Friday, November 30, 2007
In-person is best
Long story short, none of them had actually failed, it was just an easily resolved configuration hiccup. Oh well, I have a new drive coming in the mail for when it really is needed.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
The Fix...
I did not have any spare replacement drives, so I had to order one. Once that arrives I can replace the bad disk, and run a rebuild. Once that is complete, BibleShared.com will return.
Keep watching this blog for status updates. If you need an online bible in the meantime, I would recommend BibleGateway.com.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Outage Cause
I'm not on-site until later tonight, so I won't be able to do anything about it until then, but it could be a few days to get a replacement drive and get everything back and operational.
This is actually the third hard disk failure I've personally experienced in the last 2 weeks. All of them happening on Dell-built computers. It's really becoming frustrating.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Random Downtime
I hate to report it, but it is so: BibleShared.com is currently down, and I have no clue as to why. Well, okay, I have some clues as to why. There's really two main servers that make BibleShared.com happen. One of them (the database server) is not responding remotely (from anywhere in the world), or locally (from it's best friend server). In the past outages have generally been due to extended power outages and the like, but this one is a little bit different.
I live about 30 miles from the server in question, but I'm headed up there tonight to see what I can do. If it's a fairly straight-forward issue (read: does not require the purchase of new hardware), I should have it fixed and working tonight.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Friday, October 26, 2007
New Feeds & Group Creation
It has finally arrived -- the ability to create new groups on BibleShared.com. In truth this ability has been present since day 1, but it had to start with an email to myself. Now this process is partially automated. Instead of sending me an email to create a group, you can create a group by clicking "Create Group" in the "My Group" section of the page. Groups for churches with more than 100 members require a small monthly fee (depending on church size) to create. This is to cover bandwidth and storage costs (it's not a cheap site to keep running!).
On an unrelated note, feeds have been completely overhauled. They now support the category filtering options already present in your feed reader.
Please continue sending in any bugs that need fixing, or feature suggestions, by clicking the "Bug" button while logged in. Thanks!
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Power Outage!
The BibleShared.com servers are located in Everett, WA. Unfortunately, Everett, WA is experiencing intense wind storms that have knocked out the power. As such, you will notice that BibleShared.com is currently down.
It should resume normal operation once the storms pass and power is restored. You can monitor the situation here or here.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Cookies
I'm sharing this piece of information, because I've had reports of users being unable to log in. They can type their user name, password, and group code, and are redirected to the main page, to be presented with the log-in screen again. The reason for this is the site is unable to create a cookie on their computer to say that they have logged in. To correct this problem you have to allow cookies in your browser's settings. For Internet Explorer 7, this means selecting "Internet Options" from the Tools menu, clicking the "Privacy" tab, and moving the slider down until it indicates that cookies will be accepted.
There's a lot of FUD (Fear, uncertainty, doubt) around the Internet about Cookies, and most of this FUD has little to no basis in reality. Cookies have a legitimate purpose on many, many, many sites. Blocking or disabling cookies can cripple the Internet experience, and will definitely prevent you from being able to access BibleShared.com.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Bug Fixes
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain. If you ever come across a problem on BibleShared.com, or don't like how something works, you can click the "Bug" button at the top right of the screen. From there you can write up a description of the problem you're experiencing and submit it directly to me. It will be put on my to-do list for BibleShared.com, and I will address the problem as soon as I have time. Currently I'm running BibleShared.com in my spare time, and my life is kind of crazy at the moment. As such, there may be a slight delay between receiving a report, and acting on it.
So to re-iterate: 1.) I'm working to fix bugs at the end of this week, and 2.) anyone can bring problems to my attention by clicking the "Bug" button in the top right corner.
That's all for now!
the end.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Proverbs
"Justice is only afforded to those who can afford justice."
Tell me what you think.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Monday, August 27, 2007
A note about God's love by C.H. Dodd
He [John] makes use of the strongest expressions for union with God that contemporary religious language provided, in order to assure his readers that he does seriously mean what he says: that through faith in Christ we may enter into a personal community of life with the eternal God, which has the character of agape, which is essentially supernatural and not of this world, and yet plants its feet firmly in this world, not only because real agape cannot but express itself in practical conduct, but also because the crucial act of agape was actually performed in history, on an April day about A.D. 30, at a suppertable in Jerusalem, in a garden across the Kidron valley, in the headquarters of Pontius Pilate, and on a Roman cross at Golgotha.
So concrete, so actual, is the nature of the divine agape; yet none the less for that, by entering into the relation of agape thus opened up for men, we may dwell in God and He in us.
-- C.H. Dodd (1953)
Server Upgrade Phase 2 Complete-ish
In other news, I've been receiving a fair number of bug reports which I will get around to this week or next. And I will still be posting a blog with screenshots/descriptions of the features added at the time of the upgrade.
As promised, today I will start accepting applications to create a new BibleShared.com group. Just sign-up for BibleShared.com under the group code "test", and send an email to support@bibleshared.com with the following information:
- Your user id
- The group code you will want (cannot contain spaces or special characters other than ".")
