Weston Ruter

I’m a big fan of the ESV Bible Online website. It’s very readable, accessible, open, and you can listen to Scripture audio down to the verse-level. We read from it together daily in our read-through, and we just started to be more intentional about noting and sharing certain things that stand out to us.

One thing I don’t like about the website is that the document titles get so long and verbose. So if I look up John 3:16, the document title says, “ESV Bible Online: Passage: John 3:16″. If you’re doing any kind of research, you are bound to have multiple windows and tabs open at once. And if so, then all you’ll see is “ESV Bible O…” or something. And when you make bookmarks it will have that whole long title instead of just “John 3:16 (ESV)”…

Well, not any longer, if you have the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox or the GreaseKit plugin for Safari/WebKit. I wrote a user script (click to install) that shortens the document title to be as short as possible, so window titles and bookmarks are short and more manageable. The coolest part of the script, however, is that the document title changes as you select verses of text from the page! So if I’m reading Romans 5, and I select a portion of verse 5, the document title will become “Romans 5:5 (ESV)”. If I select a few verses, then it will become “Romans 5:5-8 (ESV)”, and it even works if the verses span chapters!

This script also greatly facilitates note-taking in Google Notebook. When we are reading from the ESV Online, and we want to note a passage, then we just select it with the cursor, and click “Note This” (made available by the Google Notebook extension). The selected text is then added to the selected Notebook and the title of the note is the same as the document title, which is the scripture reference of the selected text. It works great!