Beyond Belief

Monday August 8, 2011

Tomorrow I’m heading up to Manchester to record an episode of BBC Radio 4’s regular religion show, Beyond Belief, on the subject of Western Buddhism. I’ll be in the studio along with Ani Rinchen Khandro and Nagapriya Wright. The topic of the show is what, if anything, Western Buddhism is, and what the future might hold for Buddhism in the West. I’m the “Buddhish” representative, I think…

I’ll add a link here when the show is broadcast.

Have your say! [2]

thinkBuddha is back!

Monday February 7, 2011

Well, that was a far bigger job than I thought it would be; but now thinkBuddha is more or less back in action with a new look, a new structure and a slightly new focus.

As many of you will know, this site started life as a blog in 2005; but after five years I came to the conclusion that it was time to make some changes. After some thought (and discussion with several friends and visitors), I decided to refashion the site as a repository of online writing and articles. This means that I’ll continue to add to the site – although perhaps less regularly than when it was a blog; but it also means that the content on the site is rather more focussed and less tangential. For matters tangential (like, for example, how to find a Chinese translation for the famous English dish known as Sussex Pond Pudding), I can direct you to my personal blog.

A New Structure

So how does the new-look site work? Well, the new top menu should fairly self-explanatory, but there’s one important distinction in how I’m organising content, and that is the distinction between News and Articles. So what’s the difference?

Well, News is for anything that is time-specific, anything with a short shelf-life, anything that may be of interest but is probably not of lasting substance (for example, this post). So, for example, if I happen to be giving a talk, or have published something that readers might be interested in, then I’ll put it in News. The news section is laid out in a fairly bloggy fashion.

Articles on the other hand are things that have more than fleeting interest. Usually this is where I put more sustained reflections and thoughts on the things that interest me. So the Articles are where the substantial content of this website is to be found. The problem with a blog is that substantial content often gets lost in the mists of time, so I’m hoping that the new structure should help you track down some of that buried content.

You will also notice that at the bottom of most pages on this site you will find three columns where all kinds of useful links and choice bits of information appear, depending on context. You can use these to navigate as well.

Tracking down articles

How, then, do you track down articles? There are several ways. The first is that the most recently posted article is featured on the front page in a nice big box, so that you can’t really miss it. And at the bottom of the front page there’s a list of other recent articles that may be of interest. Only articles (not news posts) are featured in this way.

But if you want to dig deep into the archive, on the articles menu link, you can find a way to rummage in other ways. You can either:

   Search by tag – all articles are tagged with keywords, and you can follow the threads of various tags from one article to another – there’s a simple tag box on the article page, but you can go to the complete tag list for a fuller look at all the keywords.

   Use the search box (which will, incidentally, search articles AND news items).

   View a complete archive of every article published on the site.

   Browse the featured, recent and popular articles listed at the bottom of the page.

Feed Fun

I think (I think!) that the feeds should now be properly set up so that you can subscribe to both news and articles on thinkBuddha with your favourite RSS reader (I use Vienna on my Mac, which is good). So when you sign up to the thinkBuddha RSS feed, it should be the case that whenever a new nugget of news or a new article is posted, you’ll be amongst the first to know.

Twitter Integration

Updates to the site – both news and articles – should also be posted to my twitter feed, so if you follow me on twitter, that is another handy way of keeping up with what is new here on the site.

The Unbearable Glitchiness of Being

From this point onwards, I’m considering thinkBuddha.org as now being officially back in action. Thanks for all of your patience whilst I restructure everything over here. However, as this is all relatively new, there will inevitably be glitches. Do let me know if you come across any, and I’ll do my best to resolve them.

Have your say! [2]

Getting there!

Thursday January 13, 2011

After quite of lot of work restructuring thinkBuddha.org, things are beginning to fall into place. The site is not yet quite how I want it to be, and I’ve got quite a few more articles that need to be republishing, but the transformation from blog to article repository seems to be going well so far. It’s surprising how much fluff, how many loose ends and bits and pieces, a website can pick up over five years. Thankfully Textpattern, which this site uses, is a extremely flexible, and makes this kind of spade-work rather easier than it might otherwise be.

