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.

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.

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.