Breaking the links

I spent a lot of time last week moving Next-Wave from one content management system (CMS) to another. Since January 1999, and almost every month the Next-Wave ezine has “published” an issue on topics related to the intersection of church and culture. One of the consequences of such a “long” history on the web is that there are literally tens of thousands of links to various pages in the Next-Wave universe. Unfortunately, in the process of all of this moving, I managed to break those links.

Now the most popular page on Next-Wave is the “404” page! One of my other discoveries is that a website named sodahead has been using an image I posted years ago of waffles. Unfortunately for them, the link they have been using is outdated. Sorry about that Sodahead!

I also lost about one year of articles (from September 2003 to October 2004) from the active archive files. Over the next year or so I will probably be able to retrieve those and get them reposted. For now, serious historians can browse those articles on the Wayback Machine under the-next-wave.org.

So, you ask, “Why all of the ‘inside baseball’ info about Next-Wave?” I wish I had a good answer to that question. I’m one of those people who believes that God talks to his people today, not just through scripture and nature, but by whispers and nudgings from the Holy Spirit and occasionally with prophetic “words” from other inspired people. In the Summer of 1998 God whispered and I started Next-Wave. About a year later, or so, he spoke again and confirmed that Next-Wave is a “God-thing.” A lot of water has gone under the bridge in my life since that time, but through the thick and thin of those years I have been publishing Next-Wave.

So, in spite of the broken links, we will carry forward. One of the fun things about this change is that I have been adding content from the “legacy” archives (which can be found by searching the past issues page and the Next-Wave Issue Listing page. No longer are we using the “monthly magazine” format. But we will have plenty of material every month!

Okay, that’s enough of all of that. Thanks for listening and continuing to read Next-Wave!