Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonal articles

Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

Jon Kennedy

Jon Kennedy's 'Postcards from
the Nanty Glo in My Mind'

Tweaking, tweaking

Jonal entry 1088 | January 29 2009

Since I reported here on January 8 that I had discovered a new way to create indexes for hundreds of pages on the Home Page site much more quickly than any previous approach to it, it seems I've been struck by "Home Page flu." Though I've been able to go to Starbucks in the morning and the gym every afternoon and do my ministry trip to the Stanford campus on Monday, I keep coming up with new improvements to the Home Page site in general, mostly by treaking, tweaking, the "site index." It must be 400 percent more complete now than it was when I began adding things to it after creating those postcard indexes in the first week of January.

And if you haven't noticed, since I reported the addition of the index for the Postcards from last year, I've created identical ones for every year the "postcards" have been published. Under that name, that is 2001. And before that, "Jonals" were the names of the blogs I was updating frequently (before anyone else joined the Home Page blogging crew). So now there are indexes for every year back to 1998, which is just a few months after the Home Page was launched (September 1997).

Being able to find things a lot easier now, I started adding the things I was finding to the Site Index, and then categorizing those listings into subindexes, like "Blacklick Valley High School Class Pages," "Blacklick Township Pages," "NTAMHS," etc. Just last evening I created an all new index for the "Old News Articles" which were created on behalf of the Nant-Y-Glo Tri-Area Museum and Historical Society by its co-founder and past president, Barbara Hakanen. There were 90 of them created from mid-2002 to April 2004. Each of those pages recreates three or more items from Nanty Glo Journals dating back to its founding in 1922, so they constitute a major retelling of the Valley's history.

Another innovation, which I have desired from the very beginning (and tried with some limited success several times before) is a form that enables readers of Home Page features to reply to them directly, by writing in the form at the bottom of the page. Thus far, this has been added only to the Site Index (scroll down to the bottom), but if it catches on I'll start using it more widely. The server (the huge computer on which the Home Page resides) does not have any interactive applications like the ones most web sites have for creating surveys or taking direct information from site users, because our service provider considers those applications gateways to being hacked, and he's the expert on that subject.

But I've now found a service that lets me use an independent web page that forwards the email entered in the forms directly to my email address, without having to have any of those applications on our server. I hope this can be used, as I develop it, for sending emails to the Forum (which used to get scores of letters each year, but for the past five years or so it has been only a trickle), and even put them at the bottom of features like this one, and Judy Rose's and Frank Charney's Postcards, so you can write back immediately with your impressions, questions, or ideas.

One more innovation. You may notice that this page also has a revised look this week. I moved the information about my book on C.S. Lewis into the popup that appears when you cursor over my picture at the top. This enables me to make the page shorter, requiring fewer words to have a postcard. That, I hope, will result in my getting more prolific in the near future. Reading all those indexes from earlier years when there was a new "Jonal" every day made me wish for those halcyon days.

Please let me know how all this strikes you.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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