Posted by Mark
Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:58:00 GMT
Happy Easter to all you eBiblers! We have something more relevant than chocolate eggs to celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ this year – more ways to use, understand and share the Word of God. That is right, a big new release of eBible.com has just gone live. Here is a rundown of the major changes:
Premium memberships
Basic membership accounts at eBible.com will always be free but we have just introduced a premium membership option for those who want a little bit more from their online Bible. This is a way for those of you who believe in this project to help towards the continued innovation and improvement of the site. See the details here but the basic idea is more content, more features and no ads for $99/year (only about $8/month).
And I see we have a few more eBible.com t-shirts laying around so why don’t we say that we’ll send the first 20 premium members one. Upgrade here! (and as a heads up we will be including a discount coupon code in next week’s first eBible.com newsletter. if you want one now, email us and tell us how you are going to spread the word about eBible and we’ll see what we can do for ya)
User Profiles
eBible.com has quickly become a worldwide community of people seeking God through His Word. But we haven’t provided a good way for everyone to get to know each other up until now. The next time you login you should be directed to your settings page where you should fill out some more information about yourself. Maybe even upload a photo like Lisa has already. Let other eBiblers know what part of the world you’re from, the church you attend, your favorite verse or passage, your testimony and more.
eBible Points
eBible Points is a new way to recognize the people who are using and sharing God’s Word through eBible.com. The more time you spend with your favorite online Bible, the more points you will accrue. While eBible points won’t get you free trips around the world, they will give others an indication about your seniority at the site. Everyone starts off as an “eBible Novice” and with enough points you will soon be an “eBible Enthusiast”. Here is how you can work your way up to the highest status, “eBible Scholar”:
Advanced Search
Our ever improving search engine now has new tricks up its sleeve to help you retrieve that verse you kind of remember and help you discover new ones using keywords and topics. Just click the advanced search link to reveal advanced search options or directly enter the new syntax in the search box yourself.
- Search for a specific phrase by putting quotes around your search (“light of the world”)
- Search for phrases that DO NOT include certains words by putting a minus in front of the term (“light of the world” -city)
- Limit your search to only one or more specific Bible translations (love NASB)
- Narrow your search to a specific section or book of the Bible by including it right in the query (love Pentateuch)
Did you mean __?
Looking at the webserver logs it is clear that users have a tough time spelling many of the big words in the Bible just like us. I mean how are you supposed to find verses about Nebachnezzar when you can’t spell it?! Introducing …. eBible.com’s new Did you mean feature:
Besides the above features there are a bunch of bugfixes in this latest release thanks to the emails we have received from all of you. Now it is your turn to let us know how we can make your online Bible better. We need to keep hearing from you. Even if you have emailed or posted a blog comment before … let us know again by posting a comment below.
Finally, brethren, farewell. Become complete. Be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. (2 Corinthians 13:11)
Posted in Releases | 13 comments
Posted by Scott L
Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:33:00 GMT
We’re open!
After more than a year of planning, alpha and beta releases, late night cravings for Chinese food, the site is finally open to the public! Yes that’s right, you no longer have to beg eBible bloggers for an invitation, you can now create your own account!
We even worked through the loss of a dear friend.
Since the last release, we’ve had close to 100 bug fixes and UI enhancements
later, we’re open. Among the bug fixes and new features:
Bible Browser:
- Bolding of search terms within your bible search results
- Highlighted verse stays highlighted in the Bible Browser
- Changing Bible translations loads using Ajax
Bookmarks
- Bookmark results now indicate how many public notes are available
- Clicking on a name in the bookmark pages shows the user’s profile
- New link to toggle the display type for bookmarks (list | cloud)
- Duplicates in bookmark listings eliminated
- Limited the size of the tag clouds on the left side
New Titles Available
- Hayford’s Bible Handbook
- Talk Thru the Bible
Misc
- Fixed the broken back button.
- Removed the need to be logged in to search the Bible, and view most
content
- Changed the invite system to be fully an invitation to your community
- ‘Song of Solomon’ book name now handled properly
- We’ve purchased new servers to handle the increased traffic, and to set us
up for better scalability
- Verse pop-ups now display the translation with the verse
- Bookshelf, Account Settings and Community are all managed under the
‘settings’ area instead of in 3 places
- There is a loading animation to show that something is happening when
opening new translations or parallel bibles
- There is an eBible.com tour to show new users around the site
Check it out at http://www.eBible.com.
