Wordpress is known for its extensive collection of themes and plugins. A blogger who is self-hosting a Wordpress blog (as opposed to using wordpress.com) can find plugins for nearly any task, and the selection of themes is almost overwhelming – and there is no end in sight. More are coming out almost daily.
John’s Joint and The Go Light are presently using 28 different plugins, and Blog Diyiin Bi and Christian Internet Resources are using 29. Many of the plugins in use are designed to aid in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and some are for more convenient blog administration. The one plugin I really wanted to use, though, would not work on John’s Joint! Nor would it work on my business blog, The Go Light. (That’s why only 28 plugins.) It does work on my other two blogs, Blog Diyiin Bi and Christian Internet Resources. I’m not sure, but I think the themes in use on the two blogs are not compatible with the plugin. At any rate, that is the only thing that is completely different between all four blogs.
It is good that the plugin works on two of my blogs, since the plugin in question is “reftagger.” This plugin converts a Bible reference, like John 3:16, into a clickable link that will take you to bible.logos.com’s online Bible, and it also pops up a window with the Bible text displayed. And, of course, Blog Diyiin Bi, being a Christian ministry blog, has tons of Bible references.
Go ahead, place your mouse cursor over this link to Rev 22:21. (The last verse in the Bible.) Click on the link, too. It will open in a new window, as do all links in this article.
But wait…didn’t I just tell you that the plugin does not work on John’s Joint? That’s right, it doesn’t, but there is a workaround. Fortunately, I’m not at all squeamish about playing with php code, and so I simply copied some code from a post in bible.logos.com’s reftagger blog to the php code for the theme used by John’s Joint. And that does work! So I did the same thing on The Go Light, then played with the .css files on both to make the popup windows’ colors match the respective blogs.
Reftagger works on links in articles, comments, and the sidebar. In case you want to write comments or articles for any of the blogs, and include Bible references, there are three .pdf files you might want to read. They are bibleref-in-60-seconds.pdf, bibleref-overview.pdf, and bibleref-specification.pdf. Actually, the only one you really need to read, unless you are into technical detiails, is the first one, bibleref-in-60-seconds.pdf. The other two, bibleref-overview.pdf and bibleref-specification.pdf, are more for webpage developers. The documents can be freely distributed under the Creative Commons license. You can find links to the source website within the documents.
Just in case you don’t wish to read any of them (the first is really short, but you do need a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat), here’s a quick lesson on properly citing Bible references in articles or comments submitted to a blog or other website that uses reftagger: simply enclose the reference between “cite” tags like this: <cite class=”bibleref”>Genesis 1:1</cite>. Be sure to include the class=”bibleref” part. And, in actuality, it is not strictly necessary to use the “cite” tags, but it is a standardized way to tell robots (like google’s search engine spider) that it is a Bible reference. The “cite” tags will display the enclosed text in italics on most Web browsers unless that behaviour is overridden with a custom style sheet.
Also, be sure to use standard names or abbreviations for the names of the books of the Bible and for the desired translation. For single-chapter books, like Jude, you must use the chapter number, like this: Jude 1:1 NIV. The above-mentioned .pdf documents have more details, including ways to display non-standard book names and abbreviations while still creating a working link. And here is one more example: Jude 1:1 KJV
The default translation used by reftagger on all four of my blogs is NKJV. (My favorite modern English translation, since it is the most accurate one. NIV stands for “Not Inspired Version”…<grin!> If King James was good enough for the Apostle Paul…) It is possible to override that; see the .pdf documents for instructions, see the Bible references in the previous paragraph for examples. And see bible.logos.com’s website (just click on any Bible reference on one of the blogs) to find a list of available translations. (They have a bunch of them!)
You might also want to check out my article on Blog Diyiin Bi about Vision for Life Ministries. That article has some information about reftagger.
Pastor Marv
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