A New Site, to Match our New Direction

With the nine year plan in full swing for Baha’is around the world, it’s important to ask what role can the internet play in such a far reaching enterprise? How do we use this medium to promote constructive, spiritual and genuinely connective approaches? How can we use it to complement what’s happening on the ground in communities? In 2015 the Universal House of Justice wrote:

… learning to utilize the Internet in a manner conducive to material and spiritual progress is an immense challenge.

The Universal House of Justice, Oct 2015

There are critical questions to answer, and not just in the Baha’i world. In the New York Times this week, columnist Ezra Klein writes:

Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?

This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”

There is an optimism in that, a reminder of our own agency. And there are questions posed, ones we should spend much more time and energy trying to answer: How do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?

Ezra Klein, I didn’t want it to be true, the medium really is the message

Like the Baha’i world at large, our small initiative here at Baha’i Blog is engaged in a process of learning. With our new editorial direction for Baha’i Blog outlined earlier this year, we have been drawing our focus more tightly to an audience of Australian Baha’is and their friends, we’ve opened up a new channel for exploration on the social media platform TikTok, and this week we’re debuting our new Baha’i Blog site to help us travel further in this approach.

A Quick Tour of the New Site

It’s hard to believe that Baha’i Blog has been online for more than eleven years. In that time we’ve amassed quite a large repository of Baha’i inspired articles, music, videos and podcasts. The new site aims to make that content more accessible and well organised through drill-down filters, a simpler categorisation system, and reorganised content.

You can now:

• Browse all music (both the audio and video), filter down by language or even the source of the Writings used in the music.
  
• Find podcasts and audio readings to listen to, drilling down by the series title, or platform availability
  
• Explore our site via themed collections around spiritual principles, events in the Baha’i calendar, or the core activities. We’ll be debuting more collections as the year progresses.
  
• Find resources to start creating Baha’i-inspired content yourself! We’re excited to build on our fledgling creator hub with guides, briefs and how-to’s for creating content in your own community.
  
• Take clearer steps to connect with a local community in Australia. On every page you’ll find a connector to the Australian Baha’i Community website where with a postcode you can find your local community, and jump from an online interaction to a real world one.

A Clean New Look

Along with the new features we’ve given Baha’i Blog a visual refresh. We’ve kept the general feel of the site, but modernised it, and designed the new site with a mobile-first approach of simplicity and focus.

Behind the scenes we’ve also migrated to a new instance of WordPress, a faster webhost, and WordPress’ new block editor – which is a welcome upgrade for those of us working on the site!

All Feedback is Welcome!

As always we’d welcome your comments, suggestions, feedback and 👏

In particular, if you spot anything that’s broken or not working as it should – leave a comment or email [email protected]. Migrating a site this large (almost 4,000 pages!) does mean it’s a bit hard to spot all the minor glitches and errors, so any help is welcome!

Posted by

Collis Ta'eed

Hi I’m Collis! I live in Darwin, in the Northern Territory. I’m a Baha’i, designer, entrepreneur, climate tech angel investor, and engaged in philanthropy to support First Nations young people in Australia. I've been working on Baha'i Blog since its inception in 2011!