Bible verse housekeeping
One of the things The Sola Panel strives to be, as Tony pointed out in his introduction, is Bible-driven: the foundational question for almost all our posts is “What does the Bible say?” This is why we keep pointing you back to Scripture, and why posts are often peppered with Bible references. We want to encourage you to read those parts of the Bible so you can see for yourself whether we're just making things up or actually following what the word of God says.
One of the ways we help you do this is by hyperlinking all Bible references so that Scripture is never more than a mouse click away. Recently Lionel suggested we install RefTagger, a handy little tool for websites that supplies both hyperlinks and pop-up javascript windows with verses for all Bible references. We have done so, and the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed RefTagger at work—mostly in our Saturday blast-from-the-past Briefing specials.
However, RefTagger has the unfortunate problem of being webpage-based only; it does not work in RSS. And so, for the sake of all our feed readers, some of our Panellists and our resident web elf Karen have been hyperlinking every single Bible reference. (NB: This is not very arduous with the magic of Textmate shortcut keys.) However, this negates RefTagger's pop-up windows; they won't work with the HTML coding.
And so we thought we would put it to you, our dear readers, to decide. This poll will only be up for a week, so make sure you cast your vote before it's too late.
Or… you can have both
If you set the class of the reference to “bibleref”, and set a title (not sure if this is necessary or not - you’ll have to have a fiddle), then you can have both the link in the RSS and the pop-up on the site.
Example HTML (I tested this on my own blog, so I’m 99% sure it will work):
firebrands, arrows and death?
I would vote for the link through to another website, rather than the javascript, but I mostly use the RSS version of the blog, so my opinion may not be representative.
@Ian: What do you put in the CSS for .bibleref to make it work?
Ian: Yep, that works for me. In my RSS feed (Google reader), I get a pop-up window with the reference (not with the Bible text itself) if I hover my mouse over the link. Love it.
@Karen:- Nothing. RefTagger just looks for the class, in fact, the 1st comment works on your site at the moment… (apparently it changed my < into a ‘<’ when I hit preview - it was meant to just come out as text).
@Ian: Cool, thanks! Good to know. I admit I didn’t read the help FAQ that closely; too many other things on my plate.
@Karen:- No worries. It wasn’t easy to find - I stumbled on it when I was looking into using refTagger, as I wanted to have the reference on text, not just a bible verse. I was using it on “cite” tags, not links, but I figured it would still work.
@Ian: After much testing and reposting (to the irritation of Sola Panel readers, I’m sure), it turns out that the title attribute is necessary for the thing to work. Good to know ...
@Karen:- I thought it might be, it needs to get the verse from somewhere… That shouldn’t be too bad, it means on mouseover in the feed you get to see a nicer Bible passage, rather than just the location of the link
I initially used the title so I could reference a bible verse without explicitly putting it in the text.
Also, that explains the constant reposting - I thought it was updating every time someone posted a comment or something like that :D
@Ian: Yeah, sorry about that!
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