FireBible History and Bookmark Support

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Midland History support in FireBibleAs usual, this has been sitting complete but unpolished on my machine for a few months now and I haven’t had any time to finish it the way I wanted. I have mostly finished with History and Bookmark support, so this is a sneak peak into what is coming in FireBible 0.9. The primary issue that I was grappling with was whether Dictionary / Glossary lookups should make it to one of the primary history lists. I decided that they shouldn’t and moved on to thinking about how all history / bookmark entries could be segregated by type.  There are many different types of SWORD modules, but for the purpose of history and bookmark listings, I have divided them into the following four categories:

  • Bibles/Commentaries/Questionable
  • General Books/Daily Devotionals/Essays/Other
  • Maps/Images
  • Dictionaries/Glossaries

Humenné Bookmark support in FireBibleFireBible annotates the URLs when you visit them, placing them in one of the four categories above. Then using a simple places query, I can list them out in any way I want. What you see in the screenshot is just a number of queries I think will be useful. Besides the FireBible toolbar, they are also available in the Bookmarks menu where they can be modified and queries can be added or deleted.

Of course, FireBible has always had history, bookmark and tagging support since the beginning. Anything you read is recorded in Firefox’s regular history and locations can be bookmarked just like regular HTTP URLs. FireBible 0.9 simply adds annotations to these URLs so they can be correctly categorized and presents them in a central location, without being “disturbed” by your regular browsing history. Because the annotations will only be added for content you read after installing FireBible 0.9, the categorization might seem off for a bit, but it will settle down with use. I plan to make FireBible 0.9 available around the time Firefox 3.5 is available. FireBible 0.9 will only work on Firefox 3 and above, Firefox 2 support has been dropped, primarily because of the places queries and some cool new features yet to arrive. Stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions or critique, do send them along or leave a comment.

3 COMMENTS

  1. The integration looks nice. However, I think its usefulness is going to depend very much on what you see bookmarks used for. I already have too many bookmarks in Firefox for a menu to work well, and I have far more in my BPBible topics (probably ~200 topics, and I don’t know how many passages). While Firefox’s Organise Bookmarks functionality works pretty well, I’m not sure how well it will scale to organising and managing this many topics and references (I’m not talking about software scalability here, but UI scalability and whether it remains managable). It’s definitely not going to work in the bookmarks menu.

    • Jonathan, thanks for taking the time to look at this. If I have understood you correctly, you’re fine with *using* bookmarks from a menu (or several menus, sometimes nested) or a bookmark tree in the sidebar (View > Sidebar > Bookmarks) but you’re not too happy with FF’s bookmark organization capabilities?

      The ability to tag URLs and the Places query support may make some of the organization we needed to manually do earlier unnecessary, with all of it encapsulated in a smart query. There are also many extensions for FF which could help though I have never used any of them.

      Do you have any suggestions or examples of better UI? Perhaps I could integrate some of those into FB.

  2. I was actually saying the reverse (I think). I have too many topics and bookmarks, and navigating them with the menu is slow and cumbersome. The Organise Bookmarks is much better.

    One thing that I think is of great importance is being able to view the topics/folders that any particular verse is contained in.

    Another thing that I think is important (and have no idea if you do or not) is to allow bookmarking of a verse range, not just a single verse. There are so many things you want to mark that don’t fit into the arbitrary verse boundaries.

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