Mea Culpa: This is a re-post of something I set up on my old Typepad blog ‘News of the Day’. When I set it up, the script was running on a server that I did not control, and due to circumstances beyond my control, it was taken down.

However, what was in my control was the ability to contact those who were affected, and I didn’t. Now, I could blame that on my changing from full-time employment to uni and back again, while my wife had our second child and became pregnant with our third. But that’s all lame excuse making, it would have taken me all of 20 minutes to email everyone and let them know what happened, but I didn’t. Rank laziness. My apologies.

So to rectify the situation, I re-post the offer, slightly updated & running on my own server (or at least a server I have control of). I have emailed those people who used to use the service & who’s email addresses I could find. If you used to use this & I didn’t email you, my additional apologies, I simply couldn’t find your address.

When I moved over from my Movable Type blog, to Typepad, there was one main thing that I missed, and that was the ability to have the bible verse of the day on the site.  This was pulled from the ESV Verse of the Day RSS feed, and then included on the site. Since Typepad doesn’t have server-side scripting I wasn’t able to do this.

Borrowing from the system I came up with to create a daily quote , I’ve now got a script that creates a post containing the verse of the day.  The script runs at midnight Sydney time (which is currently GMT+11 hours thanks to daylight savings) every day.

I’d like to offer this as a free service to anyone who’s interested.  Note, this will only work for people using blog software that can accept the metaWeblog XML-RPC API.  TypePad & Movable Type both accept this, as does Wordpress. Others will need to check with the makers of your blogging software.

To set this up I’ll need a few things.  For TypePad users it’s very simple.  You will need to give permission for the script to post to your blog.  To simplify this process I have setup a user account on TypePad for this.  All you have to do is send an Additional Author invitation to dalziel at gmail dot com and I will set your site up.  To send this invitation go to your weblog’s controls and then go to Configure > Authors and you will see the invitation form at the bottom of the page.

For other blogging software users, like Movable Type, you will need to create an additional author in your software with the permission to post to your site, and then send an email to the above address with the following information:

• The location of your XML-RPC script.  For Movable Type users this is likely to be something like http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi, but if you’re not sure, email me the address of your site & we’ll see if we can find it.
• Your blog ID number.  If you only have one blog on your site then it’s just 1, otherwise it’s the number of the blog that you want the verse posted to.
• The username & password you set up.

Once you’ve sent that email, I’ll add your site to the script and it will start posting to your site the next day (just as soon as I get around to adding it to the script .

The post will consist of a title, which is "Verse of the Day: <verse_reference>" (eg. Verse of the Day: 1 Corinthians 13) and the body of the post will be a paragraph containing the verse & a link to the verse on the ESV site.  The paragraph will have a class of votd, so that you can format it as you like in your stylesheet.