Pop-Verse

The pop up verse feature is something I developed in 2003 with the help of a couple others. I wanted something to automatically insert the verse into an html file and make it popup where there is any Bible reference in the text. I found a free Java script program on the Internet called "Overlib" that actually creates the popup, but the text of each verse had to be manually inserted in the file to make it work. This was very time consuming if many verses were involved.

I sought a way to automate the process and was advised by a Christian software developer to make a Python script to insert the verses. With help from a Russian Python script expert we developed a basic script to do that. However, there were several problems to overcome that took me some weeks off and on to fix.

One was there are several variations possible when writing Bible references. For instance, Matthew 1:1 can be written Matthew 1:1, Matt. 1:1, Mat. 1:1, Mt. 1:1.
Another problem was incomplete references like Matt. 1:1, 4, 21; 2:6.
Still another problem was spanning references such as Matt. 1:5-7.

After considerable trial and error I was able to deal with all these problems. I added a section to the script to change all the different variations to a consistent reference [Matt. 1:1]. Then I added another section to make incomplete references complete. The Russian expert fixed the spanning problem. I also made a King James Bible database for the script to extract the verses from. Now the script will standardize and complete all the references and insert hundreds of verses in a html file in about 2 seconds.

One consequence of inserting the verses is if there are very many references in a file, once the verses are inserted the file can become several times larger. For instance, our More Than Forgiven book containing over 350 references is around 62k. With the verses inserted it is 196k. This makes download times a little longer for dial-up users like us, but the benefit is worth it.

Unfortunately, inserting the verses requires one to have the Python scripting language on their computer, the King James Bible database, and the scripts, and still the user has to be familiar with Python to make it work. Therefore, the script is not user friendly or ready to distribute.

Presently these works have our PopVerse feature inserted,