random book of mormon chapter atom feeds

I got a poke yesterday on my original random book of mormon chapter post about creating some feeds so that people can pull them themselves. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time, but always put it off because I’ve never written any dynamic RSS or Atom feeds before. I finally sat down and and figured it out this morning. It took me about an hour and a half to do, and I don’t think my XML is perfectly formed, but at least it works. I’ll clean it up when I have more time.

Here’s the new feeds right here. I have one for every volume of scriptures, from the Old Testament to the Pearl of Great Price, it’s all there. I think it’d be fun to add some for the Gospels and Psalms.

 http://scriptures.nephi.org/feeds.php

Right now the feed will update every time you check it, though I’ll probably come back later and change it to only update every 5 minutes or every hour or something.

To be honest, I’m not real proud of the quality of this thing right now, and I’d like to do it a lot better since I think it has some potential (like anonymous user preferences, or something), but the fact is I’ve been putting it off for way too long and I wanted to get something out the door. Aside from that, it helps me to read the scriptures more often by adding a bit of novelty to the mix.

Some other things I want to do for the feed is to have a link to the MP3 that is offered by the LDS Church on their scriptures website. Each entry feed will already link directly to the chapter page, but the naming scheme for the MP3s is slightly different, so I’ll have to do a bit of poking around before I can throw that together.

Another idea I’ve been toying with for a long time has been a simple “chapter a day” RSS feed, but with a few options for users. For instance, it’d be trivial to add features like number of chapters or verses per day, the update interval, and where to start reading.

Anyway, there’s a lot of really cool potential things to do, and I’m open to suggestions if anyone has ideas. With the database nicely normalized (and still lacking a formal release, sheesh I’m behind) it makes getting the data really simple and easy to work with.