This is a re-published (& slightly updated) article, orginaly published on my first blog The Journal (now offline, redirecting here)

The webmaster of Good News Publishers, the publishers of the ESV Bible, emailed me on Saturday to let me know that GNP now have an RSS feed for the ESV bible. There are two feeds. One is a ‘Verse of the day’ Feed and the other is a lookup feed. I have taken the Verse of the Day feed and modified Dean Peter’s versescrape script. It’s much simpler and doesn’t rely on a regular expression that can be broken any time that the Bible Society changes it’s text file.

So in short, I am impressed. The lookup feed is very good too. It takes a query string variable ‘passage’ that is the verse reference (eg John 3:16) and returns the verse. The feed is in RSS 2.0 and it can return multiple verses.

The semantics of the feed are:

  • Each <item> of the RSS feed is a different verse
  • The <title> is the reference
  • The <description> is the verse text
  • The <link> is the link back to the verse on the ESV bible.

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