First Steps

Last night I spent a lot of time looking at various bible translations, code, and opensource projects.

Step 1 is getting a good bible on the site. I'll be happy to link to gospelcom or anyone one else that's got good content, but no one is really offering true RSS style syndication or a real api so I'm going to have to host it on my site to get the type of seamless user experience I am looking for. It looks like the World English Bible will be the first translation with the launch. After an education in modern XML based bible translation and scholorship. I am in the process of evaluating opensource projects before I start from scratch. Right now there are two front-runners:

phpScripture - (formaly called phpBible) I especially like the way the verses appear as url's in a del.icio.us like fashion, but It loses a lot of the formatting and punctuation.

The other is, oddly enough the new phpBible
phpBible - from the onlineBible project. This is a much more sophisticated project that uses the OSIS format. Though ominously the home page demo isn't working

FYI,
The SWORD project has some great stuff, but unfortunatly their heavy JAVA emphasis doesn't work well with my hosting plans or expertise, so we will stick to PHP. (.NET and PHP are enough without throwing JAVA in the mix)

Dusting off a Dream

Last week I decided to dust off an old dream.

I had first thought of it in 97 or 99. But I just let it sit there in my notebook and in the back of my head. I could say it was because it was ahead of it's time, but it is just as likely that I was "busy" and too intimidated to really pursue it.

Last week it came back. I came across a couple of manefestos by Tim Bednar, One on tagging changing your congregation and the the overall 20 tech trends .

Then God give's me a one-two punch with a quick update from Tim Bulkeley, who as been working on the Postmodern Bible Commentary and also played around with tagging on his BATSIS blog.

I was starting to see everything was in place. Back in the 90's, I wanted to have an online bible that would link to all types of content - reflections, devotions, commentaries, sermons, current events, poetry, art, etc. The problem was, the infrastructure really wasn't in place. But now it's '06 and we have blogs, and we have tagging. Why not roll a website together that used the bible along with del.icio.us tags to do an online blog bible - bibleicious!

Such as site would help us see biblical application and devotion in practive and even help teach us the art of identifying it as such and relating it to chapter and verse. This kind of Living Bible could be a doorway to powerfully communicating the power and relevancy of scriptures to the next generation.

So that's the basic idea. I've got a whole lot more that I'm going to say and do about this. The Why's and the How's