Posted by Mark
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:36:00 GMT
Congratulations to our Premium members who now have high quality streaming (128 kbps) of an amazing new audio Bible from an all-star cast including Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ). Basic users can also listen chapter by chapter to the 25 hours of New Testament in lower quality (16 kbps) due to extra bandwidth costs involved in streaming media of this nature. We are very excited about our partnership with The Word of Promise folks and would encourage everyone to not only upgrade to Premium and enjoy the high quality streaming version online but also to visit http://thewordofpromise.com to purchase other products or gifts for Christmas. It really is a great way to enjoy God's Word – we have spent hours and hours in testing listening to it and just love it. Enjoy!
Login and start listening to John 1.
Posted in Releases | Tags audio, twop | 1 comment
Posted by Mark
Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:39:00 GMT
We had some great feedback from August’s newsletter and some small but major changes are now live. A big part of the vision of eBible.com is engaging with the Bible as the Story of God and His people. It is easy to get caught up in the science of scripture references (book chapter:verse) and forget that these are stories and letters written by people and inspired by the Holy Spirit. Too often the Bible is taken out of context by simply quoting a single verse here and there to back up your point. Well … today we have made some changes to recommit to that goal of keeping the Bible in context. Click around on a few verse or passage references and you will see that we now display the whole story or section for added context. We even scroll down to your selection if it is deep within the section. Reading, studying and learning God’s Word is difficult with no context so we hope you agree this is an important change.
This isn’t the final word though so we want to get some feedback on this different approach. What do you think?
Posted in Releases | 3 comments
Posted by Mark
Thu, 21 Jun 2007 05:50:00 GMT
eBible.com is proud to announce the availability of Today’s New International Version.
In other news, we made another major optimization on the site so hopefully you are now getting the Good Word delivered that much quicker to your browser!
Keep reading, studying, bookmarking and inviting others to join our growing online Bible study community. Glory to God for all He has and will do with eBible.com!
Posted in Releases | Tags speed, tniv | 4 comments
Posted by Scott L
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:11:00 GMT
Drum roll please…
Well you asked for it, and now you got it! Yes, one of the most read and most trusted Bible translations is now here for you reading and searching delight. We are always excited to unveil new features to you guys, but this is something that many of you have been asking for and we are happy to bring it to you. We have been working hard for a long time to bring the NIV to eBible.com and we want to thank IBS-STL Global, the new ministry formed by the March 2007 merger of International Bible Society and Send The Light, for making it available. The NIV is now the default Bible for eBible.com visitors and if you are a basic or premium user you can make it your personal default by simply clicking here. We are constantly listening and improving the site based on your suggestions so the more feedback we get from you the better we can make eBible.
Two Thumbs up!
Another new feature we added this week was the ability to vote on user notes for a specific passage. What better way to test out the wisdom of crowd’s theory then to let people vote on what they think the most and least helpful notes are. You are only allowed to vote once per note so make it count! The more positive votes a note receives the higher in the list it will appear. The idea behind the voting is that we want to see the best notes for a passage start to rise to the top, so help everyone out and give a note a thumbs up or down.
Posted in Releases | Tags niv | 2 comments
Posted by Scott L
Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:50:00 GMT
Another week, another eBible release. This past week we have been working at making the eBible user profiles a little bit more spiffy. We wanted to show more relevent data and let everybody see how others were using eBible.com.
Besides showing the usual member essentials, we wanted to create more of a portal with all the recent and relevent activity showing for everybody to see. We are now showing a users’ latest commentary on passages, topic cloud, latest bookmarks and list of friends. Each of these sections let you drill down and discover more about that user in each of those areas.
Communities get a face
You may have also noticed that communites are now linked to a community details page listing all the vitals and members of that community. The addition of the community page is a start towards our push of trying to connect everybody with all of the people they study the Bible with in real life.
I get by with a little help from my friends
We see a lot of you are starting to create friends with other members of the site. I’m sure many of you are wondering why there is no direct way to contact or talk with other members of the site. The reason we havent added any real discussion features is, well, top secret at the moment, but I want you to know it is coming! In the mean time keep writing those notes in your bookmarks because if make those public then other people will see them and maybe even learn from them!
Posted in Releases | 1 comment
Posted by Mark
Wed, 30 May 2007 17:45:00 GMT
First of all, thanks to all of you for using and participating in eBible.com. Together we serve the living God, the King of Kings and we are excited about the small part eBible.com will play in connecting us to each other and to Him through His Word.
