Quick rundown of what happened behind the scenes on the ministry sites this past week (June 27 – July 4), plus what the traffic numbers actually say once the noise is filtered out.
Scofield Reference Bible (scofieldbible.org)
The Scofield digitization work crossed a real landmark this week: it finished the book of Job, crossed into the Psalms, and kept going — page by page — all the way through Psalm 119, the great 22-stanza acrostic psalm. That’s roughly 55 scanned pages of the original 1917 edition turned into structured, searchable text since last week, capturing Scofield’s cross-references, footnotes, and the shifting divine-name capitalization (LORD vs. Lord) verse by verse.
Also spent time this week fixing the extraction process itself instead of just running it — the per-page working notes had been ballooning in size and slowing each session down, so that got trimmed and streamlined. Less exciting than finishing a psalm, but it means faster progress from here.
kjBible.org
The conversion of kjBible.org to a fully static site (no database lookups per page) is done on the working copy — all 66 books, 1,189 chapters, rebuilt as plain static pages. This isn’t live yet — it’s staged and waiting to be pushed to the production site. Once it is, expect faster load times and a lighter server load. Along with the conversion itself:
- Rebuilt the chapter navigation arrows and the book menu, which had display bugs.
- Removed a page-turn/pagination feature that was actually breaking the reading experience (clipped text, hidden cross-references) — chapters are simple scrolling pages now.
- Cut kjBible.org’s remaining dependency on BibleEngine.org, so it’s now fully self-contained.
- Rebuilt how cross-references are displayed in the margin.
BibleEngine.org
Built and shipped VerseTagger, a small drop-in tool that lets any page make its Bible references interactive — hover or tap a reference and the verse text pops up. Fixed a bug where compact reference formats (like “Le 25:15,16”) weren’t resolving, and added a link back to BibleEngine.org from the popup itself so people can find the tool and use it on their own site. Also gave it a visible home on the BibleEngine.org homepage — it had no way for a visitor to discover it before this.
xmlBible.org
Added three more Old Testament books to the OSIS-format rebuild this week — 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings — bringing the total to 12 of 39 Old Testament books complete (338 chapters), each one checked word-for-word against the source text and fully cross-referenced to the Hebrew.
Note: xmlBible.org doesn’t appear in the traffic table below. It currently redirects to GitHub, and Matomo can’t track visits to GitHub-hosted pages.
America Needs Your Prayers
Went through the Media section, which had drifted out of date — some entries were still listing executives who left their jobs a couple of years back. Replaced 14 outdated cards and added a new one, refreshed six Executive Branch cards to match current officeholders, and fixed a couple of technical issues along the way (a broken image fallback, missing social-share preview data).
DannyCarlton.org / This Blog
Added a “Fresh from the Blog” section and a “Blog” link to DannyCarlton.org’s homepage, plus a “What We’ve Done Recently” button — which is exactly the kind of post you’re reading right now. Also reworked this blog’s home page to show the latest post in full up top, with older posts as cards below it.
The Numbers
One caveat that matters here: kjBible.org’s traffic is mostly bots, not real readers. The rest of the sites’ traffic looks legitimate.
| Site | Visits | Pageviews | Hits | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kjBible.org (mostly bots) | 13,285 | 13,427 | 13,432 | +30.8% |
| Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening | 2,861 | 3,798 | 3,996 | +0.6% |
| Strong’s Concordance | 2,222 | 1,904 | 8,179 | +1.6% |
| My Open Bible | 1,057 | 1,442 | 1,502 | +9.0% |
| phpBible.org | 347 | 113 | 956 | +13.8% |
| Country Hymns | 136 | 166 | 174 | +1.5% |
| Matthew Henry’s Commentary | 125 | 258 | 259 | +10.6% |
| MorningPsalm.org | 62 | 72 | 73 | +44.2% |
| scofieldBible.org | 59 | 71 | 71 | +33.0% |
| Nave’s Topical Bible | 48 | 56 | 71 | +71.4% |
| Systematic Theology | 32 | 55 | 58 | +33.3% |
| VirtualBible.org | 31 | 12 | 34 | +121% |
| Vocabularium | 27 | 40 | 53 | +35.0% |
| Did You Pray First? | 24 | 28 | 29 | +71.4% |
| My Bible Memes | 22 | 29 | 32 | +4.8% |
| What My Dogs Taught Me Today | 9 | 9 | 9 | +80.0% |
| BibleEngine.org | 4 | 18 | 20 | +86.7% |
| DannyCarlton.org | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| Total (as reported) | ~20,000 | ~21,000 | ~29,000 | +22.7% |
xmlBible.org and osBible.org aren’t in this table. Both currently redirect to GitHub, and GitHub-hosted traffic doesn’t show up in our Matomo analytics.
Two sites worth a second look even though the raw numbers are small: VirtualBible.org more than doubled (31 visits, +121%), and Nave’s Topical Bible was up 71% (48 visits). Neither is big enough yet to draw real conclusions from, but both are worth watching.
Strip out kjBible.org entirely and the real, human-driven traffic across the rest of the ministry network comes to roughly 7,066 visits for the week. Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening and Strong’s Concordance are the two workhorses, with My Open Bible a solid third.
For Perspective
Break that ~7,066 weekly figure down and it comes out to about 1,010 real people a day — no bots, just actual visits.
| Category | Weekly worship attendance |
|---|---|
| Small church | ~60 |
| Medium-small church | 100–499 |
| Medium church | 500–999 |
| Large church | 1,000–1,999 |
| Megachurch | 2,000–9,999 |
| Super-megachurch | 10,000+ |
By that yardstick, the ministry sites (minus kjBible’s bot traffic) reach roughly as many real people every single day as a large church sees in one entire Sunday service. Add it up across a full week and the total — about 7,000 — lands inside megachurch territory, though on the low end: the average megachurch actually runs closer to 4,000 in weekly attendance, so this week’s number is well short of that, not past it.
Worth being straight about what this comparison is and isn’t. A website visit is a much lighter form of engagement than driving to a building and sitting through a service — it says nothing about how long someone stayed, whether they read one page or ten, or whether they came back. It’s a scale comparison, not a claim of equivalent spiritual engagement. But as a way of sizing up how many real people this actually reaches, it’s a fair and honest one.