My apologies to regular readers who may be confused by the sudden appearance of another blogger and mentions of a transfer of CrossWalk America posts.  This “other blogger” is my friend, Merrill Davison, who you will recognize from the Asphalt Jesus book as one of the core walkers on CrossWalk America’s 2006 walk across America.

Unfortunately, there will be no transfer of 2006-2009 CrossWalk America blog entries (besides Merrill’s 2009 posts), though I was very much hoping there would be.  Here’s the background for those who are interested:  In 2008, CWA merged with The Center for Progressive Christianity (TCPC).  Since then, TCPC has been maintaining CWA’s old web pages/blog, but this is coming to an end as it doesn’t mesh with their system and integration would be cost prohibitive.  Thus, I received notice that the CWA blog, which contains hundreds of entries from the entire walk team and several others, from before, during, and after the walk, was going to be taken down.  I hated to see this happen, as it would mean the loss of a distinctive resource and historical record.  Most importantly (to me, anyway), the blog contains hundreds of posts made by other people besides myself and our documentary film maker Scott Griessel.  Since Scott and I respectively have a film and a book that tells the story of the walk in our voices, it didn’t really concern me terribly that our particular blog posts would no longer be available to the public, though there is much written in them that never made it into the book or film.  What really concerned me (and continues to do so) is losing the other people’s posts.  These are voices of the other walkers and special people associated with CrossWalk America that aren’t contained in any other public source.  Thus, I asked if there was a chance that I could transfer the CWA blog onto my Asphalt Jesus blog.

Up until a few days ago, the word was “Yes, as long as you pay the $200 estimated fee for transferring the material.”  I was more than happy to pay this and was very excited about adding these posts as an archive here for the future. However, once the web developers started looking into the matter more closely, they realized that the CWA blog uses such an outdated web platform that no simple transfer exists.  They were going to have to hand cut-and-paste hundreds upon hundreds of entries, and hand-create folders in which to place them … a very expensive process.

Thus, just today we had to pull the plug on the project.   Before the plug was pulled, however, they’d already cut-and-pasted around 50 of Merrill Davison’s blog posts, which is why you find them here.

Sorry for any confusion this created.  I wish we could have that archive, but I guess sometimes things are just meant to fade over time.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Phoenix Affirmations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.