Sacred space on the web – The Irish Times – Wed, May 27, 2009

Sacredspace.ie, the Jesuit prayer site, was set up 10 years ago by Fr Alan McGuckian. It asks you to find “sacred space”, 10 minutes for prayer, in your day. This avenue to the soul has users responding with delight, as a recent American [sic] post reads: “What a wonderful, inspirational site. To be able to break off from work and reflect is such a gift.” Its success lies in the fact that you don’t have to move physically to engage spiritually.

The Catholic Register – The history of Lent

Sacred Space, an online prayer web site based in Dublin, Ireland, will be launching a special Lent page which coincides with its 10th year anniversary on Ash Wednesday. The site will provide online prayers for a Lenten retreat. For more information, visit www.sacredspace.ie.

Virtual prayer book expected to gain popularity during Lent | Irish Examiner

THOUSANDS of people are expected to go online to pray today — Ash Wednesday — as the computer gains in popularity as a virtual prayer book.

Today, the start of Lent, is also the 10th anniversary of Sacred Space, the prayer website established by Irish Jesuits in their communications centre in Dublin.

The site, which guides the visitor through prayer, is available in almost 20 languages, with up to 20,000 visitors worldwide logging on every day.

ENN.ie – In The Papers 25 February

The Irish Examiner reports that thousands of Catholics are expected to go online on Ash Wednesday to pray, as www.sacredspace.ie, a prayer website established by the Jesuits in Dublin, celebrates its 10th anniversary. The site, which guides the visitor through prayer, is available in almost 20 languages, and gets up to 20,000 visitors worldwide logging on every day. Site editor Fr Piaras Jackson is expecting a big increase in visitors on Wednesday. The website has developed beyond daily prayer to include scripture commentaries, areas to write and send prayers, e-mail greeting cards, novenas and audio.

The ability to add multiple banners (no limit) and arrange the banners using the drag and drop method as used with the footer plugin.

The description field is linked to the Scripture rather than to the date. In the past the description was always connected to the scripture but now that the same Scripture entry can be used for more than one date.

When you copy text from MSWord, you take information about size, colour and so on. This invisible code may corrupt the display in Sacred Space. It is best to put only ‘clean’ text in the editor s in SSM.

You can make cleaner text by using Notepad, or a simple text editor.
OR
When pasting text into the editor, it may be best to use this button
You may be asked to allow the browser to access the clipboard. Click ‘Allow’

The Feedback plugin was enabled in September 2007 and has been used for entries since then. It uses the style that was established during the year and allows the posting of comments during the month, as they are submitted.

Day

This option may be used or ignored. Using it allows the entries to be ordered. The date is not published at present

Name

This option may be used or ignored. If used it is not published but may be useful for archives.

Email

This option may be used or ignored. If used it is not published but may be useful for archives.

Location

If this field is used, it appears with the country.
For example “Texas, USA” or “Arizona, USA”

Country

Selecting from this list assigns a flag image to the post.
For example , ,

Comments can be released individually or held until the end of the month.

A flash tutorial is available here

Description:
The footer plugin is used to control the links that are included at the bottom of every page of Sacred Space. The plugin can create/edit links and change the order of the links. footer links:
Each link has four fields that should be filled in.
Title: The active text that the links to another page or resource
URL: The address of the page or resource you want to link to. This should be the absolute path (http://www.sacredspace.ie/feedback/en)
Target: Two options are available. Blank will open the page in a new window or tab and self will open the page in the current window or tab.

sort links:
Drag and drop the links into the order you want. Click save to save the new order of the links.

Usage on Sacred Space:
Only the links that are marked as complete in the footer links will appear at the bottom of every Sacred Space page for the given language. The plugin can be disabled by going to settings and selecting the OFF option beside the footer plugin.

Note: A flash tutorial is available in the help section of the SSM

The PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) pages have been available for some time both as a text page and via AvantGo an online service. These pages have been modified and are now available at http://www.sacredspace.ie/mobile
Adding any language code to the end of the url gives the mobile version in that language.
A Romanian mobile page, for example, can be found at http://www.sacredspace.ie/mobile/ro
At present these pages capture a week around the current date – three days back and three days ahead. This is something we will welcome comments about – leave a comment if you wish.