OnePeterFive Turns One Today

It’s hard to believe, but one year ago today, we launched OnePeterFive. For our opening day, we featured articles by Wyoming Catholic College theology professor Dr. Peter Kwasniewski; noted author and liturgical expert, Fr. Thomas Kocik; senior correspondant at The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Franciscan University of Steubenville theology professor, Dr. Michael Sirilla, Islamic Scholar and author, Andrew Bieszad, science fiction author (and now multi-Hugo Award nominee) John C. Wright, and myself.

I am, as you have no doubt already surmised, the least accomplished among them. And as our stable of writers has grown from that first seven to nearly sixty, I continue to find myself honored, humbled, and more than a little awestruck to be working with so many talented, knowledgeable, faithful men and women in our mission to rebuild Catholic culture and restore Catholic tradition.

I’m not sure how I put this together, or how I got them all to agree to work with me. Clearly, were it not for God’s blessings on this work, what we have accomplished so far would not have been possible.

And we’ve reached a lot of people. We’ve been picked up by most major Catholic websites, have made appearances in outlets like The American Conservative and National Review, and have been mentioned twice on Fox News. We’ll soon pass the threshold of 600 posts. We’ve produced 17 podcasts. We’ve fielded nearly 8,000 comments. Our Facebook page has nearly 3,500 fans, and our posts on that platform alone have reached over 1.8 million people. And as of this writing, the site itself has earned over 3.5 million pageviews. Inch by inch, we’re moving the needle, and we’ve taken our place among the more reputable online Catholic publications.

Not too shabby for an upstart website nobody had heard of last July.

So I want to take this moment to thank you. Thank you first to our writers, who have contributed so much, and have done so out of their love for our Catholic Faith. I have learned so much from all of you, and I am a better man for it. Thank you to our readers, who so faithfully come back day after day to read our articles, listen to our podcasts, and share our stories. Thank you to our donors and advertisers, who have quite literally made it possible for us to pay for the technology we need to do our work and for me to devote myself full time to orchestrating and publishing the work that we do here. Thank you to those of you who are praying for us and for our work – your contributions may seem silent, but they reach heaven like thunder.

And a special thank you to my wife and children, who have put up with me working more than I should on 1P5 in the hopes of making it a success.

As we embark on our second year, I’m going to be adding new features and content options to the site, along with new authors. I’ve been working quietly behind the scenes on some technology and cosmetic upgrades, the first of which you may have already noticed. Based in part on reader requests, we’ve made a few changes over the past week:

• We’ve increased the font size on the posts and darkened the color of the text for improved readability.
• We’ve changed a few of the font styles and colors on other areas of the site to improve appearance.
• Menu highlighting has been updated to better fit our color scheme and to increase visibility of what is being selected.
• We’ve added a subscription box for the daily digest up near the top of the page in the right sidebar.
• We’ve added “read more” links to the Features, 1P5 Blog, and Podcast sections to make it easier for people to find additional articles and archives in those sections.
• We’ve replaced our broken podcasting plugin (which was causing endless problems) with a new one, and we’ve manually rebuilt the podcast library and RSS feed along with all the podcast images and titles.
• We have confirmed after months of back and forth with Apple that the podcast is, at long last, actually working in iTunes.
• We’ve resolved an IP address conflict that was causing some individuals to be unable to access the website.
• We’ve updated a few other site capabilities, including a new and improved search function.

More new features — and quite possibly entirely new site sections — are in the planning stages. New contributors are also coming on board all the time. We have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches, and I’m tremendously thankful.

Things aren’t slowing down, and we have a lot of work to do, but we’re ready for it. It should be an exciting year.