So what has changed, or what is changing – other than the tweaks in the look of the site? Well, gone is the blogginess of the front page with posts in descending order of date. Instead, I’ll be setting up a page that introduces the site, highlights new articles and so on. The front page still has a way to go, but already I’ve got some nice links to random articles and featured articles (which I will change from time to time). Secondly, I’ve restructured the content, so now it falls into two broad camps, on the one hand news and on the other hand articles. News is is simply stuff about the site, or stuff about me, or anything that is more or less time-sensitive. So, for example, if I’m away on a retreat, or if I have a book coming out, I might post something in the news section. Updates to the news section should appear in your RSS feed, and will be linked on the front page. The news section of the site (which you are reading now) will retain a rough blog-like format. Most of the news will be relatively ephemeral. Articles are all the pieces that are more substantial in terms of content – essays, thoughts on this and that, book reviews, interviews (I’m thinking I might start some interviews here, as it could be fun) – and that are less time-sensitive.

The plan with the articles is this. I’ll link to anything new on the front page, and new articles will also be included in the site RSS feed. The columns at the bottom of the front page will also point to recently commented and noteworthy articles (as well as articles chosen at random). But when you click on the “articles” link on the menu, you will be taken to a search page, where you can search by tag, view the entire archive by date, or search by keyword. This should, I hope, mean that it’s easier to find your way to the more obscure corners of the website, to those articles that have been languishing since 2006, say. The use of tags, I hope, should make the movement through the sea of articles that has accumulated here a bit more intuitive. And the separation of news and articles means that you are more likely, when rummaging through the archive, to come across something with at least a little substance, and less likely to come up with jokes about Bodhicattva, the thinkBuddha cat (although I’m making no promises).

Anyway, there’s still a way to go, but I thought it was worth posting an update. Thanks to all of you for your patience.

Have your say!

thinkBuddha.org - the next phase

Monday December 20, 2010

Thanks for all of your kind comments about the blog, and my decision to cease blogging over here. Now that there’s time for the dust to settle, I’ve had a chance to think about what to do with thinkBuddha.org. Because a blog that has just, well, stopped is a sad thing.

So the plan is this: in the New Year, I hope to give thinkBuddha.org a thorough redesign, so that it is less a blog, and more a repository of articles. This frees me from the obligation to post regularly, and will allow me to exhume some old content that’s probably worth reading but that is currently buried. So, if all goes to plan, thinkBuddha will metamorphose into a bunch of essays, and exploratory pieces that explore all things Buddhish.

This has several advantages. It means that I no longer feel obliged to blog regularly. But it also means that if I have something new to say, I can add it to the site as a new article. And it also means that some of the older content here on thinkBuddha.org is a little more easy to access.

A blog no more, then; but thinkBuddha will continue to exist online, and – although neither in the same kind of bloggy fashion nor quite as busily as at some times in the past – it will continue to develop.

Have your say! [7]

At the end of one particular road...

Tuesday December 7, 2010

Well, it’s a somewhat sad day; but this will be the last post that I write on thinkBuddha. I’ve come to the decision over the past few weeks that I should – after a fantastically enjoyable five and a half years – wind up my blogging here on this website. When I started writing back in 2005, I hadn’t expected the blog to run for so long, or to be so enormously satisfying. But these things all have a natural life-span, and my sense is that it’s time to move on.

There are a number of reasons for this. One is that the explicit reference to Buddhism (the clue is in the name) is something that limits the range of stuff that I talk about here. There’s a lot of stuff that I could talk about, but that doesn’t seem to fit with the overall purpose of this blog. And when it comes to Buddhism, I’m not sure I have a great deal to say, without the risk of repeating myself, at the moment. And also, I’m involved in so many fun and interesting projects, that it makes more sense to have one place where I blog about everything, more or less indiscriminately.

As a result, I’m going to be switching my attention to my blog on my personal website at www.willbuckingham.com/blog. Some time ago – in 2006, in fact – I wrote a post here on thinkBuddha called How many blogs does one man need?, and I came to the conclusion then that two was probably too many, but what the hell. Now, however, given the demands of my teaching and writing, I think it makes sense to concentrate my efforts in one place.

So farewell to all of you wonderful commenters and readers. Do point your browsers and RSS readers to my personal blog, where I’ll continue to write – hopefully, in fact, with increased determination and fervour. Of course, it may happen that I decide to resurrect thinkBuddha some time in the future. For the time being, however, I’ll let the site sit here quietly, doing its own thing. I have no plans to remove it from the internet, as – who knows? – there may be people who find it interesting. But for new stuff, head over to my personal website. And my most enormous and hearty thanks for your comments and thoughts over the past years: it’s been loads of fun.

Have your say! [12]