Beth-birei is the name of a town in Old Testament Israel, as
it appears in the English Bible (it gets just one mention - 1
Chronicles 4:31). In Hebrew it looks like this:
.
If you're not familiar with Hebrew, it
is written from right to left, the principal characters being the
consonants and the small marks underneath representing the
vowels. The actual letters in English would be something like
Beyt Bire'iy
.
Many Old Testament towns and villages have names beginning "Beth" - Bethlehem and Bethel are well known examples. Beth means "house" - or more generally a place. Beth-Birei means "The house of my creation". When I needed a unique name for this web site, it seemed to fit the bill!
Christadelphians adopted their name in the mid 1800s. It is intended to cover three words - Brethren in Christ. Christadelphians are to be found in countries all over the world. They are bound together by a common faith in the Gospel preached by Christ and his apostles in the first century. It was this faith and its appeal to men and women from all walks of life which brought the community into existence. Christadelphians do not believe that any of their members, past or present, have received any special revelation direct from God. The Christadelphian faith rests squarely and solely on the Bible as the inspired Word of God.
You can find out more here: www.thechristadelphian.com.
Long Eaton is a town of moderate size, located in the district of Erewash in Derbyshire, England. It is situated between the Trent and Erewash rivers, and the Erewash canal also flows through it. In the centre of the town is the 127 acre West Park.
Its history can be traced back to the 7th Century, and in the Domesday Book, it was known by its Saxon name of "Aitone", which means a town by the water. In the 13th Century, it gained the prefix "Long". This referred to the village's expansion along its main street and also distinguished it from Little Eaton, about ten miles distant.
For much of its history, Long Eaton remained a small rural village, but rapid expansion began in the early 1800s as lace making (a major industry around the Nottingham area) and the railways arrived. Today, although much of the industry has gone, Long Eaton has a population of around 36,000.
The Long Eaton Christadelphian ecclesia was formed in 1910, though there had been meetings in the town for some years before. There are many other groups of Christadelphians in Great Britain and in many other countries throughout the world.
You can find out more here: local.htm.
My work requires a considerable amount of research using the web. From this experience, I try to follow some simple rules in web design:
These rules are in harmony with the principles of Web Content Accessibility. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has produced comprehensive guidelines on accessible web site design. For more information, see www.w3.org/WAI.
As of March 2005, the site has been completely reworked in XHTML 1.1, with some CSS improvements too.
Some years ago, analysis of visits (by the folk who provide the hit counter) showed that very nearly everyone had a browser that supported Javascript. From then, the site has included some simple scripting to add a bit of interest.
As part of the scripting, the site is cookie enabled. This makes it possible to show new and updated flags based on what's happened since you last visited. Don't worry if your browser doesn't support cookies (or you prefer not to accept them); the javascript code will choose sensible defaults instead. And if your browser doesn't do scripts, again, no problem; the scripted features aren't essential.
Many internet sites use "cookies" to customise the way pages are presented to individual visitors. A cookie is a file containing a small amount of information which the browser stores on your computer. Each time you visit the site, the Javascript in the pages can read and update that information.
This site uses two cookies at present. The first is a standard part of the hit counter code, and is used by the folk who do the counter to keep a tally of how many visits there are to the front page of the site. The other cookie helps the scripting on the front page to tell which pages have been added or updated since you last visited, and point them out. This script runs entirely inside your computer under the control of the browser - the information in this cookie is not used by the web server and takes up very little room on your disk.
The page design is intended to be reminiscent of a manuscript - a fusion of ancient and modern - in keeping with the site's principal aim of promoting the relevance of the Scriptures to today's world.
Thanks to all those who have made comments and suggestions - they have been and are most welcome.
