This month’s top reads at the Mystical Geek show that “Photoshop Trick” has jumped from No. 2 to No. 1 displacing “Readings for Simbang Gabi (2011)”, while National Bible Week 2012 has gone up from No. 6 to No. 3. “Give to God What is God’s” and “The Santo Niño and the Total Christ” have dropped off from the list. Taking their places in the Top 10 are “Prex Handouts?” and “Deny Yourself, Take Up the Cross and Follow Me”. Below are the top 10 all-time reads at the Mystical Geek.

1. Photoshop Trick
2. Readings for the Simbang Gabi (2011)
3. National Bible Week 2012
4. The Reproductive Health Bill, Again…
5. Encountering the Lord in the Midst of Life’s Upheavals
6. Three Books for the Summer
7. The Santo Niño and National Bible Sunday
8. PREX Handouts?
9. Deny Yourself, Take up the Cross and Follow Me
10. The Life of St. Augustine in a TV Series

For the month of January, the following articles were the top reads:
1. National Bible Week 2012
2. Photoshop Trick
3. PREX Handouts?
4. The Santo Niño and National Bible Sunday
5. St. Valentine and his Dublin Shrine
6. The Santo Niño and the Total Christ
7. The Reproductive Health Bill, Again…
8. Deny Yourself, Take up the Cross and Follow Me
9. The Year of Faith
10. Matthew 18:15 and Fraternal Correction

“National Bible Week 2012″ was for several weeks on the front page of the Mystical Geek and so it is understandable that it should retain its number of hits through the month of January. “St. Valentine and His Dublin Shrine” was linked through Facebook and could have been one of the favorites of Google search engine hits.

There are 391 articles posted in the Mystical Geek arranged in thirty-three categories. The articles appearing in the front page of the blog consist of the most recent posts,and the posts that WordPress plugin I am employing reposts. A lot of the reads this site gets come from search engines, but RSS feeds appearing in other better placed AgustinongPinoy sites also help. Below is a list of the ten most read Mystical Geek articles all-time.

Mystical Geek Top 10 All Time

1. Readings for Simbang Gabi 2011
2. Photoshop Trick
3. The Reproductive Health Bill Again
4. Encountering the Lord in the Midst of Life’s Upheavals
5. Three Books for the Summer
6. National Bible Week 2012
7. The Santo Niño and National Bible Sunday
8. Give to God What is God’s
9. The Life of St. Augustine in a TV Series
10. The Santo Niño and the Total Christ

No. 1 is a carryover from last month’s Simbang-Gabi. It received a lot of hits because of search engine traffic. No. 2 is an example of how the denizens of the web pay more attention to non-consequential information. No. 3 has always been a favorite; its hits are due to searches made on the topic. It lost its hold on No.1 because right now Filipinos are more interested in the fate of Chief Justice Corona.

Another perennial favorite is “Encountering the Lord in the Midst of Life’s Upheavals”. It is a commentary on John Chrysostom’s thoughts on Matthew’s narrative about Jesus walking on the sea. No. 6 — on this year’s National Bible Week — is quite new. It is surprising that it immediately rose to the all-time top ten after only a few days on the first page of this site. No. 7 and No. 10 both mention the “Santo Niño” and so it is quite safe to assume that this is again due to search engine exposure.

For the month of January so far, here are the top 10 reads:

1. National Bible Week 2012
2. Readings for the Simbang Gabi (2011)
3. Photoshop Trick
4. The Santo Ni&ntide;o and National Bible Sunday
5. The Santo Niño and the Total Christ
6. World Day of Peace 2012
7. Catholic Bible Helps
8. The Life of St. Augustine in a TV series
9. Militant Atheism and the Desecration of a Consecrated Host
10. Of 2012 and Augustine’s Sermon 97

The top 5 in the list are already in our all-time list. No. 6, 7, 9 are all currently in the first page of this site. No. 10 is due to search engine results. I say this because of the prediction that the world will end this year,2012. Augustine has his thoughts on end of the world scenarios too, since an “end-of-the-world” expectation is embedded in the Christian world-view.

Read these articles at the Mystical Geek now.

