Ron Graham’s Report
—Jul-Aug-Sep 2011
This page reports my voluntary ministry activities July to September 2011 —for the information of those who take a special interest in my work.
Dear Brethren... This report covers the third quarter of 2011.
Preaching at Bundaberg
During July, August and September 2011, I presented 21 lessons in Bundaberg. All but three of these lessons came from Paul’s first letter to Timothy. We spent the quarter going through the letter a section at a time, covering all the topics that Paul deals with in the letter. These involve God’s agenda for human beings and the kind of order he wants in the church. Paul also makes important statements about the things that are taught in the church. So this series covered many vital subjects, and the exposition of the letter provided solid food.
Additions at Bundaberg
During the quarter there were some additions to the membership at Bundaberg. These included three baptisms and one restoration.
Visit to Gladstone
Toward the end of July, Susanne and I visited the church in Gladstone. At the time we planned the visit, there were only two members meeting in a house; however, by the time we actually went, two more families had joined themselves to the church. Both families had moved into town from overseas. We enjoyed the fellowship in worship together. I gave a lesson.
The Website Has a New Home
During the quarter I furnished simplybible.com with a new web space and a new host. This frees the website from dependency upon my ISP (Internet Service Provider) and our home telephone connection. The site will now operate regardless of who provides our broadband phone services. The new space also provides much more storage, so that I can include larger files. For example all the tracts I have produced can now be made available to website users.
The new hosting also enables me to have a "proper" URL (website address) for the site. It is now "simplybible.com" which is much more professional because it allows "forward slash" to any file on the site rather than only to the home page. The old address "www.simplybible.com" or just "simplybible.com" is unchanged and will still take people to the site's welcome page, as it always did, but of course they'll go straight to the new host now.
This new hosting required a lot of work in delegating DNS (Domain Name System) service, redirecting various domain names to the new space, uploading the entire site to the new space, and so forth. There was also the need to update directories and search engines with the new URL. It's surprising how much work has to be done.
I also had to manually edit around 1500 pages with a new link instruction called a "canonical" so that search engines will know that I prefer them to index pages at the new URL, and not the identical pages which have to be left on the old site. The old site does not allow redirection, so these "canonical" links had to be put on each page. Although the edit is very simple, it is unique on each page, and having to do it on so many pages took many hours.
The changeover had to be done in such a way as to maintain the site's profile and ranking in search engines like Google. A certain amount of loss is inevitable, but I am observing less than 10% and the daily visitors still number close to 1000. The loss is only temporary and over time as migration of the site completes, visitor numbers should actually be enhanced by the new hosting.
Website Improvements
The website grew by five new lessons, but the focus remained on making the website better not bigger. Consequently I upgraded 604 lessons (about half the lessons on the site) with the improvements to page layout and design that I put together last quarter. While doing this upgrade, I also edited some lessons, and split the longer ones into two parts, to further improve and modernize presentation.
Revelation Series Completed
During the quarter I completed the series Revelation the Book, comprising 81 studies. Two chapters of Revelation had, for some time, been lacking verse by verse exposition. Finally I was able to complete the four missing lessons. This series is a very large work in itself and I am very happy that I have been granted time to finish it.
Computer Dead
In the middle of all this work my computer died beyond any hope of resurrection. So I had to set up a new computer which took a couple of days. The computer that died was pretty old and it was no surprise that it was taken to cyber heaven.
Thank You Again
Again I say a big thank you to the people who have assisted me in my work. Without you, I could not do it.
Love and best wishes in Jesus,