I have changed the name to Good Books Free .com (aka goodbooksfree.com). I think I got caught up in the marketing think of the day and wanted to name the site like so many these days, where you have no idea what it is about, but it has a trendy-sounding name, think Aviva, Splenda, Nexium, etc. (Don’t think to deeply about that, name your company what you want. I just wanted something more descriptive.)
Archive for the 'site' Category
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.
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.
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)
I have updated reformingworship.org. Now the main resources link over to Librex. I will eventually pull down the navigation. But for now, it is up with “instamatic” redirects.
(2.5+hours)
I will try here to synopsize the goals, documentation, implementation, purpose and intended audience of this (project—Librex—) in this post. This may help to keep expectations real, and focus the efforts of the coming months and years.
Continue reading ‘Crystallizing the Purpose and Plan of Librex’
I am going to pretend you care to see what the iPhone screenshots look like. Above is the home page. It has special links at top and bottom of the page allowing you to jump to the contents, next and previous chapters.
Beneath is the logo/icon that will drop on your home screen when you make a home screen bookmark.
I am happy to report (after years of not knowing how to clean and implement it) that I have finally posted the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge on the librex site. There is more clean up to come, but it is fit for publishing now.
(4-6+ hours)
There is a little more iPhone support, like increasing the view port size by “losing” the address/location bar. The titles are much more descriptive now: they tell the book and chapter and primary and secondary resource name, e.g. primary–Scriptures or Commentary, secondary–Geneva Bible, or Matthew Henry Commentary. This is most important for bookmarks and “SEO.” It makes the title and other pieces of information more valuable to folks that are finding these pages on Google. Eh, who am I kidding…this will go on for some time.
(6-8 hours)
Really, I need to get to other work. I did finish up (or start up) a look up device that allows the page to discern it’s name and title information from its position in the directory structure. It populates the title element, the first h1, it should eventually populate the dublin core data, and other elements as well.
That’s all. I think.