For those who are using PLDT as your connection to the internet, this is for you…

For more than two weeks now, I haven’t been able to access Biblista.NET using our PLDT line. Whenever I try to access the site or any section of it, my browser gives me the “time out” error: “Connection Timed Out”. Apart from the possibilities that the browser tells you, there is another one that is never mentioned: that your IP (your computer’s address on the internet) has been banned from accessing a particular webserver. You would know whether this applies to you if you would change your internet provider and the website comes up without any hitch. Whenever I use our PLDT line, I get the time out error, but not when I use SmartBro or Globe. In other words, my PLDT connection has been banned by the webhost of Biblista.NET

This is not the first time it happened. Back in April of this year, the same thing happened for this simple reason: the webhosting service behind Biblista.NET banned the IP of PLDTNET because of hacking activities coming from that IP. If you know anything about IPs, you would realize that once an IP is banned from a server, all computers connected to that IP is also banned (more about IP’s here). In short, if you would like to access Biblista.NET, you may do so using services like SmartBRO or GlobeTattoo but not PLDT.

I have however made a few adjustments so that the situation (temporary I hope) may not become a burden to anyone who has been visiting my site. I have reactivated two WordPress blogs to make the following articles accessible:

• The weekly Workshop articles and “Mag-aral Tayo” are also accessible through Mixed Innuendos
• The longer “Bibliya Tagala” articles and the Sunday reading guide “Sunday Thoughts” are now accessible via Lectio Divina

I still do updates at Biblista.NET, specifically for Sunday Thoughts and the Bible Workshop. The Bibliya Tagala section (tagala.biblista.net) has not been updated since last month.

For easier access to the above-mentioned WordPress-hosted sites, just look for their corresponding RSS feeds on the sidebar of this site. Those are the sites that are updated daily. Workshop and Bibliya Tagala pages are announced in the blog when they are uploaded (once a week).

AgustinongPinoy just turned twelve years old. From August 1999 until the present this website has been serving webpages with topics ranging from Catholicism, Education, Augustinian Spirituality, Life in the Philippines, the Internet and Web Design. It was also for a time, a venue of web publication for theology teachers of the University of San Agustin. Currently, AgustinongPinoy has three main sections: this site containing the Gallery and news posts about the Augustinians in the Province of Sto. Niño de Cebu and the Mystical Geek; the Res Biblica and its associated sites (the Bible Workshop, Bibliya Tagala and the Bibliya Tagala Podcasts); and the old Otium Sanctum articles.

The present appearance and arrangement of the site is the result of modifications made after certain services it depended on closed down. The first major modification came after I decided to make use of Content Management Systems for presenting webpages online (beginning 2002). This required me to pay for webservers that allowed me to use the automated results of CGI-Perl and PHP/MySQL.

And then, Geocities, the old home of AgustinongPinoy closed down sometime in 2009. I thought that the service would go on after I started paying for it, but Yahoo had other things in mind. When it closed down, I lost a lot of the articles, old and new ones, that I’ve uploaded into the Geocities servers. Not only that but Angfrayle.Net, which was already running on a Joomla installation also closed down with it.

And then in 2010 I had to let go of the old Mystical Geek (albertesmeralda.squarespace.com) for financial reasons. What I did however was to transfer all its contents to this AgustinongPinoy server. Around this time too, whatever I salvaged from my old HTML tutorial website was transferred to a free site: TipzNTrix.

Fortunately, the citizens of the web know how to help their own. The Internet WebArchive has — without me knowing it — saved some of the webpages AgustinongPinoy has been serving since 2001. This includes some of the first articles I wrote for AgustinongPinoy: “On Rapture” and on “Augustinian Education” (featuring articles from the former General, Fr. Orcasitas, OSA). There is another service called “Reocities” which saved the pages of Geocities before it closed down. They haven’t restored all the former Geocities websites yet, but I have submitted an application for the restoration of Geocities.Com/Athens/Parthenon/2763 and am waiting for their reply. Below are some pages from the old AgustinongPinoy that are stored in the Internet WebArchive.

Notable old pages from AgustinongPinoy

• The Articles section
• AngFrayle.Net
• Teachers’ Page: Readings on Catholic Education
• Augustinians and Education: A list of pages on the Order’s Education Apostolate
• Fray Leo Jallorina’s article on Boy Scouting and Education
• The Old Weblab

There are still pages on the web today that survived the closing of Geocities. These are

• The Friar’s Journal
• The Bible Journal, which is the predecessor of Otium Sanctum and Res Biblica

The above websites are stored in the servers of Carnegie-Mellon University’s Lycos Network.

