After joining a LinkedIn group for returned missionaries, I encountered a web site created by one of the group members that I thought was worth sharing. I invited the site owner/creator, Steve Lloyd, to share a little more about his site with our M* readers.

Steve Lloyd is an Idaho farm boy born and raised in Malad, Idaho where his
father worked for a local dairy farmer. After graduating from Malad High
School he went to Utah State University for one year before serving a
mission in Seoul, Korea.  Afterwords, he attended BYU and graduated with a
Business Management Major/Entrepreneurship emphases.

For the past 15 years, Steve has worked in the software industry in
Quality Assurance, Automation, Build Configuration, and Software
Development. An inventor at heart, he is always working on a side project
to in an effort to help others and make the world a better place.

I would like to introduce you to a site I recently launched. It is called http://www.dearscriptures.com and is a site where you can read, study, listen, annotate, take notes, search, lookup a word’s dictionary definition in multiple online dictionaries, and  lookup the Greek or Hebrew translation of nearly any word in the Old Testament or New Testament using Strong’s Concordance.

The site is pretty simple to use. Once you log in you can quickly navigate to a chapter by using the drop-down menus on the top.

Once there, you are presented with each verse in the chapter and with quite a few options:

• There is a context-sensitive right-click menu.
  • If you select a single word or a short phrase, you are given the options of looking up the word in the dictionary or in Strong’s Concordance. The dictionary search returns results from several different online dictionaries including the LDS Bible Dictionary, WordNet, Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary, Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary , and The Devil’s Dictionary. The Strong’s Concordance search returns the Hebrew and Greek word used when the Bible was translated into English. This helps understand the meaning of the original word.
  • Selecting a word or part of a verse also allows you to annotate the phrase however you  would like. Options include bold, underline, italic, color, highlight, and  font sizes.  You can also add a note to the selected phrase.
  • Right-clicking on a verse without anything selected lets you annotate the entire verse and add a note to the end.
• On the right there is an application bar that includes
  • An audio feed directly from lds.org so you can listen to the chapter.  You can also turn on “Continuous Play” in the settings dialog so that it keeps on playing even after it finishes the current chapter. This makes it easy to listen to at work.
  • A search form where you can search the entire scriptures for any word or phrase.
  • A friends list where you can add your friends and see when they are online.

I am also constantly adding new features that my current users are requesting so please feel free to send me any suggestions.

I look forward to seeing you there