Category: Websites

eBible.com says I can’t be saved!

I was signing up for an account at eBible.com. This is a site that takes the idea of online search and study of the Bible into the realm of social networking. People can leave comments on different verses. There is a whole community atmosphere. I have not delved into it deeply, but I understand that there is a lot of the social networking/bookmarking behind it.eBible error

I was excited about being able to make notes and bookmarks of my own. I don’t use a Bible program on my computer. And I currently have no digital note taking method for my Bible study. I usually just write stuff in the margin of my Bible (which is why I have a wide-margin Bible) if it is just a quick thought. Otherwise it goes into my sermon notes and preparation. The downside is that I would have to know for which sermon I studied a certain passage, otherwise I would never see those notes again. That is what is appealing about eBible to me.

I don’t know that I will use it long term. I just heard about it and decided to give it a shot. I do use Bible Gateway on a very regular basis to look up verses. They have the Spanish version I use.

While going through the registration process at eBible, I got an error that I thought was extremely humorous. This would not be funny, nor have even caught my eye had this not been a religious website.

The highlighted text in the screen shot reads, “3 errors prohibited this user from being saved.”

And I thought Baptists could be judgmental. Here is a website that has never even met me and it is telling me that I cannot be saved!

Competitive Runner

I ran across a website today that has gear reviews for runners. I was particularly interested in the shoe reviews. I have written one review and will be working on another one later.

There are many other things the site offers, but the shoe reviews interested me the most. I thought I would just point it out to other runners who read here. It was new to me.

CompetitiveRunner.com

MightySearch

After I did all the work to customize a search results theme page, I found a link at the original site telling of an easier way to do the same thing.

Get the mightysearch plugin and follow a couple of tutorials for getting it up and running. You can see what this plugin does for your site by doing a search in the sidebar to the left. It allows you to do Google searches but display results with your own website’s theme.

Ironically, the page that got me started on all of this does not use either method to display his search results as of this writing.

New search tool and theme update

I just spent some time getting a new search box running on the site here. Now I am using Google to handle the searches. With this you are also able to search the web, not just my site. I don’t have it working completely the way I want, but I am getting closer.

As a result of this, I have had a wonderful side benefit. The theme that I have used and modified for the site was a nice theme, but poorly coded. What made it poorly coded was that the whole theme was in 1 (one) file! If you know anything about theming or style sheets, you know that is a horrible mess to manage. I did not notice that until I had been using the theme for a while. Then I did not want to change.

As I have been thinking about updating the theme in the future, I really needed to break this theme down into several documents and make it a proper theme. That has been done. Hopefully there is nothing that you will be able to notice in this change (yet). Everything should look and act exactly the same with the exception of the search box now serving results from Google.

I got my information about creating a custom search results page from another blogger who has a tutorial on generating a custom Google AdSense search page.

Cool games

WinterbellsI did a little stumbling today and came across a website that had a really neat set of games. The one that StumbleUpon pointed me to was called Winterbells. You have to hop a bunny from one bell to another which gets you 10 points each. There are point doubling opportunities. As you go higher the bells get smaller.

There is a whole list of games. Some are really dumb and mindless. Some are pretty fun. I have only played a handful of them, but look forward to revisiting the site when I have 15 minutes to kill. The beauty of most of these games is that you can have a great time playing a game and it only takes 3 minutes or so.

Many of the colors are pastel and muted. That caused a problem on some of the games. There was not enough contrast to really see where you were supposed to be transporting the items.

Some of these games have been around since the turn of the century based on the copyrights on them.