Logical Antithesis

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been a webmaster for roughly four years now. This includes being hosted with a total of five different webhosts, having numerous visual designs, forums, blogs, and projects, etc.

But I hadn’t actually achieved my oldest dream.

This website started out, way back when, as a forum named Compugeeks, which I and a few friends started. The free forum service IPB-Free got progressively slower, and about this time I dipped into doing web design seriously and began learning web programming to compliment it. So I decided to make my own website. This site grew out of that determination, and (as mentioned before) underwent many experimentations.

But my largest unrealized dream was to put a bible on my website.

I confess that it wasn’t on my mind at all times, I only recently began blogging about religious matters, but was a background nagging. I’d found numerous bibles in the public domain. The trouble was the data format. Either what I found was in text, and I never was much good at text processing, or in XML. XML is like HTML, which this site uses to get data displayed in your browser, but only as a data storage format—thus you have to somehow make use of XML.

Being, as I was, a somewhat lazy individual I was deterred by the thought of editing the 66 books of the Bible into something I could use. That, and the thought of writing a complicated program (when my skills were still novice-level) just to put the data into a format I could use was daunting.

So I left it where it was, except for periodic ongoing research.

And yesterday in a total of about five hours of work I realized my entire goal, all at once. I found a website a little while ago called Believer’s Resource which had several bibles all in the public domain. But again, they were in XML format. And then it hit me, XML data can be interpreted by the browser using a standard called XSLT. I won’t get into how it works, but this lets the XML get turned into HTML by the browser getting the data. Might not sound like much to you, but this removes a significant portion of overhead to the site.

The only trouble was that I had to parse each version of the bible into seperate files. This was complicated by the fact that I had to scan the data visually and copy-paste it into a new document, then wrap the new data with some of the old to ensure it worked right. So after the first three hours of work I had only broken apart the King James Version.

So I asked a question of some programmers, and got put onto the right track. Using the same tool as before, XSLT, I transformed the bible into its books as seperate files … complete with the necessary information to just put it in a folder and have it work. It took two hours of perfecting, and repairing what I found to be damaged data in my source, but I had done it.

So now I have an online bible with four translations, the KJV, the ASV, Young’s Literal Translation, and Darby’s Literal Translation. I’m even considering another bible in the public domain, but I’m uncertain of its credibility yet (and thus will keep it to myself for awhile).

And I am content with what I’ve done with this. The realization of this dream makes my heart glad.

For those who wish to see the new online bible I’ve put together, go to http://bible.thewickedflea.com/ and browse around; you need a modern browser (Firefox 3, Chrome 2, Safari, or even an iPhone) with full support for XSLT. (Any errors that prevent your passing past the front page is the fault of your browser, so get Firefox.) I haven’t bothered to make the site compatible with Internet Explorer, thanks to that browser’s quirks (which always require 15 steps to fix).