New Webtool Spreads Bible Across the Internet
A new free tool that allows Christian websites to easily provide their visitors with the full text of Bible verses referenced on their pages has been installed on more than 1,000 sites since its release earlier this year.
The tool, RefTagger, allows website visitors to easily "look up" Scripture references by simply hovering their mouse curser over them rather than having to manually look up a Bible reference by typing or cutting-pasting them into Bible websites like BibleGateway.com.
"There are tens of thousands of Christian blogs and websites with millions – or perhaps even billions – of Scripture references," noted Phil Gons, spokesman for Logos Research Systems, which released RefTagger in February.
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"But we usually face the same problem with Scripture references on the web as we do with print books. They're just too time consuming to look up," he wrote in his corporate blog.
"With RefTagger now you can … provide your readers with some of the same conveniences of Libronix on your website," Gons added, referring to Logos' digital library system, "and without all the time and hard work it takes to create the links manually!"
According to Gons, RefTagger is currently powering the sites of ministries like Grace to You and Desiring God Ministries and a host of church websites like Compass Bible Church and Park Street Church. RefTagger can also be found on wiki sites like Theopedia and on the blogs of figures like Doug Wilson and Ray Comfort.
"No matter what kind of site you run or how much traffic you get, if your site has Bible references and you want a simple, free, time-saving solution for providing instant access to the text of Scripture, RefTagger is for you," Gons wrote.
According to the Logos spokesman, RefTagger can be set up in 5 minutes for most sites. And after doing so, all properly formatted Bible references – past and future – are instantly transformed.
"It took me less than a minute to set it up and it is a blessing to have it running on my website," wrote the Rev. Paul T. McCain, Concordia Publishing House's Publisher and Executive Director of Editorial, in a comment to Gons.
"I love this," exclaimed Ray Gano of World Changers Youth Ministries after updating his ministry's blog and devotion page to include RefTagger. "I used to manually create links to BibleGateway, but quickly grew tired of it. Now I don't have to even think about it. What a wonderful tool!"
Since its inception in 1992, Logos Research Systems, Inc., has grown to become the largest developer of Bible software and a worldwide leader in multilingual electronic publishing.
The Bellingham, Wash.-based company has partnered with more than 100 publishers to make more than 9,000 electronic Bible study resources available to customers around the world. Their technology is used in a dozen languages in more than 180 countries, including Johannesburg, South Africa, where the company has a subsidiary.
