A rundown of the week’s ministry work, for those of you who like to follow along.
The Scofield Project
The slow, careful work of turning the 1917 Scofield Reference Bible into clean, searchable data kept moving this week. I finished two whole books and started a third.
Nehemiah is now fully extracted — every verse, margin note, cross-reference, and footnote lifted off the scanned page and into structured data. Esther followed right behind it, finished start to end, through the institution of Purim and Mordecai’s rise to prime minister.
Then I started Job, which is a different animal. Job is poetry, with long speeches and slanted print the earlier scanning passes struggled to read cleanly. I worked through the prologue — Job’s losses, Satan appearing before the LORD, the three friends sitting seven days in silence — and well into the long back-and-forth that follows: the discourses of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and then young Elihu’s. By the end of the week I was into the mid-thirties of Job.
If you’d like to watch the progress chapter by chapter, the live status page is at scofieldbible.org/status.php.
BibleEngine.org — brand new, and we’re excited about it
This one is brand new. I started BibleEngine.org just this past week, and I’ll admit I’m excited about where it’s headed. It’s a free, fast way to put real Scripture in front of readers — the King James Version, the American King James, and Strong’s numbers — with the data clean enough that other people can build on it.
The first tool to come out of it is VerseTagger, and as of today it’s finished and ready to use. You add a single line to a web page, and from then on every Bible reference on that page — John 3:16, Genesis 1:1, and so on — becomes something a reader can hover over to see the actual verse, without leaving the page. No account, nothing to install on your own server. It pulls the text live from BibleEngine. If you run a site and you’d like Scripture references to come alive like that, it’s yours to use.
Along with it, I released the whole BibleEngine dataset under a no-strings public-domain release. The underlying texts have always been public domain; it never made sense for the software around them to be the thing that locked them up. Anyone can use it, in any project, for free.
xmlBible.org — a ground-up rebuild
This is the first newsletter since I began rebuilding xmlBible.org back on the 8th, so here’s the whole effort, not just this week’s slice of it.
The rebuild puts each book of the Bible into OSIS, the standard XML format for Scripture, and layers a good deal onto the bare text: Strong’s numbers on every word, the grammatical tagging (morphology) that goes with them, a word-by-word Hebrew interlinear bridged in from the STEPBible project’s openly licensed data, and proper poetry formatting drawn from the Cambridge Paragraph Bible — so passages like Hannah’s song read as the poems they are instead of being flattened into prose. Every chapter passes two automatic checks before it counts as done: that the English matches the KJV exactly, and that every Hebrew word is accounted for with nothing left unbridged.
This week’s addition was the book of 1 Samuel, all 31 chapters, which brings the Old Testament to nine books complete. Both checks came back clean on every chapter.
Nave’s Topical Bible — consolidated and upgraded
Nave’s Topical Bible had drifted into two separate installations — one for the public, one just for editing — because of a conflict between the verse-hover tool and the edit screen. I tracked the conflict down, fixed it, and folded the two back into one.
While I was in there, I also upgraded the underlying MediaWiki installation. These upgrades can be genuinely tricky, which is honestly why I’d put this one off so long — but it’s done now, and the site is back on current, supported software.
SystematicTheology.us — how far it’s come
I didn’t touch this one this past week, but it’s changed enough over the past few months to be worth catching you up on. SystematicTheology.us is a free study platform built around Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, the standard Reformed text. The whole point of it is to make a famously dense book something a person can actually study.
Every chapter across all six parts of Berkhof now has its own multiple-choice quiz to test yourself with — well over a thousand questions in all. The bigger job was rebuilding them so they test whether you understood the material instead of rewarding test-taking tricks. The old quizzes had the familiar giveaway where the longest answer, or the one stuffed with names and numbers, is always the right one. I wrote a tool that hunts down those tells, shuffled the answer order so position never gives anything away, and reworked every quiz until it passed.
Every chapter also opens with a plain-language summary now, broken into sections with a short list of key points — written to say plainly what Berkhof says densely, with no jargon left unexplained and no assumed seminary vocabulary.
Systematic theology runs on technical terms, many of them Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Hundreds of them are now marked through the text, so you can hover over a word like “supralapsarian” or “propitiation” and get a plain definition without leaving the page. Scripture references work the same way.
And the site remembers you now: create an account and it will bookmark your place in a chapter and keep track of your quiz progress from one visit to the next.
None of this shows up in a weekly traffic number, but it’s a lot of quiet work, and the site is far more useful for it than it was a few months ago.
A new home for these posts
The blog you’re reading this on got its theme built this week, matched to the look of DannyCarlton.org. This update is one of its first real posts.
By the numbers
Here’s the past week’s traffic across the ministry sites, with a daily average alongside the weekly total:
| This week | Daily average | |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | ~19,000 | ~2,700 |
| Pages viewed | ~20,000 | ~2,860 |
| Total requests | ~25,000 | ~3,570 |
(The daily figures are averages across the seven days.)
If every one of those weekly visits were a person walking through the doors, you’d be looking at a megachurch several times over. The usual line for a “megachurch” is two thousand or more in weekly attendance, and this is many times that.
I’ll be honest about what sits behind the headline, though. Most of that traffic isn’t people — it’s automated bots crawling kjBible.org, which by itself accounts for roughly 12,900 of the week’s visits. Set the bots aside, and the genuine human traffic runs around 6,000 visits a week. In church terms that’s still a healthy megachurch, three times over the threshold. The steadiest readers week to week are Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening (about 2,500 visits for the week, about 357 a day), Strong’s Concordance (about 2,000 for the week, about 285 a day), and My Open Bible (about 1,000 for the wee, or 142 per day).
That bot load is exactly why I’m converting kjBible to plain static pages (plus with BibleEngine.org I’m now able to). Right now, every bot visit makes the server do real database work to build a page that never changes. As static HTML, the same pages get handed straight over with nothing running behind them, and the bots stop being a strain. (It’s also why the headline is down about 24% from the week before — that’s the bot tide going out, not readers leaving.)
That’s the week
Thanks for following along. More next week.
And here’s every tracked ministry site for the week, largest to smallest:
| Site | Visits (week) | Daily avg. |
|---|---|---|
| kjBible.org † | 12,904 | 1,843 |
| Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening | 2,549 | 364 |
| Strong’s Concordance | 1,981 | 283 |
| My Open Bible | 980 | 140 |
| phpBible.org | 258 | 37 |
| Country Hymns | 122 | 17 |
| Matthew Henry’s Commentary | 104 | 15 |
| ScofieldBible.org | 82 | 12 |
| MorningPsalm.org | 38 | 5 |
| BibleEngine.org | 30 | 4 |
| Nave’s Topical Bible | 23 | 3 |
| My Bible Memes | 20 | 3 |
| Systematic Theology | 18 | 3 |
| Vocabularium | 18 | 3 |
| VirtualBible.org | 12 | 2 |
| Did You Pray First? | 10 | 1 |
| What My Dogs Taught Me Today | 5 | 1 |
| All tracked sites | 19,154 | 2,736 |
† Almost entirely automated bot traffic — see below. xmlBible.org and osBible.org aren’t tracked in this analytics instance, so they aren’t listed here.