Not too long ago there was a great post at Times and Seasons called “Royal Skousen’s 12 Questions – The Critical Text Version.”  This article is chock-full of notes on individual Book of Mormon verses – just the kind of thing I’d like to be able to see (when applicable) each time I hit a verse where this applies.  So I am going through and entering these notes from the article, into the ScriptureLog here.

As you can see, notes/comments in these pages do show up in Recent Comments, just as they would if a comment were entered on a blog post.

I am planning to do quite a bit of my Book of Mormon study using this blog and am looking forward to keeping notes from various sources as I go along.

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.

We are so excited that she is now a part of our lives!

I’ve installed it here and in the future I will see how it works.

In this post, it already prompted me to change a passive voice problem in my first sentence.

An oversized blank sketch book awaiting your artwork! Unlike most coffee table books, this one is blank. Weighing in at 8 lbs., it contains 348 sheets (696 pages) of 75 lb. acid-free paper. Each sheet measures 12-1/2″h x 10-3/4″w. Leave it on your coffee table and watch as the blank pages slowly fill up with treasured artwork from you, your family or friends. It makes a great gift and is a perfect way to remember and record good times shared with family and friends, or how your own art evolves over time.

You can find it for a better price at Dick Blick Art Supplies …

Anyway, you get a better feeling for how large this book is when you see it and hold it.

As far as I can tell, this is an item you can only order/purchase online.  I have not seen it in a store anywhere.  So whatever price you are seeing, you will have to throw postage on top of that cost.

Amazon.com has it too now.  They didn’t used to list it and I let them know I was interested.  A month or so later I found it was available.

Let them kill us,” said Sheik Khudair al-Allawi, the imam of a mosque bombed recently. “It’s a waste of their time. The sectarian card is an old card and no one is going to play it anymore. We know what they want, and we’ll just be patient. But they will all go to hell.”

This was not something I expected to read.

Maybe it’s Shiite Iraqis that are going to teach us about the power and significance non-violence.

How great is that?

I have a stapler on my desk.  It is a PaperPro brand stapler, the same one pictured above.

People often stop by my desk and use it and invariably after clicking it they stop, take another look at it as if it is a stapler from outer space and say “Wow, that’s a cool stapler.”

Over a period of a few years, I’ve heard at least a hundred people say this is “a cool stapler.”  That is the phrase that they use, over and over again.

It’s bizarre.  How can a stapler be cool?

Just minutes ago, a person I work with came by with her son and before she used the stapler she said to her son “this is the coolest stapler known to man.”

I am not exaggerating.  I am not making this up.  I am not being paid to write this.  I promise.

All I can say about this product is that it works well.  Previously in our office we were using another brand but their staplers would break down after a couple of weeks or use.  So we went online and actually looked for a stapler that had a good review – we consequently ended up with this PaperPro brand.  For what it is worth, it is a dependable and functional stapler.

The only thing I can say though is that the “coolness” commentary almost becomes annoying after awhile.  Sometimes I wish I could have a stapler that would just do it’s job and not elicit commentary or conversation.  But then again, it’s funny that this happens at all – so I put up with it.

I did find a blog post that figured out what happened and commented a little about it.  It is such a shame as this was a tool I used on a regular basis.

There were a lot of peacocks strutting about – there they are allowed to go pretty much wherever they want and they seem to often go into areas that would be restricted to other animals.

A couple of times we saw peacocks that were clearly confused and fascinated by their own reflections.  Below is a picture of a peacock that was pecking at its own reflection for perhaps as long as an hour.

In another location at the zoo, we saw four peacocks strutting about with their tail feathers fully extended.  Here is a picture of one of them.

But it dawned on me that this might actually be the perfect gift for my dad, who also is a bit of an environmentalist and supporter of good causes.  So yes, indeed, a composter for Christmas.  It is specially designed so that you can turn the compost easily – which is vital for proper decomposition.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought – but also got on the phone very quickly to speak with my Mom and sister about this possibility.  They both laughed as well and also agreed that this would be a great gift for Dad.

Now I finally have a picture.

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