Calling all Webmasters, Bloggers and Developers
Posted by Mark Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:17:00 GMT
Last night we launched a new Javascript API called eBibleicious. Why did we call it that? Well … why not is the better question?
It is a very simple way to make your blog, CMS or website eBibleicious. Just one line in fact to make every Bible reference on your site come alive in 4 cool ways. So check it out and let us know how we can make it better. The idea is to now use it to make really simple blog and CMS plugins for the world. The first one is a simple Wordpress plugin that should be out in the next week or so (email me if you want to help test it now).
But the bigger story here is that we are looking for help with a lower-level API – the ultimate eBible webservice. In two years we have built a strong foundation of backend code and licensed some great Bibles and reference content to match. We are using Ruby on Rails and so doing a REST-like API that returns beautiful XHTML is pretty straight forward. The goal is to open up our platform so that no developer will ever have to go through all the pain and expense fun that we did. The feature requests we keep getting are awesome but we will never be able to build every online Bible related feature or service or application out there. That is where you … and the eBible.com API come into play.
So let’s hear what you want specifically in an API, what you want first, or what you want to build with an API to help work backwards from there.
Awesome! Beautiful! Mouseover mode rules, why would one use anything else?
Congrats to Mark, Scott, and everyone else.
Hey, I love the new features and need to play with it soon, but I have to ask: can you add a feature to return non-styled verses? It is a pain trying to integrate this into websites when it has it’s own style.
I agree with James. We are launching a large church site next week and would love to use this, but we want our own styling.
Love, let me repeat, Love the new feature. Just started with eBible and was working to produce this exact effect (mouseover).
Couple of requests: Like the previous commentors, I would like to see an unstyled version.
Would also like to see the entire passage returned and the div set to overflow:auto or like above let us style everything.
Could use a “close” link in the mouseover div for those users that won’t think to click outside the div.
References like Luke 24:1-16, 28-36 only pick up the 1-16 verses but not sure how you would code around that.
Last, I would like to see the new_window parameter apply to the links in the mouseover div. I have no problem giving eBible credit and presence but don’t want the users to lose the originating site.
Thanks,
Sam Lewis
James, Jason and Sam:
We are working on a “theme” parameter right now and “theme=none” returns no CSS style. Will update the documentation on what CSS class names are as well.
Am I hearing that the mouseover mode should be the default? :-)
ATTENTION: We just changed eBibleicious so that you now have to include a CSS file in the header as well for mouseover and snippet modes.
The page has been updated to reflect this and moving forward all changes will be backwards compatible or use a different VERSION in the script include.
Sorry for the inconvenience but between the comments above and the emails we got today it was clear people needed a standard way to stylize the mouseover popups and snippets themselves.
Hope this is good news and we will keep working to clean stuff up and add more features at your requests.
If you create any Blog or CMS plugins that automatically include eBiblicious in the header, please contact us and we’ll put it up for everyone.
If you want to take help with development of ASP, contact me, i will help for free for God Name. Contact me in this blog, i will come next week.
I LOVE this!!! This just cut down my time considerably!
I just went to use it, and you removed a feature that was available in the old API. The ability to retrieve a verse at any time. I developed a Bible search and wanted to go and use this new API (I have it working on the old one) and what it did is you typed in the verse and hit search, and AJAX sent the query and retrieved the result to show on the page. Now I cannot do this?
James – email me at the link in the post above to figure this out. We have not disabled or changed the previous ebSnippet stuff you were using so everything should be fine. We do have plans of a more generic API though that will more easily apply to what you are doing. In the meantime though there should be no problem doing the old JSON calls.