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.

(≈30min)

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.

• “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.php does 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.

(3-6 hours)

(2.5+hours)

What are my goals?

At this point I have met many of my preliminary goals, but there are more.

Preliminary Goals:

• Offer Two Bibles: King James and Geneva
• Offer Two Psalters: Scottish Psalter and Bay Psalm Book
• Offer Two Commentaries: John Gill and Matthew Henry
• Offer Geneva Notes
• Offer Cross References: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
• Link them well back and forth between references
• Link them well within the individual reference (previous and next chapters, etc.)
• Make a very uniform appearance between works (steady style)
• Make it very appealing/inviting/clean
• Make it easy-to-use and intuitive
• Make it look a lot like a Bible or old-style reference
• Offer credal statements: London Baptist Confession, Keech’s Catechism

Some of these “Preliminary Goals” have only been met in part. There are many works that need to be better linked. There are many things that can be made better in the way of user interface. There are some things that are partially unimplemented.

Ongoing Goals:

• Make it lightweight, and lighten the load on the CPU
• Clean up and “smarten” the user interface
• Add references like John Owen’s Commentary on Hebrews, Haldane’s and Charles Hodge’s Commentaries on Romans, etc.
• Add works like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, maybe John Calvin’s Institutes, etc.
• Move it to a database driven structure
• Add historic headings to Bibles, and display them on the pages (at least the beginning of the first chapter of each book)
• Make the user interface look and act more like a book (if appropriate)
• Edit E-Tags, and gzip files, make better use of caching, implement versioning that allows for the minimization of server activity.
• After many changes are beginning to cement and the work is truly a solid work, set caching for regular pages, not just js and css to again minimize the server activity
• Give better support to mobile devices, and maybe even offer a different version of the site the the iphone altogether, rather than the slightly modified version that is there now, see http://www.brainhandles.com/2007/10/15/detecting-mobile-browsers/ for more details.

How am I documenting this?

I am blogging about it, that is a real journal, though I presume it is an abnormal format for this type of project. I have invited some friends to check it out and help me to make it more helpful for others within that on a feature requests page.

How am I doing (implementing) this?

I have some web hosting space. I have created the site from scratch using html (from php • server-side scripting), css, and I will probably use some javascript. I have been downloading some different references (TSK, Gill, Henry commentaries), and we have even captured some old references ourselves, like the Geneva Bible and the Bay Psalm Book.

I have in mind to make this with good code, that is available particularly with a couple of key implementation features:

It is made especially with mobile user agents (portable browser-enabled devices, like phones, PDAs and the like) in mind, so pages will be light and appropriately optimized for those requirements, like smaller screen and file sizes.

In the Lord’s kind providence, the works that are available on the site are in the public domain, as their authors are long dead. Most works (with a few exceptions) are around 300- to 400-years-old. Since they were freely given to me, I would like to freely offer them. I release the little bit of my work in this, and all of the work of those dead and gone to whatever use the readers would like.

In that vein, I am trying to make the site to download very easily for folks for later offline browsing with no consideration for copyright whatsoever, not even any attribution/credit.

I want to link the works back and forth in a way that makes it especially easy to see what other works have to say about a given passage.

Why am I doing this?

There are a lot of Bible reference sites out there: blueletterbible.org, biblegateway.com, studylight.org, searchgodsword.org, godrules.net and many more. Many of them are very powerful (esp. the first two). Many offer many (modern) references (e.g. Blue Letter and God Rules).

The advantage of this tool is multiple: it offers works of a certain category that is generally hard to find today: puritan, historic protestant and reformed works. The Bibles come from a historic body of texts that is largely neglected today: the “Received Text” (Textus Receptus/Majority Text) family. Notable among those translations are the Geneva and King James/Authorized Version Bibles, and to a lesser extent the Scottish Psalter and Bay Psalm Book.

This grouping of these references is largely opinionated: where many organizations/sites tend to lump a large variety of works together with little discretion, these works are lumped together in a much more exclusive effort.

Who is it for?

I have a number of people in mind with this: I would like by this to serve my church, my wife and children, parents and siblings. I would also like this to serve other like-minded Christians: Reformed Baptists, Reformed Presbyterians, other Evangelical Christians who share our historic Protestant-Reformed understanding. (Of course I will make much use of it as well.)

Even if you have not spoken to me about this, I would love to hear what you would like in this site, how it could be better, and what features lack, or could be dropped.

I am not making any guarantees about implementation or timeline. Though I would love to say, yes and right away. We will see what comes. I think I will be surprised by just how little really comes in. (Don’t laugh when you read this post in five years, and see that no one ever posted to it.)