January 10th, 2009
Posted on the wiki the first bible study note on Acts 1. I’m pretty excited about filling up the wiki with study notes as I prepares them for our small group discussion. Evidently we are starting the book of Acts.
Also the wiki is becoming rather useful digital notepad for posting things learned and came across. If only the internet connection could be faster, I had noticed the few seconds wait for each update do add up to quite a bit of time spent.
Wonder if MediaWiki has something like WordPress – auto save and Turbo. That would really helps.
Tags: bible study, notes, wiki
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December 2nd, 2008
The wiki had been running for about a week. It is still rather empty except for some links on the main page a few random pages. For now the wiki serves as a brain dump of useful bits and pieces found when researching for my project. It will probably also contains Bible studies materials as I prepare them in future.
The intention is not to turn it into another overarching Christian wiki. There are a few out there already. Not to mention Wikipedia has an extensive section on Christinity and a Christianity Portal. An extensive wiki is not a project for a single person who neither has the breadth of knowledge nor the time and energy.
As it stands, it is doubtful anyone else (other than maybe spammers) would be interested to post content. But in case anyone has any suggestions, leave a comment or go ahead and edit the wiki.
Tags: wiki, wikipedia
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December 1st, 2008
Surely the first thing that came to many mind (my included) when thinking about doing a software/computer-based project to server the Lord is to create a Bible application. What else can explain the glorious number of Bible applications that one can find online. Just like the many Bible versions that one can choose from, there are online, open source, free, shareware, or commercial packages, so many Bible programs to choose from.
For those interested in working on the Bible in the electronic format, there is yet another layer of choices to wade through before going right into the heart of working on the application itself.
Not only are there many Bible versions and Bible software, there are also many Bible encoding formats, which includes OSIS, USFM, Zefania, ThML and some others.
When I jumped in and started researching on an idea to create an application around the Bible text, little did I expect the initial Bible encoding hurdle would be so high.
The philosophical background and a discussion of the different encoding format had been very well covered by Kahunapule Michael Johnson. These articles are good starting points to anyone wanting to learn about the different Bible encoding formats.
This detour opened my eyes to new level of understanding of the Bible encoding format. One thing that could comes out from this exercise is that it forces anyone who intents to work on the Bible in electronic format to gain a deeper insight into the complexity of the undertaking. Those that persisted and comprehened the working details of the formats would then build perseverance for the endeavor to come.
Tags: bible encoding, bible software
Posted in Defining, Learned | No Comments »
November 26th, 2008
One question that frequently comes up when studying or researching a Bible study is “what are the references to and from this topic/word/phase/verse/passage/chapter”.
Let say I want to learn more about the “angel of the Lord“, what are the verses in the Bible that refer to this? (Genesis 16:7, Exodus 3:2, Numbers 22:22 …). What are the references out there that speaks about this topic? Wikipedia has a write up about it and there are many people who studied and wrote about it, like Angel of the LORD (this was just picked from the search result).
Considering online materials only, these might be broken down into three types of cross-references, namely
- Verses – Topic, Topic – Verses (Genesis 16:7 – angel of the lord)
- Topic – Online resources (angel of the lord – Wikipedia)
- Verses – Online resources (Genesis 16:7 – Wikipedia)
Not too long ago, I came across YouVersion while looking into Web2.0 in the context of Bible study and reference. Wouldn’t it be good if everyone’s effort put into researching a topic or passage could be captured and shared? It looks like YouVersion is moving in that direction. Very promising.
At this point, I’m still trying to crystallize my thoughts on what to do for my project. One important consideration is not to repeat what had already been done but to build upon existing work.
Tags: bible study, web 2.0, youversion
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November 15th, 2008
This website/project had been in my head for so long, it certainly felt like a great burden had been lifted-off to have now taken a small baby step in realizing it.
What is this project about?
At this stage everything is still a mist as to what it is or what it eventually will be. Various floating pieces are in my mind but I should not be talking about them before they are ripe. If it is God’s will, I will live and this project would take shape. The about page will be constantly updated to reflect what this project is about.
As for now, the name was decided – Glorious.Name.
Thinking of a domain name for this site took a long time since most of the nice .com names are already registered. Can’t remember what led me to change strategy and search for other TLD (that’s top level domain, like .com .net .name) but it was fruitful. Glorious.Name sounds great and catchy (you think?). Also it is my hope what this project does glorifies His glorious name.
With the name settled, the hosting for the website was purchase and this blog (using WordPress for the tech-inclined) was installed.
And so ends the first post to update and get this blog started …
Tags: about, name
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