Hello. As a creator of software for Windows and also of reference materials using TiddlyWiki, I have found ways to create similar apps using Twine.
From the link below are eleven Bible related references. Hopefully some of you will benefit from the material or at least see other possibilities for using Twine.
https://bible-topics.michaels-tech-notes.info/Bible%20Tools%20Launcher.html
Not sure what the point is in using Twine to create an entirely static web page. It’s adding a lot of code burden to something that doesn’t need it.
I hear ya. The Launcher file is dead simple and yes could just be a plain HTML page, but the files it launches do have some interactivity, search features, etc. Might want to poke through those some. Of course, it could all be done with HTML, CSS and JS, but, I just wanted to see what all I can get Twine w/Harlowe to do for reference materials. Plus, I’m a decades long PC programmer so it has been neat to find a lightweight web framework like Twine.
Ahh! I see. I missed that the first set of links went to other Twine files. Why not put them all in a single file?
Well, it’s about 18 megabytes of files altogether and I use the passages array to do searches which would be far slower with everything in one file. And I would have to do more filtering on those searches to segregate the matches returned. I had been looking for something much easier to view and work with than TiddlyWiki in which I have a 45 megabyte HTML file w/pictures. And with Twine, I just upload the files anywhere and they fully operate. With TiddlyWiki, they need to be the index file on their own subdomain to open properly.
I’m still doing the theological classification of these pages (from it depends the level of cooperation…) but I consider the bible (I noted that the canon is the protestant one) a good standard benchmark for text-related software: known size, known internal division, even known words. and known number of occurrances of a word, too.
the bible text search engine is definitively slow (7+ minutes in its search for “Jerusalem”, but I tested it online, and Twine isn’t precisely an indexed database… )but gives the correct number of occurrances of a word (767 results). and handle well the results and the evidentiation of the output, carrying it into the link to the chapter, (a good use of Twine’s features) aside the alphabetical sort of the books of the bible instead of the (IMVHO) correct, literally canonical (that is, from Genesis to Revelation…) sorting.
this is all I will say; Until proven otherwise, I’m incline to classify your site as “borne-again fundamentalist”, a denomination whose is really low in my appreciation of the Faiths.
(please note that notwhistanding my country, I’m NOT catholic…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I appreciate you checking out the files. The whole Bible file is over 1,200 passages in Twine. So the text search looks at all of those and separates each passage into verses. So it’s a lot of work. If Twine had indexing that would be great but since it’s a tool for creating fiction that’s not something it’s author thought about. On my PC, it took about 3 minutes to search for Jerusalem. In the New Testament it takes about 10 seconds. Putting the Bible into Twine was an experiment to see how big a files it could handle.
Since I’m accessing the Books through the passages array, the results come out sorted alphabetically by passage or book name. I could create a dataset with book names in canonical order then use it to output search results in book order.
Yes, I believe in Bible fundamentals, literal interpretation as well. It keeps me from getting bogged down with the myriad of interpretations people have come up with, especially in the last 100 years. As far as borne again, in the Spirit, yes. I was baptized as an adult about 20 years ago as well. Regarding denominations, I’m not part of one after having been in United Methodist for 20 years. Sadly, that denomination has veered away from fundamentals and has greatly shrunk in size due to churches leaving it the last few years (especially in America).
Hope you have a blessed week.
Maybe the search could use a separate concordance? That would be a lot easier to manage. You could generate one automatically as static data, but of course they do already exist.
How are you getting your search results, Michael?
Are you using Harlowe’s built-in macros? …or are you using JavaScript directly in the DOM? …or some other strategy?
I’m just wondering what would be the fastest way to display the search results. (I’ve played with using JavaScript in Harlowe stories in the past, is all.)
I’ve just been accessing the passages array, breaking it into sentences via split: newline and looping through it. And also filtering out start or contents passages. My JS is weak which is why I have stayed with Harlowe. It’s okay but has some weird named macros and a few unique conventions I’ve not seen in any PC language I have used. For most of the files the search mechanism is quite adequate but I realize Twine was not really created with large files in mind.
Doing it with Harlowe is going to be much slower than doing it in JS
Harlowe has to take the code, translate it, and then execute it, using JS to do so. So if you skip that and use JS directly it will be faster
I tried the same search, and it eventually returned no results at all?
Harlowe definitely has its limits. I really just included the text search for completeness but in no way can it compete with full text indexed databases. I have written two programs that run under Windows that are very speedy and return matches on 4000 verses in less than two seconds. I may learn more JS in this regard. For those that have heard there are Greek and Hebrew dictionaries keyed to some translations. I merged in the Greek dictionary with the New Testament and it works, but is over 6000 passages. So would not be usable for text searches. I also attempted to do the Old Testament and the file size got up to 11 meg. And the Twine editor would not even import it. So that’s another limit. Not that I blame Twine because it wasn’t designed for searchable textual databases.