Posted By danithew on October 26, 2009
Before I get into the tedious specifics, let me get right to the main announcement.
J. Max Wilson and I are very excited to introduce you to ScriptureLog.
ScriptureLog
Scripturelog is a free, open source plugin for the popular WordPress blogging platform that turns Wordpress into a collaborative online LDS scripture study journal.
The plugin installs volumes of scripture into Wordpress as hierarchical, inter-linking pages of books, chapters, and verses. Once the pages are installed, you can use the built-in features of Wordpress by yourself or in collaboration with others to read the scriptures, take notes, and discuss the gospel.
ScriptureLog can be used by a family or a study group to read and comment on the scriptures from a distance. It can be used by a Sunday school, seminary, or school religion class to allow for preparatory or follow up discussion by class members on the scriptures being studied for a class. It can be set up on an local network for private use or hosted publicly.
Go check it out right now at http://www.scripturelog.com and then come back here.
Features
ScriptureLog benefits from all of the great features of Wordpress. And there are scores of free plugins and themes that can be used to customize the site to your liking: plugins to make the site private, or to require registration; plugins to allow people to subscribe to be notified of comments by email; plugins to allow people to login using Facebook or Open ID; plugins to interface with twitter.
Currently only the Book of Mormon is available. It is organized in a way to help readers understand the textual structure of the book. Though not yet available for download, the code for the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price is substantially complete. However we are still working on an organization that helps illuminate some of the textual structure of these other books, like we have for The Book of Mormon, so we have not made them available quite yet.
Every ScriptureLog page links to the corresponding section at the official LDS Scriptures website.
Because it is open source and built on Wordpress, the plugin is open to innovation by others. Wordpress has a well documented plugin API and we hope that in addition to suggesting patches to the plugin itself, other developers will produce companion plugins to enhance features.
How ScriptureLog Came To Pass
Years ago J. Max Wilson and I met at small gathering of LDS bloggers held at the home of a mutual friend in Salt Lake City. At the time he was blogging mostly anonymously under the moniker (and at a blog called) Ebenezer Orthodoxy. Under that name he was already known for helping some LDS bloggers with blogging-related coding needs that they had. One of my favorite things that he did was to create a much better alternate commenting system for blogspot.com blogs – something that at the time I felt was woefully needed.
I was impressed by his coding talents and willingness to help others – as well as his creative energy. Besides coding and other things, he worked with puppets (and still does), which I thought was pretty original and cool.
As we communicated more over time, I also came to realize that J. Max and I had a mutual passion for the LDS Church, the gospel and the scriptures. He was already using his coding abilities to seek to enhance scripture study and create scripture study tools – something I was also interested in developing.
Over an extended period of time we chatted and shared our thoughts and ideas and interests with each other. Sometimes J. Max would show me things he was working on and I would try to help him test some of them out. I also had some scripture-project ideas I was working on and not being much of a programmer myself, needed a coder. I began to ask J. Max for reactions to ideas, to find out if he thought they were feasible and eventually began to ask him if he could code certain programs that I needed. He was generous with his time and talents and it became obvious to me that J. Max was particularly gifted. I could describe to him what I wanted and he would either create exactly that thing or even provide me with something that was value-added.
At the end of 2007 I paid J. Max to write a custom program for me. I was hand-coding an html website for the Book of Mormon and needed a way to automate (and thus speed up) this process. In a short period of time J. Max produced a program that would parse text files containing scriptures and then generate thousands of static HTML files based upon customizable templates. Again I was really impressed because J. Max was able to take a specific set of ideas that I described and turn it into the program that was needed.
The program worked perfectly – it did everything that I had asked for and more. But the final result was still not entirely satisfying. This was not J. Max’s fault – it was simply a realization that additional steps needed to be taken to make the program more user-friendly and more useful overall. I realized more and more that we needed an open-source, downloadable, adaptable, scripture-study program that would make it easy for a student of the scriptures to record comments, notes and insights. I also realized that the model I was looking for was already provided by WordPress. I had been a fan of WordPress for a long time and realized it provided exactly the functionality I was seeking.
I called J. Max Wilson and the phone and asked him how hard it would be to import the html scripture pages (generated by the program he created for me) into a Wordpress MySql database. He told me it was very possible and had some immediate ideas about how to do it. At that point we both became very excited about the prospects. I wanted to pay him to work on it, but after looking into it J. Max was so excited about his idea that he offered to do it for free. In addition to the aspects of the program that interested me, he realized that Wordpress offered all of the things he had wanted to do with his own scripture study service: user management, tagging, RSS feeds, plugins, and developer API.
J. Max had seen himself as merely a technical advisor to the project, but it became obvious to me that his participation and talents were essential to getting this to happen and also so that the project could progress in the future, after the initial release was created and made available to people. So I asked J. Max to partner with me and he accepted.
I enjoy working with J. Max and we look forward to not only eventually making all the scriptures available for Wordpress, but also to develop ways that we can apply this blog-and-a-book technology to other forms of great literature.
Sources of Inspiration
President Ezra Taft Benson, in his famous sermon on the Book of Mormon said:
“The time is long overdue for a massive flooding of the earth with the Book of Mormon for the many reasons which the Lord has given. In this age of the electronic media and the mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way.”
On 15 December 2007, Elder M. Russell Ballard (of the Quorum of the Twelve) gave a talk titled “Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church”
He gave this talk to graduating students at BYU Hawaii but also directed some of his thoughts to the general membership of the church.
Some excerpts from the talk read:
“Today we have a modern equivalent of the printing press in the Internet and all that it means. The Internet allows everyone to be a publisher, to have their voice heard, and it is revolutionizing society. Before the Internet, there were great barriers to printing. It took money, power, or influence and a great amount of time to publish. But today, because of the emergence of what some call New Media, made possible by the Internet, many of those barriers have been removed. New Media consists of tools on the Internet that make it possible for nearly anyone to publish or broadcast to either a large or a niche audience. I have mentioned some of these tools already, and I know you are familiar with them. The emergence of New Media is facilitating a world-wide conversation on almost every subject including religion, and nearly everyone can participate. This modern equivalent of the printing press is not reserved only for the elite … Now, to you who are graduating today and all other faithful members of the Church, as you graduate from this wonderful university, may I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple, clear terms the message of the Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true.”
ScriptureLog represents the culmination of our personal attempts to find ways to better study the scriptures, in particular the Book of Mormon, and we hope that it can contribute to the fulfillment of President Benson’s prophetic vision and also to positive uses of New Media to support the ongoing work and mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Category: LDS, LDS Blogs |
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Tags: Book of Mormon, ScriptureLog, WordPress plugins
