Paul Matzko and I have started a new blog, titled Religion in America, about the history of American religion. We plan to alternate writing a post a week. Our posts will be essays, book reviews, and the occasional tour of a historical site. For our first series of post, we’re writing about how our religious background has influenced our philosophies of history.

Paul and I are both graduate students in history, and we’re both focusing on American religious history. Paul studies history in the twentieth century, while I do history before the Civil War. We also both have the same alma mater, so it’s a good partnership.

Religion in America screenshot

The Making of Religion in America

I enjoyed setting up the blog for Religion in America. It’s the first blog that I’ve created where I felt like I knew what I was doing. It’s run on WordPress, of course. The theme is a modified version of the theme framework Carrington. It took me a little while to catch on to how Carrington works, but now that I understand, I see what a powerful tool it is. I’m probably going to base the redesign of this site on Carrington.

Because I was building Religion in America from the ground up, I was able to do some optimizations that I haven’t done before. I’ve added meta descriptions based on post excerpts; that’s a small thing, but I hope it will help in the search engines. The site is also generating a sitemap for Google. The site’s statistics are tracked using Google Analytics, and Feedburner tracks the feed statistics and provides e-mail subscriptions. I made the subscription options prominent, and added a plug-in that greets new visitors and asks them to subscribe. A plug-in also provides a mobile version of the site to people using iPhones, Blackberries, and the like.

Of course, it’s not the software but the writing that will make the blog worthwhile, so I need to start drafting my post for next week.