As many of you know by now, last November the Website Team, leveraging years of prior work by dedicated individuals, introduced significant enhancements and new capabilities into the Fellowship’s website.
Chief among the goals of this newly redesigned website are: ease of use and features to quickly locate resources of interest (such as Urantia Book related articles, study aids, Urantia Book Fellowship publications, videos, audio recordings, brochures, downloadable eBook versions of the Urantia Book in English and other languages, and more).
This column is intended to describe some of those features and how to access them.
There is now an easy way to copy a Urantia Book link, audio or even text and then paste it for a reference or draft an email to someone.
a. Navigate to the Urantia Book Online: Urantiabook.org -> READ/RESEARCH -> READ THE URANTIA BOOK IN ENGLISH
b. Choose a section like Paper 100, “The Real Nature of Religion,” “True Religion.”
c. At the top of the section (or the top of the paper) see the 3 vertical dots to the left of the heading and hover there (or tap there if on a mobile device).
d. See Dissemination Aid that enables you to do the following: “Copy text link to clipboard,” “Copy audio link to clipboard,” “Send audio link via email.” The audio link is only available for the entire paper or section. e. The paragraphs have different options. At each paragraph see the 3 vertical dots to the left of the SRT (Standard Reference Text).
f. For these, the Dissemination Aid enables you to: “Copy text link to clipboard,” “Copy text to clipboard,” “Send text via email.”
g. If you choose any of the “Copy” functions, you can go to any editor (including inside an email) and paste the item just copied.
There are now web pages available for each Regional Society complete with a capability to include Discussion Forums and a way to store minutes. You must be registered on the website as one of that Society’s members to be able to see your specific Society page/pages. Contact admin@urantiabook.org to get more information about how to enable someone in your society to modify the content on the page for your society. Urantiabook.org -> OUR ORGANIZATION -> REGIONAL SOCIETIES
Towards the goal of more quickly locating resources of particular interest, the Website Team is pleased to provide a few details (and without getting too wonky!) regarding these new capabilities, for example:
a. All prior resources (thousands of them!) are being gathered into a common “repository” (aka database) to facilitate their discovery. This work is approximately 80% complete as of this writing.
b. Additional resources are continually being added as they become available. If you have resources that you would like us to present here, please submit them to us using the link at the end of this article.
c. Access to these resources is provided by custom views into the repository and these views are contained on various pages throughout the new website.
d. It is important to understand that each of these views into the repository is tailored to provide access to the most-relevant resources related to that particular webpage view. As some examples:
i. On the DISCOVER (home) page: the view into the repository only provides basic, introductory-like material,
ii. If you are a Fellowship Member, there are specific pages you will be directed to when you log in depending on your role in the organization. On the Members-Only Home Page, (accessed from the GC Home Page under OUR ORGANIZATION), the view provides access to: pertinent Urantia Book Fellowship documents,
iii. On the “Urantia Book Paper Focused Resources,” under READ / RESEARCH navigation link, the view provides access to highly recommended resources related to particular papers. Note that these resources can also be found when reading the Urantia Book online. Just hover over the yellow book icon in the upper right.
iv. A view of all publicly-available resources is available on the “Research Resources” web page.
e. And, it is important to mention that there are several features within the repository views that should greatly aid your searching and viewing of the resources within the repository, such as:
i. Views can be filtered (e.g., show me only “Articles”) to focus on content that is most relevant to you.
ii. Within a view, you can search for resources of particular interest by entering relevant keywords into the search box provided.
iii. Within a particular view, the sort order of the resources shown can be reversed (alphabetically or numerically) by clicking the column header.
iv. And please don’t forget to click the “+” icon to reveal additional content related to any particular resource!
f. “How To” use the repository views in more specific detail is provided:
i. Within each view by clicking the “Info icon” near the top of the view.
ii. In even more detail in a soon-to-bereleased written guide that will be available via the view’s “How To” section.
iii. And in a soon-to-be-released video tutorial, likewise to be available via the “How To” section.
What is described above, along with several other not-mentioned details, is what the Web Team refers to as the “Phase 1 Repository.”
And while we consider this a good start, the work on Phase 2 capabilities is underway and this work will yield some additional and significant benefits, such as full document searching (instead of searching only within the repository fields)! While we are in the design and planning mode for Phase 2 - we heartily welcome your feedback towards our ongoing efforts to continuously improve the capabilities we provide.
Thank you in advance for your comments and/ or suggestions that may be emailed to admin@urantiabook.org