I have written a brief history of the twelve years that AgustinongPinoy has been on the web. You may find it at the Mystical Geek.

AgustinongPinoy was and continues to be a labor of love. It is the pioneering work of a Filipino Augustinian friar who from the time he logged onto the web in an Iloilo Internet Cafe in 1998 was convinced that the future of evangelization will not and should not ignore the World Wide Web. John Paul II vindicated this conviction. And now Benedict XVI has reiterated his predecessor’s appeal for Catholics to let the face of Christ shine through the many bright lights of the World Wide Web.

About twenty friars coming from different parts of the Philippines left their convents to gather in Balay Isabel, Batangas. Their objective was to go through Petak and Leman’s “The Way of the Shepherd” and the GIRM.

“The Way of the Shepherd” is John 10 applied to personnel management and served as a launch pad for the friars to examine the way they deal with the people they work with whether in their respective communities or outside of these. There are seven management principles that helped them examine themselves as pastors.

The review of the GIRM was basically for the friars to familiarize themselves more with liturgical rubrics.

Balay Isabel is a semi-private resort located on the shores of Taal Lake. The friars stayed in houses which also served as their place for rest and prayer. The three day exercise also served as a bonding activity. Photos are found at the Gallery.

Pictures from two MGCP events are now in the Gallery:

• Pics from beach outing
• the first BEC Animators’ Recollection

The pictures from Munting Buhangin, Batangas were taken on the occassion of Fr. Bong’s birthday. The community took a day off and we went on a long drive to a semi-private resort. We didn’t swim but we did enjoy the view and the lunch!

The first MGCP BEC Animators’ Recollection was finally held on April 19, Holy Tuesday. We have been planning it for a long time, but it was only this year that we were able to hold it. The theme of the recollection was “In the Service of the Total Christ” and consisted of reflections on John 4, John 15:1-17 and the Mystery of Light from an evangelizer’s perspective.

AgustinongPinoy will now be discontinuing its “Bibliya Tagala” section. Like the other sections of AgustinongPinoy, “Bibliya Tagala” now has its own website at http://angfrayle.x10.mx/wp http://tagala.biblista.net

“Ang Bibliya Tagala” is quite new. I started it during the last days of August 2010 and at present contains more than ten posts. The fact that Google has begun indexing its pages and has begun presenting them in its Search results is cause for announcing it now as a website independent from this one. I originally intended it to extend the “Mag-aral Tayo” section of the Bible Workshop. “Mag-aral Tayo” is a guide for our parish’s BEC leaders who look for resources on the web that would help them prepare their weekly lessons. Most of the lessons there are on the Sunday Gospel readings. “Bibliya Tagala” provides lessons on the other Sunday readings, whether from the New Testament or the Old Testament.

The home page of Ang Bibliya Tagala

When I started the “Bibliya Tagala” section for AgustinongPinoy, I was thinking of presenting my own Tagalog translations of the Scriptures. I could not do it at “Res Biblica” since it was already for my longer articles on the liturgical readings and on passages that I thought should be given more attention, as far as explanations are concerned. So I started to present my translations on the Psalms. “Ang Bibliya Tagala” is better suited for the purpose I guess. In a separate website in Tagalog, I would be able to present my own translation of particular bible passages and even highlight the way particular phrases are rendered in the Tagalog translations currently being used.

The main categories of “Ang Bibliya Tagala” cover explanations for liturgical readings. Each article is divided into the following sections:

• Outline of the Passage under consideration
• A short explanation of the passage
• The sentence flow of the passage
• Guide questions regarding the text of the passage

The sections “outline” and “sentence flow” are by intent paedagogic: I always tell my BEC leaders to prepare their lessons rigorously by preparing a “sentence flow” of the text and, based on it, an outline. The “questions” at the end of the “sentence flow” are somewhat similar to those found at “Mag-aral Tayo”. These are guide questions for the understanding of the text. The type of questions given here are explained in an article at the Mystical Geek. The “brief explanation” is a feature that sets “Ang Bibliya Tagala” apart from “Mag-aral Tayo.”