As happy as we are with the site at this point, we’re always looking for new
ideas and bugs to fix, so let us know what you think at http://discuss.ebible.com.
Thanks to our more than 5500 beta users who helped us with suggestions,
comments, and finding bugs. Thanks also to everyone who posted on their
blogs about the site. We couldn’t have done it without you!
On another note,
If anyone finds my car keys let me know, I want to go home.
The eBible.com team
Posted in Releases | 9 comments
Posted by James
Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:02:00 GMT
We’re open! Close to 100 bug fixes and UI enhancements later, we’re open… check it out at http://www.eBible.com
More to come soon…
Posted in Releases | 1 comment
Posted by James
Fri, 04 Aug 2006 18:25:00 GMT
Our server was down for a bit this week, thanks in large part to a rogue log file. But everything is up and running again now. We should be moving the site to faster servers in the next few weeks. But on to this release…
To be honest, we had no name to this release until about 5 minutes ago… why did we choose the name “And friends are friends forever…”? I’m not sure… maybe it has to do with the fact that for 5 years in high school and university fellowships, it was pounded into my brain every time someone was graduating, moving away, leaving on missions, or out to grab a loaf of bread and some milk. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Smitty’s a great guy, and Friends is great song, but you would think some other artist at the time would’ve realized the revenue potential in tear jerking parting songs, and capitalized on it at some point, thus saving us from mind numbing repetition… maybe the magic was in the key change just before the 7th repetition of the chorus… but I digress… On with the details of the goodies in this release…
Community
One of the biggest changes you’ll notice is the sense of ‘community’. Yes, it is a Christian buzz word, much like ‘journey’, ‘seasons’, and ‘exegeses’, but on eBible.com, your community is a way to share and read bookmarks (which consists of notes and tags) from a smaller group of people, than the whole eBible.com user base. Those bookmarks are still available through the “Everyone’s” links you’ll see around the bookmarks area.
You can invite new people to your community, but unlike the name of the release, friends aren’t necessarily forever… you can remove them. For your convenience, we have pre populated your community with the people you have invited, and the person you were invited by.
Some UI stuff
- Parallel Bibles now open up asynchronously… uh.. that’s pretty techy… um… it’s slicker!
- The popup menu can now be accessed by clicking on the verse number
- There is a new context menu on the left side so you can see where you are in relation to other stories, sections, and books in the bible
- We have removed the auto complete functionality from the Bible and Answers search boxes as it seemed to be more of a hindrance than a help
- You can now switch commentary versions right from the commentary callouts in the Bible browser.
- Bookmarks are now highlighted
- Left and Right arrow functionality has been restored so you can use them to navigate to the previous/next chapters of the Bible respectively.
Pages of Wisdom, Knowledge, and Understanding
We realize the features of eBible.com keep growing, and some features are becoming a bit muddy in terms of how to use them, and when they are available. To help explain some of the things, we have put up some articles
here.
Outside of that, we’ve done some bug fixing, but those are boring and not worth talking about. Unfixed bugs though, are worth talking about. Please post them on our forums so we can improve the site more.
Thanks again,
The eBible.com Team
Posted in Releases | 1 comment
Posted by James
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:05:00 GMT
Mark’s been away the last week and a bit on his honeymoon to Italy, which we imagine, is amidst a week-long celebration. I’ve been to a few celebrations in Italy in the past, though nothing remotly on this scale… ah, to be in Italy…
But, while the cat’s away, we’ve been doing some more cleaning, rather rewriting. Specifically of the Bible browser. Much of the functionality has remains unchanged, though we haven’t ported all of the previous functionality over. Why did we do this? The old code was getting to an unmanageable state, and would have requred extensive changes to work with some of the new things we wanted to incorporate.
Some things you’ll notice in this release:
- There is a new menu when you right click on verses.
- You can add your own bookmarks/notes, that will be shareable at some point, though not yet. This was one of the more popular feature requests, and we agree… a great idea. Thanks!
- Commentaries are accessible through the right click menu. You can minimize the menus by clicking on the title bar of the commentary. If you want to get the commentary out of the way completely, you can drag it over to the left sidebar where it will remain. Minimizing also works in the left sidebar.
