A Walk Through The Word has its beginnings closely tied to the Daily Audio Bible. Not because one founded the other, but because the DAB was a huge part of MY (Chet's) own journey to becoming a man and accepting myself as a son of God, that I wouldn't be "here" without it. The daily readings, the community, they were, are, and will be a huge part of my life. When I originally made up this "Read Along" for the DAB, it was a single page on my company website that had the readings. It used some antiquated technology, but it worked... most of the time.

Since that time, the site has matured quite a bit. We're still all about the daily readings, but WTTW is also on a focused journey to provide journalling and "pile of bricks" resources to people around the world who recognize the value of chronicling their walk with God.

We’re very excited to have the opportunity to provide another resource to DAB listeners. If you were around when we “cut over” to the new site last year, you experienced, with many others, the discombobulated feeling of suddently being in a big new house. Everything familiar was gone. Conversations that were in progress had to be kick-started and context re-given. We simply couldn’t make the jump to transfer all our user accounts and forums to the new site. However, all was not lost.

We decided that it would be great to make a “Forum Museum” to display all these old posts. And that’s what WTTW has just released. You can now go to our Resources Page and click on the DAB Forum Museum. All our threads, dating way back to 2006, are RIGHT THERE. You can browse them by forum and topic, or you can search for things like “long walk” or even your old user name to find everything you once wrote.

We hope this resource provides another layer of community to the DAB. Just like the Israelites laid down a pile of rocks after crossing the Jordan, we can once again look back to where we came from, and as we do so, it sheds new light on where (and who) we are now.

From Joshua 4:

19 The people came up from the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and camped at Gilgal on the eastern limits of Jericho. Then Joshua set up in Gilgal the 12 stones they had taken from the Jordan, and he said to the Israelites, "When your children ask their fathers in the future, 'What is the meaning of these stones?' you should tell your children, 'Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.' For the LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, just as the LORD your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over. This is so that all the people of the earth may know that the LORD's hand is mighty, and so that you may always fear the LORD your God."

Thanks for supporting A Walk Through The Word and the Daily Audio Bible.

Chet

We've done quite a bit of work around here over the last few days. Here's a few highlights, and then a more comprehensive list below.

OLD JOURNALS ARE BACK ONLINE! If you registered on this "new" site using the same User Name as you had on the old site (i.e. "chet"), you'll find that your journals from the old site have been transferred over to the new site. This is a manual process, so we'll do it every so often as people continue to re-register on the site... if you happened to use a different User Name or can't find your old journals, feel free to send us a note using the feedback tool on the About page. We'll soon be adding pages so you can better browse and search the Journal archives.

JOURNAL FROM THE BIBLE READINGS. There are several links on the Bible Reading Page that will take you straight to a new journal entry for the specific passage we're reading. These links are also made available in the RSS feeds.

FACEBOOK PRESENCE. We're growing on facebook! Public journals and Bible Readings are automatically posted to the Walk Through The Word facebook page. Become a fan today and share them with your friends!

Below are some other things we've been working on that you might not notice.

• Premium Subscriptions that allow you to "email" your journal entries straight to the site. Soon, you'll also be able to pull data from your blog or other RSS source, including twitter, which means you'll be able to text straight to your journal!
• Cross Links are links between passages with key or repeated words. Currently these are being automatically indexed for each Bible reading and displayed at the bottom of the passage. You can click on a linked word, which will then take you to the cross links page, where you can view other passages with similar words. In the future, we'll also tie in related journals.
• Passage Viewer allows you to look up any passage in any of our available versions. You can then read it or link directly to a journal entry from it.
• Journal Images allow you to add some flair to your journals with uploaded images from your own computer each time you create a journal.

You can now "subscribe" to WTTW's public journal via our RSS feed at Feedburner. The feed, along with the site's other feeds, the Bible Reading Feed and the Blog Feed, are also auto-published to Facebook and Twitter.

Today we added some "flair" to the site.

Journal Images

Every time you create a journal entry now, you are asked for an image selection. By default, a generic "journaling" image is used:

However, if you want to use a different image, a few "system" images are made available right on the page, and you can also upload your own images to the site, such as those used in these journal entries:

Example Journal #1: Look at the Birds

Example Journal #2: Coffee with my Brothers

This will add a personal touch to journaled pages, as well as the (future) RSS feeds that are based on those journals.

Bible Reading Images

Each day's Bible reading (and the cooresponding RSS feeds) now have an image associated with them that relates to the version being used that week. For instance, the ESV version  has this image associated with it:

Any time you're viewing a reading for that version, it will show up. While this may not seem like a major change, it adds to the "spread the word" challenge because RSS feeds now have an image in them that can be used for each day's reading, and it will give it a fresher look each week as the version changes.

This is the "master" to do list. A place to keep track of ideas, bugs, and general things that need done around here. View the entire blog entry for details, and if you have other ideas, feel free to share them as comments on the post.

So we've got a page header image... the mountains and clouds with the site title and catch phrase... and I think I like it. I cropped and mirrored it so that no matter how wide your browser or the skin you're using (did you see those buttons at the top right of the page?) it will fill the header area... looks pretty nice, I think.

But what do we do with other pages? It would be nice to have some changing images for journal entries, but i'm not sure how to make that "easy." I guess I could just include an "upload image" box with each journal and store that with the journal... that makes a little sense.

What about the bible reading pages, or other pages? Does it help or distract to have extra images across the top or down the side? I'm eventually thinking those might be replaced by (relevant) ads for things such as Bibles, links to partner sites, and things like that... but I'm not totally sure.

We'd appreciate your thoughts... and again, thanks for helping "spread the Word."

Chet

We're excited to share some great news! The daily reading page at aWalkThroughTheWord.com got a BIG face lift today. Not only does the page "flow" easier and utilize what we believe are some easier to read fonts and color schemes, but we've also added some often-asked-for features, along with a few other things that are just "cool." We hope you like it!

Here are a few highlights, other than the complete redesign of the site:

1. No more pesky "quick journal" on top of your reading. Journal entries are on a separate page now, and while we'll eventually allow you to "popup" a quick journal while you read, this was causing some problems on smart phones and other small-screened browers.

2. Quick Version Switching. The reading plan on WTTW changes each week to provide some variety and also to match the reading plan of the Daily Audio Bible (www.dailyaudiobible.com).

You can journal again! To create a journal entry, click on the "Journal" link in the top menu of the page, or in the list of links at the bottom of the page. Or you can bookmark this link. We've loaded all of the public journal entries from the old site but have not "assigned" them to individual user accounts yet; we'll get to this ASAP! We'll also load your private entries and tie them to your account once you make one on the new site. To make everything flow smoothly, please create and account with the same Login Id as you had on the old site.