Today, AgustinongPinoy turns eleven years old. Nothing much has been added to this website but its subsites have been growing. The Bible Workshop, the site I maintain as a resource site for BEC cell leaders has been gaining quite a large audience since last year. Below is a screenshot of the hits and visits statistics of the site (August 27, 2010)

The Mystical Geek has taken the place of this website for articles relating to what I’ve been doing in my current assignment. It is also the place where I review and update articles from the past. I haven’t been regular in posting articles here since my time is taken up by the Bible Workshop and Res Biblica. What I was doing with Otium Sanctum before is continued at Res Biblica. During this past year, I’ve been posting more articles at the Bible Workshop and Res Biblica more than in any sub-site.

Some acquaintances have been asking me about my HTML tutorials. They are now at the Collectanea, a collection of the HTML tutorials I wrote during the period 2000-2004 while I was trying to maintain the school website originally hosted at http://geocities.com/agilawan

AgustinongPinoy lost some of its sections due to the changes in the web during recent years. One of these changes was the demise of Geocities, the original server of AgustinongPinoy and Angfrayle. But the WWW knows how to keep its denizens well provided. And so I was able to put up the original HTML Tutorials section of AgustinongPinoy at another free server; the daily Bible journal has also been transferred to a Frihost server. This latter also hosts the old AgustinongPinoy blogs.

Right now, this main AgustinongPinoy site serves Glitches In Time, my photo Gallery, a series of articles containing some of my translations of the psalms, articles on Augustinian Values and subsequent updates. There is a fledgling website at AngFrayle’s Otium Sanctum which I am maintaining with the use of a text-editor and PERL-CGI scripts which a lot of my contemporaries consider outdated. The website contains the notes I create when preparing an article or a school handout. It also serves as a reminder that a website can be maintained using the most basic of Content Management Systems. After all, what is important to the web is content; all the rest is eye-candy.

After eleven years on the web, I have learned to focus on just a few things to present. I still write my reviews on the software which I think others like me would find useful. And once in a while I still post a few pointers about the web and about the lingua franca of the web, HTML. But because of pastoral pressures, I have limited my output to practical guides on the reading of Scriptures especially as these are read in the Sunday liturgy. Commitment to the building-up of Basic Ecclesial Communities has been a big factor in this choice.

The Pope’s message for the 44th World Day of Communications (May 2010) is available.  The link to the document and a video can be found at the Mystical Geek.  The Pope writes:

All priests have as their primary duty the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, and the communication of his saving grace in the sacraments. Gathered and called by the Word, the Church is the sign and instrument of the communion that God creates with all people, and every priest is called to build up this communion, in Christ and with Christ. Such is the lofty dignity and beauty of the mission of the priest, which responds in a special way to the challenge raised by the Apostle Paul: “The Scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame … everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent? (Romans 10:11,13-15).

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

The call to use the new technologies that have come out recently — especially the internet and mobile networking — is not new. Pope John Paul II said years ago that those who proclaim the word ex officio cannot but make use of these emerging technologies. We continually hope and pray that AgustinongPinoy continues to be faithful to its avowed mission: to let the face of Christ shine through the digital lights of the web.

St. Augustine of Hippo

The Mystical Geek has lately become the place where I post quick articles on Augustinian topics. I have made a list of these articles until August 2009 in an article called For the Feast of St. Augustine. Most of those articles listed there are among the more popular pages in the site. One can come upon these articles simply by typing “Augustine” into the Search facility of the site. Below are articles which are either on St. Augustine or indirectly related to his ideas. Some of these are not easily found through the search engine.

• Articles Posted after August 13, 2008
  • Augustine and Prayer
  • Augustine in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy
  • Of 2012 and Augustine’s Sermon 97
  • Augustinian Spirituality
  • An Augustinian Platform in the Middle Ages
• Articles That Derive from Augustinian Themes
  • Minister of Word and Sacraments
  • The Lenten Cross: Sermon 205
  • The Total Christ
  • Interpreting Scriptures with Scriptures
  • Like A Ruminant
  • Light of the World
  • Luke 18:9-14 in the Catechism

The Augustinian articles posted at AgustinongPinoy are blog posts proper. These point to Augustinian resources I have found on the web.

• A Note on Augustinian Spirituality
• Augustinian Values
• Augustine, Science and Bible Reading
• Aumann on Augustine’s Theology of Ministry
• On Christmas Day