Start a Bible Reading Plan Midyear with the ESV Site and API
Robert at Prone to Wander wonders about having to shift all the dates when starting a Bible reading plan in the middle of the year:
For now, one of the things I am resolving to do in the near future is force myself back into a regular routine of Bible study and reading. To that end, I have been looking online for Bible study plans. There are a lot of them, which is nice. But there’s one annoying feature they all share: They all start on January 1. It’s as if people don’t start one-year reading plans unless it’s a New Year’s resolution. If I want to start a one-year Bible plan on July 7, then I guess I just have to shift the calendar manually.
Do you know of a Bible reading plan that just lists the days 1 through 365 instead of January 1 through December 31?
You can now set up the ESV site (and thus the RSS feeds and API) to treat any day as January 1 by adding a start-date parameter to the URL. For example:
These URLs show you the Chronological Reading Plan, with the year starting today, July 11, 2007, and ending next July 9. (Using start-date ignores leap days.)
There’s no user-interface yet to access this time-shifting ability.
(Robert finds a few other plans in a later post.)
July 11th, 2007 at 10:02 am
The ESV Bible Blog just linked to my earlier two posts in which I complained asked about Bible study plans that didn’t start on January 1. The ESV web site can now be configured to treat any day as January 1; they show you the code for making this happen. Especially nice is the fact that the RSS feed…
July 11th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
An article I posted last week was featured this morning at the ESV Bible Blog, the corporate blog by the publishers of the English Standard Version…
July 11th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Start a Bible Reading Plan Midyear with the ESV Site and API…
July 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
This post is a bit out of place in the middle of July. It’s more at home in January—right around the first of the year. Actually, that was my problem this morning. It wasn’t the first of the year. As I considered my current quiet time plan, I decided that I wanted to begin to read through the Bible during my daily devotions. Only, today is July 11, and as everyone knows, you are supposed to start these plans on January 1…
July 12th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Yesterday I mentioned the possibility that task #4 might be completed very soon due to an unexpected, and most welcome, prominent spot in the ESV Bible Blog. At some point overnight, we made it!…
July 14th, 2007 at 7:44 am
By now most of the people I know who started to read through the Bible in a year have rationalized their way to some other plan. Well thanks to the ESV people you can get a fresh start mid-year. Read about it here on the ESV blog….