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

What is RSS?

You may have seen the image on some sites, or maybe a link to “Syndicate this site” or “RSS” or something similar and wondered “What is all this talking about? Does it matter? Is it useful to me?”

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

*cue Tim Shaw voice-over* “Have you ever wanted to have the latest news on the persecution of Christians around the world on your website? Well now you can!“

ahem…

I’ve written a perl script to extract the RSS file from the Voice of the Martyrs website.

This takes the rss file and parses it using the XML::RSS module. So obviously you will need to be running a server that has both perl and the XML module installed. By default the script creates a div that looks like this (using the default css file), but it can be edited to change the HTML produced.

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