Posted by Geoff
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:30:00 GMT
Things have been pretty quiet around the eBible.com blog for the past couple of months. But do not mistake the tumbleweeds and the quiet whistle of the west winds as a sign of inactivity, for there has been much brewing in both the eBible.com camp and behind the scenes at Godspeed.
First of all, we’d like to thank those of you who responded to the eBible.com survey. I’ll have the iPod winner to announce in a few days, so stay tuned. We’ve learned a lot in our preliminary look at your criticism and praise, and will be implementing many of your suggestions in future releases. Which brings me back to where things are at with eBible.com.
1) Godspeed just bought out the joint partner in eBible.com to gain full control over the development of the site and the direction that things take. Now that we are in a position to do so, we want and NEED your help to make eBible.com everything it can be. We’re pumped about the changes you’ll soon see with eBible.com. We appreciate your patience, and thank you for all your support.
2) We have moved the site to a state of the art accelerator/container facility solution from TexDrive where the very best web 2.0 websites go to get supercharged. So what does this mean to you? Over the coming weeks, you will begin to notice improvements in performance (speed) and positive changes to overall stability. In a nutshell, blistering fast search results and improvements to all areas of the site’s performance will be gained through this transition. We heard you all loud and clear with your requests to increase the site speed and we hope to deliver on this very shortly.
3) We are launching a series of eBible.com subscriptions that will allow users to have instant, full time access to some of the best selling Bible reference content, in addition to other top secret benefits that we can’t share with you quite yet…
4) New Bible translations. With commitments to several new Bibles, we are happy to announce a rounding out of the available translations for Bible search with more to come as well.
5) Changes to the user interface. We have worked to just give you the search results when you type in a verse instead of returning the result in context which took more time to load. While this in depth, contextual mode of study is of course still available, we listened to your feedback and moved it to not be the default step after you type in your Bible verse. Just click “Study” to go deeper into your online Study Bible like before.
While these are just some of the highlights, we wanted to get in touch with everyone and give you the straight goods on where we are at and what everyone can expect in the coming days and weeks.
Posted in Site Status | 4 comments
Posted by Scott L
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:08:00 GMT
Ok so yes, the web site is now open to everyone but that doesn’t mean we still aren’t frantically adding things to make it better for everyone. This was our Toolkit release which means we are starting to put together a suite of tools for bloggers’ and developers to use on their own web sites which will hopefully help make it easier to share the word. We have been receiving great feedback from everyone and will continue to listen to the community and integrate your ideas into future updates and releases.
On the footer of every page you will now see a link to the new tools section which includes:
Tools for bloggers‘
- Weblog badges and buttons for you to download and use freely on your web site to link to eBible.com
- Add the eBible.com search box to your site to let your readers search the good word directly from your web page.
RSS Feeds
- Bookmark feeds for everyone’s and your own personal bookmarks.
Plugins
- IE toolbar and Firefox search plugins are now included in the toolkit.
- We are currently working on a ton of other plugins to help you integrate the power of eBible.com into some of your favorite applications.
Developer API’s
- We have opened up a JavaScript API that will let developers add bible text to their web sites just by entering the verse reference.
Besides the addition of the eBible.com toolkit, we have fixed and bunch of bugs as well as added two new bible translations. If you ever feel like brushing up on your Italian or Spanish, why not try these out for size.
We have also been receiving a lot of press lately from Time magazine to newspapers in Italy, and we hope we can reach as many people as we can.
Until next time, keep posting your feedback and we will keep reading it and working with you to make eBible.com better than ever!
2 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 Scott L
Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:26:00 GMT
As the public launch for eBible.com quickly approaches, all of us here are really turning things up to eleven and working extra hard to make the site the best we can for September 5th. We are extremely thankful to all the thousands of users who have helped us with testing, reported bugs, given us suggestions, feature ideas, and all the feedback we’ve received, good and bad. As we make our final push towards the release we ask for your prayers for us and our servers, and remember to tell your friends and church to check out eBible.com the second week of September. Also, we want everyone to know that development on the site won’t stop once it goes public, so remember to keep the suggestions and feedback coming because it will always be appreciated. Thanks again everyone!
5 comments
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 Geoff
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:01:00 GMT
Thanks for your patience everyone, but here is a contest update for the last several days of the “10 Tens of eBible.com” t-shirt giveaways. Your winners are as follows:
Alex Morganis. Alex wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Great work Alex.
Melissa Felkins. Melissa wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Appreciate it Melissa.
David Russell. David wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Nice Job David.
Dave Faulkner. Dave wrote several
blog entries of eBible.com. Some good stuff Dave, and some good humour too. I’m happy that your eBible.com invite giveaway’s were among your most memorable blogging experiences.
Jim Walton. Jim wrote a
review of eBible.com. Great work Jim, it’s great to know that you have an audience who is
interested in what eBible.com is all about.
Ben Askew. Ben wrote a couple of great
review of eBible.com. Thanks Ben, appreciate your entry.
Drew Moser. Drew wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Good show Drew.
Jason Powell. Jason wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Great work.
Kevin Hendricks. Kevin wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Thanks Kevin.
Mark Berry. Mark wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Great work.
Randy Pollock. Randy wrote a great
review of eBible.com. Thanks Randy, we loved your screenshots.
I have 2 more t-shirts to give out. So I’m going to be looking for a new blog post or site review that generates at least 10 comments from people looking for invites. If you need invites to give out, let me know and I’ll top you up. So, if you think you can post something on your blog that generates at least 10 comments regarding eBible.com, e-mail me and I’ll send you a t-shirt. Remember, only 2 available. First come first serve.
3 comments
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 Geoff
Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:03:00 GMT
For day #4, the two eBible.com t-shirt winners are as follows:
Jeremy Flint from the Godbit Project. Jeremy wrote a great
review of eBible.com early on. Great work Jeremy.
The second winner for Day #4 is Jeff Barnes for his objective review of eBible.com. Appreciate the time you took Jeremy. Thanks.
So, keep the e-mail’s coming to let me know that you’ve posted a review, painted eBible.com on the roads of the Tour De France or whatever other scheme you can come up with. Thanks everyone.
3 comments
Posted by Geoff
Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:17:00 GMT
Hope everyone enjoyed the holiday. Well to catch up on the 10 Days of eBible.com with the 3rd round of winners, I’ve had to do a lot of digging around. Thanks for those of you who e-mailed me with your stories and adventures to help spread the word about eBible.com.
For day #3 of the 10 Days of eBible.com, we have a
blog entry from Chris Marsden. Thanks Chris, nice work.
Today’s second winner is Gregory Nilsen for his blog entry. Thanks Greg.
So, with 3 of 10 days down, there is still plenty of time to get in on the swag giveaways. Because I’m too lazy rigth now to go and find new posts etc. the next 2 shirts will come from people who e-mail me with news of their blog post, review or other stunt of grandeur. Let me know!
Posted in Competitions | no comments
