Well, we’ve now been up and running online for a bit over a month. There’s lots of discussion happening (and increasingly so), we’ve got a great set of contributions waiting to be published, and we’re smoothing out some of the start-up wrinkles. Who knew a month with so many late nights could go past so quickly?
The November issue of The Briefing has been printed, and is now on its way to ports around the world, ready to land in your mailboxes on (a day hopefully very close to) the first of the month. We’re putting the major articles from that issue online over the next couple of weeks, starting with Sandy’s reflections on English Bible translations and where many of us might go to from our current NIV church bibles. There’s some really interesting material to come, so stay tuned.
To help you do just that, we’ve come up with a variety of options to keep you updated with the latest and greatest from The Briefing.
Magazine
Firstly, of course, you can subscribe to the printed magazine, published every two months. It’s affordable, beautiful, and needs no power source. There’s nothing quite like the feel of a beautifully laid-out and printed magazine that you can leaf through as you settle into a hammock on a slow weekend… although, it turns out I can no longer do that.
RSS
For more immediacy than a two-month print cycle, RSS feeds are great. And we’ve got lots of them.
[If this sounds like gibberish, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to subscribe to news alerts from a website, so you can check up on feeds from a number of different places on the web without going to each and every site to see if there’s something new. Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Reeder, and FeedDemon are popular RSS tools.]
Our subscription page has lots of details about the variety of feeds you can link up to, including by topic or author, but the main ones are:
If you’ve already signed up to the RSS feed, you’ll be receiving the summary feed. Note that the full text really does mean full text, including a couple of 5000-word articles each month!
Additionally, each article now has a link for comment updates on that particular post. Look for the link at the bottom of the article text, or on the comment form itself.
Twitter and Facebook
Follow The Briefing on twitter, or connect up on Facebook. Twitter will give you a link to each new post, and we’ll put some of the bigger articles through on Facebook for discussion.
Finally, we’ve got an option to subscribe via email for a daily digest of new articles. You’ll get sent a daily roundup of the new content on the site. (Of course, you can be assured we aren’t going to sell your email address to spammers or anything horrible like that.)
Please keep letting us know what you like (and what you don’t) about The Briefing, by dropping a comment below, or email the editors.
Thanks for providing the RSS to full articles. I like that much better than just the summary and it will help me stay up with your excellent content. Thanks!
Thanks for the subscription options. Just a thought for the future: it might be helpful to be able to specify which article categories readers want to subscribe to. For example, someone might be particularly interested in the Life and Everyday Ministry categories and only want notification of new articles in those categories.
Really liking the new website though – good job :-)