I am amazed by what is possible with jQuery. I look forward to making good use of it on the site, now that I realize how easy it is to implement. I am so excited about making good use of it. 
Archive for the 'development' Category
If you are watching the Private Alpha, I have updated the style, and finally posted the confessions (Keach’s Catechism and the 1689 London Baptist Confession). I have a lot in the hopper of my brain, and no idea what the time frame is for implementation. I had something called verse wrappers coming up, and I thought I was on the verge of completion, and the more I worked on it, the worse it got. 
If you are interested in using the Private Alpha, know that there is zero guarantee about it’s working. Just contact me using the name admin on the current domain (librex.us).
To that loan search bot that is reading this post, good night.
To my one dear reader,
I have been busy with school (and work). I plan on reading a book about (My)SQL before starting back up. I may also try to read a lot more and otherwise inform myself about JavaScript before I get back on this like I was. I imagine I may not really do much with this in the next month to three at that rate. I am sorry for the slowing, but my desire has in no way been diminished. Thank you for using Librex.
Sincerely,
David
Ryle has earmarks. I am excited!
(≈30min)
I have changed a lot of what is out there. The look is substantially different. The way the earmarks work is pretty different. They look a lot alike, but they work in IE6/8 (and I presume IE7).
I removed the earmarking from many works until I can implement it better. I am bummed about the fact that I cannot earmark from Ryle’s Holiness any longer. I hope to fix that soon. I have grown some new ideas. And I have moved a WinXP/IE6 laptop in next to me so I can check my work periodically. I hope not to leave my IE6 users in the dark any longer, until such time as they drop significantly in the usage stats.
The navigation is changed a bit. The previous, next, contents, and page-level stuff is a bit different.
Next in the chute are the following:
- prefered version of Bible (and Psalter?)
- verse wrappers: <?=”Genesis 1.1″?> or <?=”Gen 1:1-12″?> will turn out the verse and link more easily with preferred version support
- psalm-singing helps: recommended tunes, available tunes, etc.: this may require SQL/DB before implementation.
- earmarking at paragraph and verse level (one before the para, and one after the verse) allowing use in works like the Geneva Notes which have multiple, or no notes per verse, etc.
- Support for earmarking in the Psalters
There are no guarantees here. But I hope to have the Ryle thing done soon.
With some help I found a number of problems in IE and other places with asymmetric form implementation. So, I have changed the earmark system (formerly “Dog Ears”). I have pulled earmarks off of all but a few portions of the site, until I have time to ensure their performance. I grew this thing too fast, and have been embarassed by it for a couple of days now. I will try to implement the earmarks in more places in different degrees as the Lord allows.
Now that I have learned a thing or two about cookies, I am planning to eventually implement a Preferred Bible option. (That does not give you a lot of options: Geneva Bible and Authorized Version; it’s basically my way or the highway.) At some point in the future, if we are able to offer other older (TR) English Bibles, e.g. Coverdale, Wycliffe, Tyndale, etc., you will see that option open up. I don’t know how reasonable that is, but I would like to see it eventually.
I hope there will be more to come.
(8-16 hours—big gap, I know, I have not been recording my hours carefully: 4+ hours tonight, and the same last night)
I have posted a fix to the stalling IE8 cookie monster problem, I think. (We don’t have IE8 here to test it, so I am presuming to know if this was a helpful thing.) I have also posted a fix to the IE6 style problem. I hope it works, too. Please let me know if you have problems.
…
I worked some more and the KJB is now cleaned up a bit, and the iPhone has some lighter page loads. I also added a new script from Dean Edwards that allows IE6 and IE7 to act more like IE8 in terms of CSS/Style selectors and other behavior. This makes it easier to use one stylesheet. If you are using IE5.5 or lower, you are most likely having a hard time using this site, but that should be par for the course with you. If you are using IE6 and you have Javascript disabled, your experience on here will be poor. I think there are some other good things I did, but I am so fuzzy at this point that I cannot remember what it was. Good night.
I was at a friend’s house today. (I am thankful that he—Kevin—makes good use of the site.) I found out a number of problems with the site. While Dog Ears worked in IE6—and I seem to remember them working in IE7—they apparently don’t work in IE8. (I do know from experience that they work well in FF3/Mac, Safari 4/Mac, and Safari/iPhone.) In IE8, the cookie-handling file (/innards/php/cookie-monster.php) stalls, without pushing you back to the referring page. Here is a quick breakdown of problems that I have recently found:
- “Contents:” links return null for the link text in IE6.
- The bookmark does not display correctly in IE6, still showing the background image at this point.
- The outbound link disclaimer/landing page works on site links in IE6.
cookie-monster.phpdoes not work in IE8.
There are still lots of things going on in development here on my own machine at home (and other things that I realize need to be updated or changed):
- Dog Ears are much nicer, but have not been implemented throughout. They tell you the book, chapter and verse in a more human-friendly way, e.g. “Gen 1.3″. But they do not work well in books that are not related to the Bible directly.
- I have lots of simple clean-up to do on books:
- educating quotes and apostrophes (all books)
- spelling (non-Bible)
- grammar (non-Bible)
- I still need to build previous and next chapter navigation in non-Bible books.
- I need a standardized naming convention for non-Bible books.
- I also need to put heading for Aleph, Beth, Gamel, etc. in Psalm 119 for easier navigation and reading (particularly in the two psalters).
- I also need to build a better index for the Bay Psalm Book.
There is so much to do, and so little time. The Lord is gracious. He will provide what he is pleased to. And it will be excellent. Good night.
Thanks for the idea, Kevin and Chris. Thanks for the name, Sarah. “Dog ears” allow you to keep your place. It needs polish (the dog ear names are not entirely human friendly), and its implementation is partial: Ryle’s Holiness, The King James, Henry and Gill’s Commentaries, and Geneva Notes have it for now. I will work it in to others shortly, if the Lord allows. They are easy enough to set and easy to delete. They make devotional reading much easier, coming back to your place, etc. WOW! (They do require you to enable cookies.)
(3-6 hours)
Here are some features that I have recently added: print support, the Bay Psalm Book (now complete, though still in revision), a better index for Scottish Psalter, some tunes and a tune index.
BTW, librex is still in beta (though I would not say it means “bleeding-edge testing alpha” any longer), but I have removed it as a host name (i.e. beta.librex.us → librex.us).
(8-12 hours)