For those of you who enjoy blogging, but wonder what would happen to all your writing if the entire computer world disappeared, here's your answer: BlogBinders.com - Turn your blog into reality.
Not a bad idea at all.
Maybe some day we could publish a "Best of Ben's Friends" blog binder.
In my often confused, finite brain I had been looking at grace all wrong.
Grace in my mind had been the thing that rescues me when I don't get it right. The thing I hadn't really thought of, was that I never get things right.
God's grace gives us the ability to do what's right. Without it, doing right is impossible. "All our righteousness is as filthy rags."
Without Him there is nothing.
In Him, there is Life and Peace.
This is the urgency: Live!
And have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
--Gwendolyn Brooks
The Linked Word Project is an online Bible application built by BJU's Web Technologies department. It allows users to search the KJV, link to passages, and cross link to Strong's Concordance entries.
The project was originally built from a bunch of generated HTML files. It worked well enough, but the design was hard coded into each file, and updating was beginning to look like a daunting task.
When we began the project we did a lot of research on different Bible technologies available. During our search we came across OSIS. OSIS is an XML vocabulary for "marking up" (as in markup languages) the Bible and other related texts. Using OSIS gave us some abilities that we wouldn't have had with other applications or databases.
One of the key features we focused on was creating user friendly URLs. The idea was to design the Linked Word Project in such a way that people could easily link to Scripture without having to copy and past the URL. They could simply remeber the structure once they learned it and link to any section of Scripture.
The book abbreviations we used are the standard abbreviations set down by the OSIS Project.
Here's an example:
http://www.bju.edu/bible/ps.94.17
Can you guess where that goes? 8o)
It's a lot better than Bible Gateway's linking:
http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=psalm+94%3A17&version=KJV
Not quite as user friendly.
With the Linked Word you can also do ranges:
http://www.bju.edu/bible/ps.94.17-ps.94.19
There were/are plans to incorporate multiple versions and languages. The URLs would then become something like this:
for languages:
http://www.bju.edu/bible/en/ps.94.17
http://www.bju.edu/bible/jp/ps.94.17
for translations:
http://www.bju.edu/bible/nasb/ps.94.17
http://www.bju.edu/bible/en/nasb/ps.94.17 (same just more specific)
The underpinnings for that kind of URL structure is already there. It wouldn't take much to extend it. Just need the other translations/languages added.
Hopefully the easy URLs will be a help to people needing to link to passages in e-mails or applications. At one time there was also a plan to have the web site offer OSIS versions of the verses simply by adding a ".osis" extension on the end. From what I can tell, that's still in place. I don't know if the markup is up to date or not. We used OSIS 1.1 and OSIS is now in 1.5.
Try adding ".osis" to the end of your URLs if you'd like to see what's behind it all. 8o)
In the future I hope the univeristy continues to expand the project. It was one of the projects I enjoyed most, and one that seemed to have the greatest possible return on investment.
Beyond MVC: A New Look at the Servlet Infrastructure got me thinking about the MVC design pattern again.
Of late, most of my work has been with PHP-based Open Source projects. Each of them incorporate different design patterns. Most of which prove to be frustrating at some level.
Having worked with Cocoon, I remember well the advantages and disadvantages of an MVC like structure. The concepts talked about in the article helped put some pieces of the puzzle back into place.
I'd been hoping for an MVC focused PHP framework, but after reading the article I'm rather glad there isn't one. There does need to be some framework though. At least, I'd like to have one.
The DataSource, Action, Workflow concept would carry over fairly well. The ideas are cementing themselves in my mind, and there are some definite conclusions on the horizon.