Make sure you take a second to add your church as one of your communities so we can continue towards our goal of better connecting everyone as they use the site. Last night we pre-populated our communities database with 20,000 Canadian Churches so that many of you in Canada (like us!) will be able to find your church straight away.
Multiple Passages Support
We have started to redesign the main page where Bible passages are displayed. We call this the “quickview” page opposed to the “studybrowser” page where the Bible is also displayed with more study features available. One of the reasons for the changes is to support multiple passage lookup. If you have a list of verses or passages that you want to look up you can just enter them all at once separated by spaces or commas. Here is an example:
matthew 22:30, hebrews 13:4, luke 20:34-35, 1 Corinthians 7
Share on Facebook
Another change available on the quickview page as well as other places on the site is ability to share on facebook. For all those out there who do not know what Facebook is …. you will …and this is just a simple way to share a Bible verse with a friend on Facebook or post it to your Facebook profile.
Topics Autofill
Now you can more easily browse the Bible by topic with the new autofill searchbox on the Bookmarks tab. Just start typing and see all the topic suggestions you can find related verses for.
Posted in Releases | 2 comments
Posted by Mark
Wed, 23 May 2007 16:00:00 GMT
A new version of the site went live last night and here are the highlights:
Friends and Communities
eBible.com is about sharing the Bible with others and most of us are already doing that in some form “offline” in our everyday lives. For many of us this is through specific communities such as a church, ministry or school that we attend. Our goal is to reflect these communities online at eBible.com so everyone can extend their fellowship and Bible study among these communities online.
Everyone who signs up for an account at eBible.com can now find and add their church from our database of churches. (If it is not there they can quickly request it to be added). Everyone else who already has an account is encouraged to go to the new “Communities” tab in their Settings to find and add their church community as well. All of this is an effort to help people better connect with others at eBible.com who are also involved in the same church, ministry or school community.
You will also notice that you can add individual “friends” in order to share bookmarks, notes and topics with each other. (Just a bit of name changing here from “My Community”)
View other people’s friends
When viewing someone’s eBible.com profile you will now see a button to “View Friends”. This is a great way to see others who are using the site and add them to your own list of friends. Here is an example
Personal Commentary
Another new button on each profile is “Personal Commentary” which is just a simple view of all the person’s shared notes on the Bible. The notes are in canonical (Gen-Rev) order and is a good way to find people who you may want to add as a friend if they have some insights you find interesting. Here is an example
Related Topics
I love this new feature. On every bookmark search we now display a list of related topics that helps you find even more great passages. Look at the left sidebar on this search for redemption for example.
Bible Search Changes
We have tweaked our Bible search algorithm a bit and are really liking the new results on many searches. Give it a try and let us know if you are able to recover verses you kind of remember and discover new verses on a topic or issue.
As always there has been some bug fixes and work on optimization in this release and we look forward to much more in the coming weeks and months! Post your thoughts, comments and feedback below as comments.
Posted in Releases | 2 comments
Posted by Mark
Thu, 10 May 2007 20:09:00 GMT
Many of you have already installed our eBible.com Toolbar to quickly search the Bible and more from any webpage. Well for others out there who have the Google Toolbar installed we now have an eBible.com custom button that you can add on. Installing the custom button is as simple as clicking on this link and it will allow you to search eBible from the main search box as well as have the Verse of the Day always 1-click away on your Google Toolbar. You can always delete our button at a later date under Settings > Options > Buttons on the Google Toolbar. Let us know what you think.
Posted in Releases | Tags plugin | 1 comment
Posted by Mark
Tue, 08 May 2007 21:21:00 GMT
The last week was the first steps towards optimizing the site to get you your Bible and study resources quicker. To decrease the time it takes to load a webpage at eBible.com we used some tricks to reduce the number and size of javascript and CSS files involved in a Web 2.0 site such as this. (sorry for the geek speak)
We have noticed some improvement but we are hoping you do as well. Click around and let us know if we are crazy or not :-)
Note: The study browser was broken for the last 24 hours as we attempted to optimize that page as well. It is fixed now but unfortunately it is still not fully optimized due to some problems that will have to wait till the next round of optimizations.
Posted in Releases | no comments
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.
Posted in Releases | Tags api, developers | 10 comments
