Heidi and I wish you all a Merry Christmas. We were going to sign it “the Haverbergs” or “the Friekamps.” But with as many people as we have confused on our names, we decided to be literal. 
Merry Christmas from Heidi and Adam
Merry Christmas!
Every ms counts
I’m trying to teach myself this workflow and how to get all of the code to interact.
The red connection and path are what I just stopped on. The JSON is working like a charm. In creating the PHP Web Service, I ran into a bit of an obstacle with large sections of scripture verses. The XPath query on the Full XML File was getting taxed pretty hard when iterating through the bible’s data structure with a do-while loop. Returning over 300 verses and here’s what the do-while loop looked like:
Do-While Loop
The do-while loop was iterating through the xml nodes linearly (since the bounds are known by the bible verse locations). It had to do a switch statement on the node type to determine how to output the JSON. Needless to say, it was a lot of operations for every node.
Instead, I changed it to target the XPath so it iterates with the exact path, already knowing every node type. The difference was dramatic:
For Loop
My next step is to finish connecting the PHP code to the database (green line). Then, once I know it works, I’ll put it into a WordPress plugin. Hopefully it will be live on DiscipleShare before 2011!
Disconnecting Facebook from Twitter
Trying to grasp social media is like taking two steps forward, one step back.
Like many of my friends, I ran an analysis of the top words used in my Facebook statuses in 2010. While many of my colleagues had their spouse’s name, an affirming adjective, and a time of day in their words — mine were strictly work-related.
1. www.
2. uppermidwestcc
3. .org
Not good, Adam!
As Heidi said on my last post: “Adam, that was indecipherable …”
I’ve taken the first step by disconnecting my Twitter account from automatically importing to my Facebook status. Tweeting a computer programming accomplishment became demoralizing as so many of my church friends said “speak English” or “what?!?” No need for a part of my ministry to get lost in translation.
And I’m not sure what’s next in my journey to de-clutter my social media presence. It’s not like I want to give it up — far from it! — it’s part of my ministry. But when several minister friends are just now getting onto Facebook, and think Twitter is irrelevant and unnecessary, I’m not sure them knowing I speak in multiple languages in multiple social media worlds is helpful.
So for now, I’m taking adding an extra step to the communication … hoping to confuse less people.
(And to not let my statuses betray my real priorities … even though the 2010 Top Words algorithm was off in at least two ways!)
No kidding …
I had to laugh at this article from CNN:
They describe most NGOs, religious movements, and social service organizations. That line thrown in by the CNN Wire staff is classic. True. And yet, I hope it’s successful (in whatever way that might mean …)
Sick as a Dog
Last week started horribly wrong. What we suspected was a foodborne illness was probably a stomach virus.
Two and a half days later and I was just starting to re-hydrate. Thankfully, Odo, our beagle, kept me company. It made it being “sick as a dog” tolerable.
Custom Bible Taxonomy – Fail
I’ve spent a couple weeks’ free time building a custom Bible verse tagger for curriculum on DiscipleShare.
It’s close, but not close enough that I can post the code for other developers to use.
Right now I’m keeping it out of the WordPress structure. It’ll eventually be its own taxonomy plugin for a WordPress database — so users can tag with scripture verses and have them database-searchable. But for now, it’s just a simple Javascript/XML parser (with some wicked CSS to make it great amongst all web browsers).
As you can probably guess, the “green” box is to set the starting verse; the “red” box is to set the ending verse. Yep — there’s a problem in the logic. Two steps forward, one step back.
More to come.
