Square Galaxy » Scriptures

ScriptureCast highlights

Jacob — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 07:25:31 +0000

A few months ago I announced the release of a new website, ScriptureCast.net. Since then, things have taken off. The site has been featured in the ldsWebguy blog as well in the More Good Foundation blog. I’ve also received numerous emails praising the site for helping people study the scriptures.

The stats for the site have also been encouraging. In the last three weeks alone, there have been over 100,000 seconds of audio downloaded. There have also been a couple of hundred custom feeds created since the launch of the site (although I don’t have the stats indicating how many of those feeds are still active).

ScriptureCast.net currently can create feeds for The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the October 2007 LDS General Conference.

My next plan for ScriptureCast.net is to provide the audio for “Teaching of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith”, and set up a feed that is synchronized with the standard lesson schedule.

You can read more about my progress at the ScriptureCast development blog.

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Introducing ScriptureCast.net

Jacob — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 05:50:48 +0000

Sometimes, some of us need a little help remembering to keep on top of our daily scripture study. To assist in this, I’ve built a new website at ScriptureCast.net . This site helps you to create custom podcast feeds of the scriptures to help you stay on top of your scripture reading.

What is a podcast feed? A podcast feed is a frequently updated file on the Internet which contains information about recently posted items. In the case of ScriptureCast.net, each item is a chapter or section of scripture. Each feed item contains both a summary, and a link to the full text of the chapter or section. A podcast feed item also contains a link to the sound file for the chapter or section. See the Wikipedia Podcast entry for more information.

How do I use a podcast? You need a podcast program, feed reader, or news aggregator. Not all feed readers are the same, and not all will let you download or listen to the audio. iTunes is a good program for subscribing to podcasts, especially since it allows you to listed to podcast items on your iPod music player. MyYahoo! is a web based service which can also help you access the full text or audio. If you don’t care about listening to the audio and you just want links to the full text, you can also subscribe to the feed using any number of regular news aggregators, including Google Reader.

Why would I want to podcast the scriptures when I can put them on my computer or iPod manually? Most podcast software keeps track of which items you’ve listened to. This makes it easy to keep track of what chapters you’ve read and which chapters you have yet to read. In addition, if you have a small portable music player, such as a 1GB iPod Nano, you may find it difficult to keep the scriptures and all your music on the player. In this case, the podcast software adds items to your player as they become available, and removes them from your player when you are done with them.

I have a question about ScriptureCast.net that I would like to ask. Leave a comment below and I’ll try and answer it. If it is a good question, it might become part of the documentation.

I have a suggestion or feedback about how to improve the web site. You can leave your feedback on the official ScriptureCast.net development blog.

Is the site in beta? What does beta mean? The site currently is in beta, which means that there are still a few things to be worked out and still some features that need to be added. While the site is in beta, you might find things rearranged or changed, but I’ll make every effort not to disrupt service.

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Religion case example for OpenSearch

Jacob — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:48:11 +0000

On my technical blog, I talked about aggregating search results with OpenSearch. Below is a religious case example for use of the OpenSearch technology. (You should read what I’ve written about OpenSearch before continuing to read this.)

Something I’ve been working on has been my LDSsearch.com project. LDSsearch.com is a search engine which has indexed a selection of web sites which have been identified as friendly to the LDS faith. It is good, but it fails at completely indexing all LDS content out there. However, it does provide its search results in an OpenSearch format. Now there is another site called Scripture Tag which tags verses from scriptures. I’ve talked with the developer of the site about returning the scripture tag information in an OpenSearch format. I’m also hoping that someday we can get a search engine for general conference talks which can provide its search results in an OpenSearch format.

With all these, and hopefully more, sources for topic specific information about the LDS faith, I could perform a search query for “wisdom” and the results could be all aggregated to one point. I would see websites about wisdom, scriptures which have been tagged with the word wisdom, and general conference talks which mention wisdom all together at once.

The new gospel library at LDS.org already aggregates searches by providing results from scriptures, magazines, and lessons all on one page. I hope that someday they can also provide their search data with OpenSearch, so that the data can be used in other applications and aggregated with additional content.

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Ethics

Jacob — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 06:41:27 +0000

In one of my classes, we’ve been talking about business ethics. I presented the following self-check questions that someone can ask themselves. Here is the list of these questions:

Is it against the law?
Is it against the commandments or the teachings in the scriptures?
Would my wife approve? (Note, I don’t have a wife, but this would be one of those questions to ask yourself if you did)

So, supposing in business, there was an opportunity to do something questionably non-ethical. One can begin to answer resolve if the opportunity is or isn’t ethical by answering the three questions above.

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