I've Been Thinking About This…

I wanted to play around a bit with Sparklines – cool little in-line charts and graphs that run off the jQuery library base. I’d found them several months ago in my regular trawling through the ‘net. So I took some of the CDC stats on N1H1 (aka swine flu) that they Twitter each day, and put this and this little Sparkline together. These are running on this page.

I also liked the Dow Jones Sparkline that they had on the screen, so I wrote a PHP server to get the closing prices from Yahoo! for the last 4 weeks and pass them to a Dow chart like theirs.

Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t let me include server-side scripting, so here’s a screen-capture of it.

I must say I’m pretty chuffed with it all…

[Updated this page 5/22/09]

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It’s been a while since I last blogged, because I’ve been building a free Twitterbot to serve the text of Scripture verses over Twitter – something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year. It’s finished now; I’ll get into the technical aspects in another post, perhaps, but for this post I want to tell about how to use it. The basic idea is simple – send a Twitter message containing the reference to the ‘bot (whose name is ‘votd’) and it will reply with the text.

Step 1 is being on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitterer yet, this step is fairly easy…go to http://Twitter.com and sign up. That’s all.

Step 2 is to type in the reference like this:

@votd john 11:35

After a while votd will wake up (it does this once a minute), see your message, interpret it, reply to it, and you’ll see this come back on your Twitter client:

John 11:35 - Jesus wept. (KJV)

In its basic form, it’s really that simple.

Verses that are longer than 140 characters (Twitter’s message limit) are wrapped into 2 (or 3, 4, 5 or even 6) messages.

By connecting to the Blue Letter Bible’s site and using the interface they provide to other sites, their translations are also available. If you want to read your verse in Latin, try

@votd john 11:35 vul

And it will come back with the Vulgate translation – BLB has 14 versions that they make available this way (besides the KJV which I have on my own site).

If you want to set a different version to be your default translation, type this:

@votd pref rsv

… then when you send in a verse request without a version, votd will use the RSV.

You can also subscribe to the automatic transmission of the verse of the day (that’s why it’s called ‘votd’, after all!) this way:

@votd pref votd=on

And, starting that night after midnight EST, votd will Twitter you the verse of the day, each day, until you unsubscribe.

Finally, if you’re not sure of your settings, or you want more detailed help, send this:

@votd ?

And votd will tell you what your defaults are and where the help page is.

Pretty nifty, no?

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