Sunday, April 6th, 2008
Inspired by General Conference weekend, I’m throwing up a little posting that could be useful to all my LDS friends. Many of you may now be resolving to try to improve your study of the scriptures, but you may find the prospect daunting in that you haven’t been able to devise a system that gets you to make your study a habitual, daily thing.
I’ve found a wonderful online service at a website called Scripturecast.net. Effectively what scripturecast does is to permit you to customize a daily RSS feed that tells you what you should be reading every day, according to the parameters you set. For example, if you want to read the Book of Mormon by July 1st of this year, Scripturecast will automatically divide the book into equal segements. Every day, it will add a new piece to your RSS feed, so you know how much you should read that day. You can access your RSS feed through iTunes or any RSS capable software that you may have on your machine.
If you prefer to set up your schedule with a certain amount of reading per day rather than with a target completion date, Scripturecast has your back there too. You can set it to schedule you to read anything from a chapter (or section) per month to several chapters per day. It’s really all up to you and your personal needs.
That’s not all. Scripturecast will create an HTML page for you (just in case you don’t do the RSS thing so much), where your reading schedule will automatically update every day. It will even provide a link to the chapters or sections you are to read each day so you can go straight to the page on lds.org and read them off the screen. There is even an audio player embedded in the Scripturecast page, so you can simply click it, and have your computer read your scheduled verses to you (once again borrowing from the audiobooks files housed at lds.org).
So if you want to make scripture reading a regular part of your daily schedule, maybe Scripturecast is the trick for you. Scripturecast currently only schedules reading in the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and the most recently posted LDS General Conference (so right now they have the October 2007 addresses up), and I don’t know if there are any plans to add the Bible or Pearl of Great Price to the lineup. Nevertheless, I’ve found it to be a very valuable tool in my personal study, and hope it can be useful for you as well.
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
I’ve just downloaded a new messenger program called Digsby. After a few days of use, it has me very impressed.
Digsby is an internet messenger program comparable to MSN’s Live Messenger or AOL’s AIM. In fact, it’s not just comparable to these programs, but works as a replacement for them. Digsby allows you to sign into all the major messenger services (AOL, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ {for those of you who remember ICQ}, and Jabber). It can also be set up to give you e-mail notifications for your Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as any POP server based e-mail that you may specify. Finally, it allows you to sign into Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace and receive updates and notifications for those social network services.
These capabilities by themselves don’t necessarily set Digsby apart. A program called Trillian has been around for years that allowed you to have one contact list for all your messenger accounts. Another messenger called Pidgin later came on the scene with the basic same abilities, adding support for Google Talk and MySpace messenger. I don’t know if those programs ever let you check any POP server mail account, so Digsby has an edge there, but a couple of other functions that really set it apart.
For one, Digsby is the first free messenger through which you can access all your major messenger accounts that has web cam support. So for those of you out there that want to run a cam, but don’t want to have four different messengers running all the time, Digsby is the choice for you.
Second, and this is really cool, Digsby allows you to embed a widget on any webpage through which a visitor to that page can talk to you live. They don’t have to install a thing (well…they do have to have Adobe Shockwave running on their machine, but apparently 200 million users out there already have it installed). They just browse to the web page where the widget lives. They click on it and can start chatting with you live.
It opens up all sorts of new possibilities for web businesses working on a budget. Did you want to have a live assistance area on your website, where visitors can chat with you? Well, now you can just download and install Digsby, and then run through the simple process of building your widget and embedding the tiny chunk of code Digsby generates into your webage. If you want to add the Widget to Facebook, it’s even more simple. When you set up your Facebook service in Digsby’s preferences, it asks you if you want to add the widget to your profile. It then behaves like any other Facebook app.
Sound cool? You can try it out right now without any downloading. I’ve already installed the widget on my portfolio website at gurustump.com (check the right column under latest additions), and on my facebook profile (left column this time). All you have to do is click in the text-entry field and start typing. If I’m listed as online, it’s a good bet I’ll respond.
So there is a first introduction to Digsby. It is apparently getting a lot of buzz and users out there on the interwebs right now, even though it’s only been in public beta for a few days. It’s already very customizable, but look for it to get mroe features and updates as time goes on.
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