- Scrolling up and down should be smoother as you read the Bible.
- The left and right arrows to go to the previous and next chapter aren’t working yet, with this new bible browser. It will be added back as we have time.
- We have added autocomplete functionality to the Bible and Answers search box. While not perfect, it is a start.
Thanks to those who continue to provide feedback, and spread the news… even in Italia!
James
Posted in Releases | 2 comments
Posted by Scott L
Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:18:00 GMT
With all the back-end spring cleaning we did on the last release we thought we would extend the favor to everyone and make things just a little bit more user friendly and intuitive. We’ve also made the browsing of different content available so you can wander and discover things you never knew. Like this.
We’re happy to see people are starting to use the bookmarking feature and as of right there are 712 saved bookmarks and counting. We’ve added the ability to edit and delete your bookmarks as well as made the viewing of them a little bit more intuitive and clean. Searching continues to lead the way with over 128,000 bible searches so far!
As usual continue to post your comments and feedback at discuss.ebible.com because we actually do read and use it!
Posted in Releases | 6 comments
Posted by Mark
Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:13:00 GMT
Or as we like to call it, our first “invisible release”. Today we went live with a new version of eBible.com … and nobody will probably even notice the fruit of our hard work.
You see, we have been getting so many great ideas from people that we knew in order to better keep scaling the site and adding features a good old fashioned spring cleaning was in order. So you won’t see many changes but hopefully you feel a bit warmer inside knowing that behind the scenes things are now all shiny and clean. :-)
(And not just spray-it-with-some-perfume kind of clean, we are talking real scrub-it-hard-with-mr-clean-even-behind-the-fridge kinda clean!)
So this has paved the way nicely for our June 20th release. Stay tuned for more details on what is next in the eBible.com journey.
Posted in Releases | 8 comments
Posted by James
Thu, 01 Jun 2006 19:19:00 GMT
After weeks of hard work, late nights, and many a befuddled look, bug.alicio.us err… tag.alicio.us has finally been deployed. Most of you who have been using the site will see a ton of changes. Some subtle, some not so much.
Among the new features and enhancements:
- Tagging and bookmarking
- Images in some titles:
- Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Dictionary
- Nelson’s New Illustrated Manners and Customs
- Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary
- Smith’s Bible Dictionary
- ESV is now available – Thanks for letting the publisher know you love and want their Bible!
There are a few more things to tidy up and fix in the few days. Thanks for giving us feedback and finding bugs!
James
Posted in Releases | 4 comments
Posted by Scott L
Wed, 03 May 2006 19:58:00 GMT
Yesterday was a huge day on all of our calendars as it marked the official beta launch of ebible.com. We want to welcome all of you who have been let in from the line as well as those that have been invited by current members. We have given every new member one invitation so that you can invite someone to create their own account and help “spread the word.? Stay tuned as we continually add new content, and believe me there is a TON more on its way!
We have noticed a few blog postings about the site and are excited what people are saying. Tim Bednar over at e-church has written up a great review, as well as Ryan Heneise from art of mission.
For those of you that have been here since the last release, here are some new features:
- loads of new content! You can see all the titles in your bookshelf by clicking on your name in the nav-bar. You can also set your defaults for each type.
- The store is here! You can now search and browse from thousands of Christian books.
- Shortcuts to the answers section from within the bible search results.
Remember, if you want to check out what other people are saying about specific parts of the site, or if you want to start your own discussion then head over to http://discuss.ebible.com.
Posted in Releases | 44 comments
Posted by Scott L
Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:13:00 GMT
Well we sent out a huge schwack of invites last night to people waiting in the line, and I want to welcome all the new Alpha users to eBible.com. We also released a bunch of bug fixes and we are gearing up for our biggest release yet. After many months of hard work we are approaching a huge milestone on May 2nd, and that milestone is: BETA Launch! I know its a pretty overused word lately, it seems like every new “Web two-point-oh?-ish site out there has the four letters B-E-T-A printed right underneath their new and shiny logo and for most people it doesn’t mean anything, and you know what, it shouldn’t. For us however it means something huge, it means users. We are going to start inviting more and more people every day to use eBible.com and hopefully enjoy using it. We will also start handing out invites so that you can invite friends and family to come sign-up for a free account. So all you people still in line, just hang tight, it shouldn’t be too long now!
Posted in Releases | 3 comments
