Love this Version!

Image via CrunchBaseAbout a year ago, one of my friends mentioned on Facebook that she had started an online Bible reading plan together with a couple other friends.  Being nosy, or always looking for a good site for Bible reading, I asked her what site they were using.  That's how I found YouVersion, and I really love it.  They have many, many, many different Bible versions for reading, and it's so handy when I'm online and want to look up a scripture.  You can even use the Parallel option to compare two versions at once.

There are lots of reading plans to choose from - over 150.  Choose a plan, and YouVersion sets it up for you and gives you the daily readings - and keeps track of your progress.  I just started a Chronological plan to read through the entire Bible in chronological order, and my plan is 1.4% complete!  I hope I won't need to do it too often, but YouVersion also has an option to 'Catch Me Up!' so if you get behind (or read ahead) it will reset the calendar to make you current.  This is good for me because I tend to get discouraged when I get behind a few days and despair of ever catching up - so this way I can just catch up and continue with the plan.  I think it sets people up for success.

YouVersion is also available as a Mobile App for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows phone, and practically everything else - meaning you can take your Bible reading with you everywhere you go!  I love it.  I've got it on my tablet, and it makes the daily Bible reading so nice, and it keeps track of my progress as I go.  I also love that the app makes it super easy to share verses to Facebook!  and take notes, and highlight meaningful verses.  All the Bible versions that are available on the web are available in the app if you're connected to the Internet or your service provider, and many of them are available for download, meaning you can read the ones you download literally anytime, anyplace, even when you can’t connect to your service provider or to the Internet.  This Sunday and Monday, two versions that aren't usually available for download will be - the NIV and NLT.  They will only be available from 12am Central time on Sunday October 30 through 11:59pm on Monday October 31.  The NLT is one of my favorite versions, so I'm planning to download that one.  Usually I'm using my tablet here or somewhere that I'm connected to WiFi, but you never know, and I like knowing I will always have it available.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying everything YouVersion has to offer, and I'm sure there are even more features that I haven't discovered yet.  And did I mention that it's all FREE!

Going Mobile

I read about this on Lady Banana today. She recently got a new Internet enabled mobile phone, but so many sites are not mobile friendly. In a search to see how she could make her own site mobile friendly, she came across MoFuse. It's an easy, free way to create a mobile version of your site. I signed up and set up a mobile site for this blog and also for one of my other blogs. MoFuse uses the RSS of your blog to update the content, so once you've got it set up, you don't have to do anything else - just keep blogging. You can customize colors, create additional pages - like a contact page or an about me page, enable comments, and more. MoFuse also has site analytics so you can track your visitors.

I added a Mobile button to the top of the sidebar so hopefully, if someone browses through on their mobile, they will be able to get to the button and click through to the mobile friendly site. Ideally, I think, once visitors find mobile friendly sites, they will bookmark that url and bypass the 'real' computer site altogether. I was interested in the Automatic Redirect, but that won't work with my blog. If you have a Wordpress blog and can paste the code into your header.php file, you can use that. Then, if someone browses by your blog on their mobile device, they will be automatically redirected to the mobile friendly site.

View the mobile phone simulation for this blog if you'd like to get an idea what it will look like. Remember, the colors are fully customizable - header, text, links. If there are images in a post, they are resized to fit, too.

It's good to be aware that more and more people are browsing the Internet on their mobile phones. MoFuse makes it easy for you to make sure they can view your site. I'm sure I would appreciate it if I was trying to read my favorite blogs with a mobile phone.