- The name of your group
- The name of your church
- The number of members in your church
- A contact phone number
- A contact address (including state/city/zip/country)
If your church has less than 100 members, groups for your church can be created free of charge. Otherwise there will be a monthly charge (ranging from $15 [100-200 members] to $70 [1,000+ members]) relative to the bandwidth needed to support such a large group. Each church can have 1 main group, and a reasonable number of sub-groups (formatted like this: churchgroupcode.subgroupcode). The reason for any kind of charge is that (1) it costs around $183.08/mo [bandwidth/domain registration/server hardware] to run BibleShared.com, (2) that cost increases as more people use it, (3) I personally fund the site 100% out of pocket and don't have any spare funds.
Anyway, enjoy the site, and I'll be looking forward to group applications!
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Email Outage -- Fixed
On an unrelated note, I have decided to not go forward with phase 2 of the server upgrades for another 2 weeks. I'm preaching tomorrow morning so I don't want to commit myself to another long night. Phase 1 took 6 hours longer than I had initially anticipated, and I was absolutely exhausted the next day.
The email server upgrade (which is phase 2) should help prevent this issue in the future.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Friday, August 24, 2007
BibleShared.com Server Upgrade Phase 1
In addition to better performance, you'll notice some new features that have appeared. I'll let those be a mystery for the time being, and post a blog about those (with screenshots) later.
Enjoy!
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Downtime This Evening
Also, email notifications from BibleShared.com will be disabled sometime tomorrow night/early Saturday morning while the email server is reconfigured. It may be down for up to 3 hours [most likely after Midnight]. This will only affect groups that require Administrator approval for a sign-up to occur. Be sure to check Saturday morning for any new sign-ups (they will appear as "inactive" users in the "Admin" section).
Thanks for your patience!
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
BibleShared.com Blog
Since I have not kept this up since the initial creation of BibleShared.com, I'm going to record some history here. On or around the 25th of January, 2007 I had a meeting with my pastor about a class I was taking at Northwest University in Kirkland, WA. The class was Pastoral Ministries Internship II, and the professor was determined to "extract at least a pound of flesh" from each of the 8 or so students in the class. Many of us in the class were already involved in full time ministry, but we would be required to set aside our main ministry duties for a semester and focus on creating something new that would solve a problem within our church.
During the meeting my pastor and I discussed the church's website and also the need for accessible devotionals that would inspire the church to read and study the Bible with regularity. Now about three years ago I toyed with the idea of user submitted devotionals for youth group, but that did not really work. I was too embarrassed to post anything personally, and no one else did either.
As my pastor was describing a place online where we could maintain a repository of devotionals, something clicked. Though I may not write a 4-5 page insightful commentary-worthy devotional every time I sit down to read my Bible, I'm always underlining things and scribbling in the margins (or in a notes file if I'm reading on my phone). Sometimes these notes can be just as valuable as full fledged devotionals. I don't say that to discount the scholarly work that goes into some devotionals, because I personally place a high value on Biblical scholarship, but I mean that they both point back to the text. More than that, within a church at a specific place in a specific time, two people might be facing the exact same issues, and seeking answers in the same place. Without a place to record one's spiritual journey through the Scriptures, these people may never realize any of this, and they could miss the comfort afforded by knowing that they are both trusting God in the same situation. I pitched the idea of a shared margin note system the next time I saw him, and so BibleShared was born.
Initially it was going to be called Shared Margins. But I ditched that name because it did not mention the Bible, and could be confusing as to what the site did. Single Word was also considered, but again this wasn't clear enough (though I did end up naming the youth group Singλe Word Ministries in reference to a single absolute truth revealed in Jesus). The clear final choice then was BibleShared.com which I promptly registered at my favorite registrar.
I immediately sought out a Bible text to use. My first choice was the NLT because of it's fluid language and use among my generation (who would be the most likely to use an online devotional as opposed to a book-based devotional). Unfortunately Tyndale, the publisher that distributes the NLT does not take kindly to their text being used on the Internet. The next choice was the NASB. I submitted a formal copyright request, but gave up after not hearing back in a timely manner. In the meantime I used the King James Version so that a text could be in place to test the features of the site.
On June 15th I received one of the greatest surprises of my life -- Permission to quote the NASB on the Internet without having to pay royalties. Since BibleShared.com operates on a budget very near $0, this is exactly what was needed. I thanked God and also Lockman's VP of Operations profusely.
After a few tweaks, and many long nights, BibleShared.com is poised for launch at the church I go to (Abundant Life Christian Fellowship) and ready for launch at churches/schools around the world.
Considering the current (read slow) speed of the site, I re-worked all the code, and ordered a shiny new server. For the technically inclined it's a Quad Intel Xeon 1.5 GHz with 2 GB RAM running Windows Server 2003. The server will arrive on Thursday and should be loaded up late Friday or Saturday night with the current version of BibleShared.com.
Starting this coming Monday, BibleShared.com will be accepting applications for new groups. This means that if you are at a church or school that does not already have it's own BibleShared.com group, you can submit an application for a group on Monday. For the time being there will be a nominal monthly fee to create a group (i.e. individual users will not be charged a single penny, EVER). Hopes are that fees will not be necessary in the future. The money would be used to pay the bandwidth bills ($104.95/month), and the cost of the new server ($862 including software), and if enough groups join, additional money may spill over into smaller churches in Washington State or be used to allow smaller churches to host BibleShared.com groups for free.
That really about covers everything for now. My next post will be after the server upgrade to provide a walk through of the new features available.
Until then, sign-up and read the Bible.
About the Author: Nick is the creator of BibleShared.com -- a web application that allows you to read the Bible, write notes in the margin, share these notes with others, and track your Bible reading progress.