The Sad Passing of commonprayer.org

In the midst of the many things–good and bad–that transpire these days, one thing crept up on me that I wasn’t expecting and regret to see–the passing of the website commonprayer.org. It was vanished completely since the first of the year.

As a person who was raised on and still uses the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, this website was a major blessing, and its loss a setback. When I was growing up on the 1928 BCP, Bethesda put out a physical desk calendar with the liturgical year highlighted and all of the liturgical colours noted on the dates. commonprayer.org did that virtually. I’ve reproduced the annual Sunday calendar for this year (early in the year, before they disappeared) at the top of the page, but my favorites were the monthly calendars such as you see below for this time last year. I used these extensively in my 2023 Advent series.

Notice that the site allowed for several options for the liturgical year: the original 1928 BCP, the 1637 Scottish, the 1662 English, and the Anglo-Catholic version (which one is not explained.) It was a good teaching tool for the newbies (well, most of them) I was lecturing to.

They also had specific calendars, not only for the Sundays, but for the fixed holy/saints days, which is shown below.

The site dated back to 2001, which is four years after the predecessor of this site was started, both of which are an eternity on the internet. I don’t know who built and maintained it. I do know that, online as everywhere else, time takes its toll, and the Anglican internet (which spawned the blogosphere and then the social media groups) has been around long enough for sites (and sadly people) to pass on. commonprayer.org was especially vulnerable for two reasons.

The first is that it was an active site; where the web pages themselves were code to produce a web page based on the commands given either in the URL or by other means (GET and POST to use the proper terms, also cookies.) commonprayer.org used cfm, Microsoft’s active language; I preferred php, which is what all my sites use and have for a long time. Active sites are subject to the security updates which result from constantly changing hacking, and language elements get deprecated and even dropped from the language, rendering code limited in functionality or useless. This problem is why I migrated all my sites to wordpress.com, it’s not perfect but it keeps up both the page codes and the php version of the server. I also had to drop an active site for that reason as well.

The second is that it had its own URL, which doesn’t come free either. I have made provisions for mine and hope they work for a reasonable period of time. Really, the “ghost” sites that have done the best (such as John Richardson, the Ugley Vicar, David Trimble, Still on Patrol and Mary Ailes, Baby Blue) are those which used the blog service URL, and that is a fallback for my own sites.

These days if you’re connected on social media with enough people you can keep up with the liturgical year in whatever flavour you prefer, but I still think that sites such as commonprayer.org serve a purpose and are missed when they go away.