comments on them are granted more points, rising higher on the popularity scale. Users can up- or down-vote items; up-voted items will increase the popularity as well.
- Fresh: new posts from any category. The idea here is to have fresh items here every time you visit the site. To that end, I’ll seed it with the RSS feeds of the 200 some Messianic blogs I’m aware of.
- News: items from any category tagged with “news”. The items here are biblical archeology and news items from the Jewish and Christian worlds.
- Podcasts: items from any category tagged with podcast. If mp3, we provide an inline player.
- Video: items from any category pointing to YouTube. Inline player. Considering seeding this with some of the well-known Messianic YouTube channels out there.
The purpose of the site is to quickly see what’s happening in the Messianic world: blogs, news, podcasts, videos. And I don’t want to dump a boatload of links on the person, information overload; I don’t want a cluttered, hard-to-navigate site. So I’m experimenting now with the oversized, clean design: few links, only the essentials.
That’s my current thinking! So keep an eye out for the new bracha site. Should be fun! And hopefully useful!
