ESV Bible Online: Short Dynamic Title
Update 12/29: User script updated to also work on the ESV Online Study Bible.
I’m a big fan of the ESV Bible Online. 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!
Comments
Good work!
Do you know if there is search add-on for firefox for the esv study bible (for the search bar at the top right)? I’ve been using the normal esv one for years, but it would be good if there was one for the study bible.
Thanks Stephen. I am not aware of a Firefox search plugin for the ESV. However, I have found this unnecessary because of Firefox’s Smart Keywords functionality. If you go to the ESV Online website and right-click on the search box, you’ll see an option to “Add a keyword for this Search”. Upon clicking this, it will bring up the bookmark dialog. For the bookmark title put something like “ESV Quick Search” and for the keyword supply “esv”, and then file the bookmark into an unused folder (you’ll not ever be clicking this bookmark directly).
Once this bookmark is added you can then type into the location bar things like “esv John 1” or “esv God's love” and the results from the website will appear. Hope this helps!
Thanks Weston, that works nicely. I knew you could do it in Google Chrome, didn’t realise it worked in Firefox too!
I am really enjoy Flock as my browser will ESV Online should I experience any difficulties? Will this Greasemonkey work on here? Have found this Site and so excited I have a bible study online this will be so useful. God Bless.
@Sandi: I’ve never used Flock, but according to Wikipedia Greasemonkey works on Flock. I hope you find that it does work.
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Thank you for your notes..
Hi weston, nice post. Im a chistian brother and web applications developer from Cuba. Nice project you make. Im planing make and open source CMS for churchs and ministries, i think all that are on market now are very expensive. Would be great if we can work togueter on some project.
Lord bless you