You may be interested to know that last year  a Spanish version of the MediaNet was born. On 12th November it will hold its second annual conference in beautiful surroundings close to Madrid. Pity I can't be there!

Plenary sessions are on the topics:  'Protestantism in the works of Miguel Delibes' (the top novelist who died this year - famous in evangelical circles for The Heretic); being a Christian and a writer; workshop on writing, using the DNA of words; workshop on how to (or improve) speaking on/ to the media; the life and works of Miguel Hernandez (poet who died in prison just after the Civil War- this year is his centenary). Sound familiar, if different?

More about ADECE on their web: http:www.adece.es ... in Spanish!

How old is the Bible? This afternoon I have been browsing the Spanish press, looking for content for PrayforSpain and found this interesting article.

It's about the digitalisation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The title is 

Google digitalizará textos de la Biblia de 2.000 años de antigüedad

I starts with the words:

""Las personas que pasaron al papel historias del Antiguo Testamento no podían ni imaginar hace 2.000 millones de años que parte de los manuscritos irían a parar a Google. "

Now even your Spanish should be able to notice the error. It seems some journalists really need a bit more education from Christians. Or perhaps they just need good old fashioned copy readers... who can at least spot the internal inconsistencies of an article.

Takes me back to a holiday job I did for a week copy-reading classified ads for an East London group of papers.

OK, so the rest of the line reads: The people who first wrote the Old Testament on paper nnn years ago would never have imagined that part of their manuscripts would end up on Google. Indeed, times are changing, but I would be the first to be surprised if Google, or Europa Press were around in 2,000 years, let alone 2 billion years! But if the Earth stays around the paper just might. God has certainly said His Word will hang around for a very long time indeed. 1 Peter 1:25

P.S. Here's the original article they were reporting on.

Hello!

I just got the circular from the EA, with news of this short film competition. If you haven't already heard about it from elsewhere, perhaps you aren't the right person to make it, but... maybe so! anyway, take a look at www.enterthepitch.com/ ... and maybe you'll be blogging from Hollywood sometime soon!

Well, actually, I'm in France at the moment, as I had agreed with Mark to visit at the end of August on the basis that he would have finished the Media site and have time to help me working on Pray4Spain. Of course, my favourite option would be to find a Carrelet Formatted script option, but that is like asking Mark to to add a behave like Windows 98 button. Carrelet has been available to the general public for almost a decade now and as I understand it will be fully replaced by X-Cathedra any time soon, i.e. 'yesterday'.

I must explain that I got onto Carrelet in the Dark Ages. Here it is: www.cyberporte.com/mathieson/ Yes, that is the Mark 1 point something of content Management Systems. Then we moved on a bit jump to Carrelet 3. Like most systems, version 2 never happened and we moved straight onto version 3. However, there was never a definitive 'best' 3.1, although Mark made numerous improvements which were added to whichever particular web site he happened to remember at the time he was making the change, so there are probably several hundred versions of Carrelet out there. You can see a fairly bog standard version of Carrelet 3 at www.oaci.org On the other hand, I got a special template made - or rather Mark did- for www.prayforspain.com This has been a very effective way of keeping a news web up to date on a daily basis and we are incredibly excited about the possibilities about pontification on the new CMS.

The came 'Gadara', which can be seen exclusively at www.stpixels.com This also has an interesting 'grammar' of instructions to make the text look interesting, although it has shown that most bloggers and live visitors prefer to use the small selection of options which are suggested as click choices.

So I await with baited breath the arrival of an option between 'Plain text' and 'XHTML (Selected tags only)', even if i can hardly expect it to look like the [Carrelet formatted script] way of writing, but hopefully rather different to Gadara.