Electric Prayer

The Liturgy of the Hours, the Mass, and other things.

New: web feeds / RSS feeds / Live Bookmarks

Posted by universalis on 1 May 2006

Here is a description of what web feeds are, adapted from the Wikipedia article:

A web feed is a document which contains content items, often summaries of news stories or weblog posts. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to "top ten" lists of hit tunes.

Like syndicated print newspaper features or broadcast programs, web feed contents may be shared and republished by other web sites.

More often, feeds are subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens. As of 2006, the latest advance in this area is the appearance of web browsers incorporating aggregator features: Mozilla Firefox and Opera already do this, as will the forthcoming Version 7 of Internet Explorer.

Universalis now provides the following web feeds:

  • A week's worth of articles that name the feast of the day and contain links to the relevant Universalis liturgy pages.
  • The same, but for only three days (yesterday, today and tomorrow).
  • Mass readings for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
  • Mass readings for today only.

To use your browser to subscribe to these feeds, open a main Universalis page or a Mass Readings page. If your web browser is able to recognise feeds, you'll see a little orange icon on the address bar. Click on it, and a menu will pop up listing the Universalis feeds and giving you a change to subscribe to them.

With other kinds of aggregators such as SharpReader or Snarfer, or with web-based aggregators such as My Yahoo!, follow the instructions they give (it may help you to know that the Universalis feeds are in "Atom 1.0" format).

Web feeds are still a relatively new technology and some problems are inevitable. Google Reader can't understand our feeds at all. Bloglines omits spaces whenever the typeface changes.

The Sage add-on for Mozilla Firefox is excellent.

I'd be interested to hear of your experiences with the Universalis web feeds. Please add your comments to this posting.

Posted in The Universalis site | 1 Comment »

Wallowing in the Fathers

Posted by universalis on 30 April 2006

The Office of Readings has two big readings each day. The first is from the Bible and the second is from more or less anywhere else – but often from the Christian writers of the earliest centuries, the “Fathers of the Church”.

Filling in the gaps in the collection of Second Readings, I’ve been (re)translating some of the very earliest Fathers from around 100AD – Pope Clement I, Ignatius of Antioch (who was sent from Smyrna to Rome to be killed by the beasts in the amphitheatre and spent the journey firing off letters to half a dozen Christian churches), and others. Some of these Apostolic Fathers were treated more or less as Scripture in the first few centuries.

What stands out for me – getting all of them in one dose like this, rather than the steady drip-by-drip daily readings that you will see – is the way that everything has been turned upside down for these people by the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are still overwhelmed by what God did and still coming to terms with it, and you can see them thinking out what it all means. It’s like looking like an Old Master’s drawings rather than just his finished, polished final painting. You see the ideas that didn’t make it as well as the ones that did; and even the most familiar phrases gain freshness and power when you watch someone working them out for the first time.

On Universalis the Second Readings are now complete until early June. The first missing one is for the Wednesday after Pentecost, when the first reading is from the book of Job and the second is from meditations on the book of Job by St Gregory the Great. At least I can rest for a few weeks first…

Posted in Translating | 13 Comments »

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