The Power of Tools, or, You Have A Bible Now

I found a website that offers a number of html Bible downloads, in a variety of translations and versions. The idea is that you can download one to your computer, and then upload it to your website, and have a Bible on your website. Being a quintessential collector, I couldn’t resist giving it a try. I knew then that I just couldn’t be cool unless I had my very own Bible on my website. I already had Genesis through Deuteronomy up, but it took me a long time to do just those five books. It would take me months to format and upload the rest of the Bible in the same manner.

I read the license agreement on the html Bible. You can’t sell it, or take the author’s name off it, unless you modify it so beyond recognition that the author wouldn’t want his name associated with it. So of course that is what I did. The original is at www.htmlbible.com, and also www.johnhurt.com. John Hurt is the one who compiled it. He used a Microsoft database to compile it and export it to html. Consequently, it is in a table format.

My hat is off to John Hurt for doing all that work. There are a LOT of cool Bibles on his site. I settled on the King James Version, because I believe it is still the most widely read, and it is the only one that has been keyed to Strong’s dictionary numbers. With the King James Version and Strong’s Concordance, you can delve deep into the meanings in the original languages without being a linguist. I don’t know of any other version that offers that at this time. Unfortunately, John Hurt compiled his KJV in 2000, and he hasn’t updated the technology on it since then. I wasn’t fond of the format that he chose. The colors and background image are nice, but not anything like my website. I thought about using it as it is, but I really wanted to do better. The question is, how do you completely reformat 1200 html pages so that they all suit you? One by one, it would take me a year to do it.

Behold, I discovered a program called BK ReplaceEm. You can program it to search and replace text in multiple files. Not only that, but you can program it to do multiple search and replaces in one step. So first thing, I got rid of the table tags and everything else that was not useful to me, and inserted things that I felt were helpful or necessary. I programmed it to do 22 search and replace functions, on 1200 files. What would have surely taken me a year, took this little compact program about three minutes. I felt like I had just traveled through time. Annoyingly, I couldn’t get the full functionality out of the program, and had to hack my way through some of the processes. I think it is related to the fact that I am running linux and the program is written for windows.

I spent the next couple of days tweaking and debugging the pages to get them just right (hopefully… it’s hard to check 1200 pages and something might have been missed). Another program that was helpful was Html Tidy. It went through and corrected all the coding errors, and inserted all the relevant document declarations to make a well-formed xhtml page out of each file. And because it can run in a command line terminal with wild card file names, I was able to turn it on once and do all 1200 files in about 20 minutes. So about an hour of careful pre-programming, three minutes of search-and-replace, and twenty minutes of correcting and validating the code, and it was nearly ready. Another bunch of hours tweaking and debugging, and it was ready to upload. Check it out here.

One hard decision was whether to use a frame. Frames pages are problematic, and all the problems of frames pages can be worked around using a .css style sheet. However, in this case, the navigation links to surf the whole holy Bible added up to 80KB. Multiply that by 1200 files and it would take 100MB to achieve the nice results of the .css coding. Not only would that put 100MB on my server, but each chapter of the Bible would be 80-100KB in size, taking much too long to download. I finally settled on a frames page in order to spare the readers the 80KB Bible chapters, and go easy on my server’s bandwidth. There is one 80KB file, it loads up once, and it sits in the left frame while all the 2-6KB Bible chapters load on the right. In order to satisfy the search engines (and provide an alternative surfing experience), I also included a frameless navigation page as an optional link to the Bible verses. This was the most elegant solution that presented itself in terms of end result and speed of execution. It could probably be done better still by making a dynamic page that queries a database for each chapter, but since I am not fluent with database queries, that would have to wait for a much later day.

I really made the Bible my own by tying it to the same .css style sheet that controls the formatting of the main website. The Bible chapters look like my other pages. It just doesn’t get any cooler than that. One of these days I will work on re-formatting this blog so it looks like the main site also. That will require more time than I have at the moment to learn the php language and learn to build a Wordpress theme. Probably one day in the not too distant future I’ll get around to that.

Something else I accomplished over the last day was to join the Amazon affiliate program so that I can offer you books for sale. In particular, any books that seem relevant to a Biblical lifestyle or theology or economy, I can make available. Just click on the Store link above to see what is there. Right now it isn’t much because I just started it, but there are some good books there. My goal is to eventually offer an array of things which will be of unique interest to Law-Keepers. Lots of sites offer theological books; I want to offer mostly practical books and trust you with your own theology.

One thing I have noticed about websites that have a mountain of content is that it becomes impossible to find anything on the sites. One of my goals (and hardest challenges) is to put up a mountain of good content, without sacrificing navigation. It is my observation that good navigation is one of the most neglected arts in web design. Many people put a lot of effort into cute flash programs to animate their pages, and yet you can’t get to anything useful by clicking on any links.

Sleep is overcoming me. I at least need a nap. But I wanted to post this so that everyone can know that there are new and exciting things here this week. Again, I got the whole Bible uploaded to my website, and started an Amazon store for anyone who wants to spend their money on things that will enrich them. I’ll add the hyperlinks that belong in this article a little later. [Update: after a little sleep, the hyperlinks are there.]

Also, reformatting and uploading 1200 pages including all the chapters of the Bible feels like a real accomplishment. Therefore, I intend to take the rest of the week off and, among other things, do my day job. So I may not post until the weekend. Have a great week.