In following up their massive work in separating out the audio for individual verses, the good people who publish the ESV bible have added enclosures to the RSS feeds they provide, including the verse of the day feed. With some gracious help from Stephen, the webmaster over there, I’ve updated the Wordpress Verse of the Day Plugin. You can download the new version from here or from here for Wordpress 1.2, but if you’re using the Wordpress Plugin Manager, there is a 1-click upgrade available.

If the feed you subscribe to has enclosures added, the plugin will add a (Listen) link next to the verse reference, which you can click on to listen to the verse.

If you install this plugin & have any problems with it, please read through the comments here first, and then, if that doesn’t answer your question, please leave any question as a comment on that post rather than here. It makes it easier for me to answer questions if they’re all in one place. Thanks.

Interesting little bit of information I discovered yesterday about how IE manages memory usage. I was testing a site in IE & I needed another window open to view a different section on the site, so for some reason I clicked the icon rather than pressing ctrl-n. Later on I opened up Task Manager to kill a stalled program & I noticed that there were two instances of IEXPLORE.EXE listed. This, I thought, was odd. I’d always assumed IE spawned new windows off the same process instance, but it appeared not.

So then I go back into IE, press ctrl-n and check back on task manager and low & behold, there’s no new instance, just a memory use increase in one of the current ones. So it would seem that how you open IE changes how it manages the processes it uses. Here’s a shot of task manager with IE & Firefox both having the same four sites open, the 1^st with the IE windows opened using ctrl-n and the other with them opened by clicking on the IE icon.

Each successive IE processes has less memory usage, so it would seem that it’s either caching or sharing some of the resources, but none the less, to open the same four pages, the memory usage difference is huge - 74,236KB! So the lesson for today is, use ctrl-n. (Well, actually, the lesson is use Firefox. Even with all the windows opened on the single process, Firefox still used less memory)

The IE7 dev team are actually going to change CSS handling to be more consistant with the standards, and have detailed a few on their blog.

Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent.

’bout time too. major inconsistencies sounds so much nicer than stupid bug doesn’t it. The PNG support is a great thing too, hopefully PNGs can get the popularity they deserve.

ESV Bible Blog. Outstandingly cool. Just reinforces my opinion that the GNP guys are on the right track for promoting the Gospel, which is one of the main reasons I chose it as the default for my Verse of the Day plugin for WordPress

They offer more web-services than any other Bible publisher I can find, and now they have a blog too (which is giving away bible in return for links. Yes it’s shameless self-promotion, but who cares?)

The great thing is that they seem to be following the sort of thing Dean Peters was asking for ages ago, that is, free resources for anyone to use (Since then BibleGateway has added a bunch of web services as well). This is the sort of thing that will drag the church into the 21^st century. If de-centralised publishing can change the way people think about news, it can do the same thing for evangelism.

Because All Consuming is so very cool, and I’m so very lazy, I’ve written up a small bookmarklet that simplifies the process of adding an item to AC. Basically what it does is whenever you’re looking at an item on Amazon you can click on the bookmarklet and it will open up the item’s page in All Consuming in a new window, from which you can add it to your list.

Unfortunately, because AC uses it’s own id numbering system for adding items to lists, I can’t just make this bookmarklet automatically add the item (Erik, please tell me if I’m wrong here!), but it’s only one extra click to add the item anyway.

Bookmarklet link: Add to All Consuming (Updated link 2005-04-13)

How to set it up:

• IE 5.5 and above: Right click on the link above, and then click on “Add to Favorites…”
• Netscape 6 and above and Mozilla/Firefox: Drag the link into your bookmark bar or right click on the link and then click on “Add bookmark”/”Bookmark this link…”.
• For Safari: Drag the link into your bookmark bar.

This bookmarklet works for Amazon URLs that have the /asin/1234567890/ format, i.e. The Shadow Rising and the /detail/-/1234567890/ format, i.e. The Eleventh Hour. If there are other formats that I’ve missed, please let me know.

To do: Expand the script to search the body text of the current page for ASIN’s and allow the user to select from a list.

Erik Benson has been busy rebuilding All Consuming. Along with updating the interface & functionality, he’s also added tagging rather than fixed categories and the ability to add things other than books.

My little list, which as of right now consists of two Terry Pratchett books, will be getting added to regularly! (There’s RSS feeds for each user too, but unfortunately no feed for the ‘Latest Consumed’ list yet.)