The long and sorry saga of my website for the Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has, I hope, come to a triumphant end!

In the beginning, Fr Paul Anthony McGavin, longtime editor of The Priest posted an electronic archive of the journal at the now-defunct australian-ccc.org:

Then Dr Chris Steward, webmaster of Melbourne’s Catholic Community of JH Newman website, prepared a website which processed electronic registrations for the ACCC’s 2010 international conference in Rome. The also now-defunct www.yearforpriests-clergyconferencerome2010.org:

In 2011 I was approached to produce a website which integrated the electronic archive and electronic registration for conferences and membership. So I produced the first version of www.clergy.asn.au; a design I was very pleased with:

Within a few months, however, the website was down and gone forever. It had been hacked, and I had foolishly neglected to maintain a back up. (Sound familiar? My blog met with a similar fate. These days, I back up everything!)

A new site was half-heartedly developed, which had much stronger security credentials, but which I never really liked. It looked dated from the start:

But now, after many months of enjoyable design and tedious data entry, a new and hopefully permanent website is in operation:

This third version has the advantages of the first (it is functional and attractive) and the second (it is secure and backed up). But I think it is an improvement on both. The new site is designed to show case the enormous cache of mostly scholarly articles which have been printed in The Priest over the past two decades. I am slowly digitalising every article, which will take another year to complete I think. But it is a worthy project. The Priest is a real treasure trove, and it’s a privilege to increase its audience.

Go on over for a quick look, and alert me to any bugs. I designed it on a Mac. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it played up on PCs. Which isn’t a criticism of my website. It’s a criticism of PCs!