The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

It only took 25 years for my idea to catch on

I was exchanging emails with Christian about online document structure when I mentioned The Electric King James Bible and it's rather unique addressing scheme. I came up with that 25 years ago [Good Lord! Has it been that long? —Sean] [Yes. —Editor] [Yikes! —Sean] to precisely pull up Bible verses—anywhere from one verse to an entire book. Of all the Bible sites across the Intarwebs I've come across since have never used such an elegant, and to me, obvious, way of referencing the Bible online. Usually they use a URL format like <https://bible.example.org/?bible=kj&book=Genesis&chapter=1&start_verse=1&end_verse=1>.

But Christian mentioned Sefaria as using my method, and true enough, it does! <https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.6:9-9:17> does indeed go to the Noah's Ark story. I think that's neat! I don't know if they were inspired by my site (unlikely, but not completely out of the relms of possibility) or just came up with it on their own, but it's nice to see someone else is using an easy to hack URL form for Bible references.

There are differences though—my site only brings up the requested material, whereas Sefaria implements a bidirectional “Scroll Of Doom” where additional material appears when you go up or down. I can't say I'm a fan of that, but it apparently works for them.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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