Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The Proverbs

I've been reading a lot of Proverbs lately, and was kind of inspired in a way. The Proverbs encapsulate complex ideas in simple phrases that are loaded with meaning, and I wanted to try and do the same. As such I will put this out there as a proverb that may or may not be true:

"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

I found this while I was studying up on the book of John. Dodd was exploring how John used the greek terms"agape" (translated love) and "meno" (translated remain or abide) in description of the relationship Christians can have with God.

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

So after church on Sunday, and after a birthday celebration with Katie (my wife), I received the go ahead to finish the server upgrades. It took 5-6 hours, but is now finally complete (kind of). In the process I had to down two of my web sites. They're not fully compatible with the new server software, so I'll have to re-work them sometime in the near future. Hopefully this will be one of the last times I have to talk about the servers on this blog.

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

I just found out that the Mail Server Software that BibleShared.com relies on has been rejecting emails for the last two weeks! If emails to support@bibleshared.com have bounced, I greatly apologize. I just fixed the issue, so everything should be working properly now.

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

The first phase of the BibleShared.com server upgrade is complete. You'll notice that page load times are much quicker with the exception of the "My Progress" and "Record Offline Progress" pages. There's really no way around those two considering the sheer bulk of data they generate and transfer. It still takes 1-3 seconds to load either one of those pages even with the best broadband connection. That said, other load times such as the "Recent Notes" page and even the Bible text pages are anywhere from 4-6x faster. Any page that causes email to be sent is now 9x faster or more.

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

BibleShared.com will most likely be experiencing a period of downtime this evening lasting anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. A new server will be added and the main BibleShared.com database is going to be up-sized and moved to this new server. During that time a message will appear on the site re-directing you to this blog post.

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

This is the first installment of the BibleShared.com blog. From now on, this will be the place where you will find announcements, news, tips, tricks, and on occasion Scriptural insights.

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.