Phil Gons | LogosTalk

12 New Bundles to Build Your Library!

Phil Gons | Fri, November 21, 2008 | Products

We prepared 12 new bundles for ETS and SBL and wanted to share these specials with you as well. Each of these collections was carefully crafted and offers some really nice savings.

Whether you’re into the original languages, OT studies, NT studies, church history, theology, or apologetics, there’s something here for just about everyone.

For those of you who want to beef up the Greek and Hebrew sections of your digital library, we have three language supplements containing some of our best original language resources:

Many of our other top-selling resources and collections have been conveniently combined into these nine bundles.

Go take a look at what’s included and see if anything here would be a good addition to your Libronix library.

Goodies for the Holidays

Phil Gons | Wed, November 19, 2008 | Misc.

Today’s guest blogger is Adam Navarrete, who works in the marketing department here at Logos.

Just in time to get you thinking about your holiday cooking calendar, we held another bake-off this past Friday. There were more than a dozen delicious treats, but three rose to the top.

Our winners were as follows:

Heidie Godfrey with her Chocolate Raspberry bars
Elise Starkovich with her In Search of Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo (translation: Cookie Cheesecake)
Elizabeth Sanborn with her Keebler Bars

We invite you to download the recipes and give them a try!

If you make any of these for your household, church function, or holiday event, let us know how you like them.

Enjoy!

Steve Runge Joins the Blogosphere

Phil Gons | Tue, November 18, 2008 | Misc.

Steve Runge, a scholar-in-residence here at Logos and author of the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament, the High Definition New Testament, and the forthcoming Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction to Discourse Features for Teaching and Exegesis has contributed to the blog here on several occasions.

But he has a lot more to say about discourse grammar, his area of expertise, so he’s decided to start his own blog, NT Discourse. His stated goal is to remove the mystery from discourse grammar. If it’s still a mystery to you, you might want to give it a read.

Steve’s hit the blogging ground running, and has been averaging about five posts per week. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of things he’s been discussing:

If you’ve purchased the LDGNT or the HDNT and are looking for some help learning how to put them to good use, you’ll definitely want to check out Steve’s new blog. You RSS folks can grab his newly burned FeedBurner feed.

Even if you’re not into discourse grammar, you won’t want to miss Steve and his dog singing a duet!

Lots of Journals from Logos

Phil Gons | Fri, November 14, 2008 | Products

We’ve mentioned the Theological Journal Library several times here on the blog. It’s a favorite of many Logos users. But even though it’s a phenomenal deal, not everyone needs or wants all of that content.

If you’ve ever wanted to pick and choose only the journals that interest you, now you can. Visit our new Journals page to purchase individual journals from the Theological Journal Library.

Of course, do your math. It may be a better deal to get the whole bundle than piece together several individual journals. But in our effort to make more things available as individual downloads, we wanted to give you the option to purchase only what you want.

What about new content? The Theological Journal Library is typically updated annually. We plan to add that new content every year or two so you can stay up to date with the latest additions. You’ll be able to upgrade your current collection for a fee that corresponds to the amount of new content for that particular journal.

In addition to all of the journals from the Theological Journal Library, we also have a number of other journals and periodicals listed on our new Journals page. Be sure to give it a look.

Help Us Decide What to Put on Pre-Pub

Phil Gons | Wed, November 12, 2008 | Products

Our Pre-Pub system let’s you decide which resources make it into production and which ones don’t—or at least which one’s make it sooner than other.

It works quite well for the most part. But for the Pre-Pubs that don’t generate sufficient interest in a reasonable amount of time, perhaps our time could have been better spent working on titles that you want to see turned into Libronix resources.

You get a say in which titles go up on Pre-Pub by submitting your requests to suggest@logos.com and posting them in the suggestions newsgroup. While those suggestions are very helpful, we can’t always license the things you want.

We’re considering another way that you can help us decide which books to Pre-Pub and which ones to pass by or put on the back burner. We’re tentatively calling it Pre-Pre-Pub. :)

Here’s how it will work. Visit the Pre-Pre-Pub page, enter your full name, and then vote on as many of the titles as you’d like. After you’re done, click the submit button at the bottom of the page. (Please vote only once.) After we’ve had enough people respond, we’ll do our best to put your recommendations into action and put up a new list.

At close to 500 titles, our first list might be a bit too large. If you move quickly, you should be able to get through it in roughly 10 minutes. Feel free to skip the ones that don’t interest you. A skip will count as a low vote. To help you navigate the list, we’ve arranged the titles in alphabetical order of the author’s last name.

Thanks for your help! As always, we welcome your feedback on how we can continue to offer you more of the books that you want.

Adding RefTagger to a WordPress Blog

Phil Gons | Tue, November 11, 2008 | Apps & Web Tools, Training

WordPress is one of the most popular and powerful blogging platforms. It comes in two flavors: the hosted version (i.e., WordPress.com) and the self-hosted version (i.e., WordPress.org). This tutorial addresses how to add RefTagger to a WordPress.org blog since it is currently not possible to add it to a WordPress.com blog. WordPress.com bloggers, jump to the bottom to find out how you can help to change that.

There are two ways to set up RefTagger on your WordPress.org blog: (1) use the plugin or (2) set it up manually. The plugin is the best option since it keeps the code separate from your theme, which allows you to change themes without having to reinstall the code. It also enables you to keep up to date easily with future changes and feature additions to RefTagger with WordPress’s simply one-click plugin updates. But some of you may prefer the control of the manual route or may just not know how to find your WordPress files via FTP.

So take your pick with either of the below methods.

Method 1: Using the Plugin

To use the plugin, you need FTP access to your site’s files—at least for now. With WordPress 2.7, you will be able to browse and install plugins right from the admin panel!

If you’re like me and happen to be using WordPress 2.7 Beta 2, adding a new plugin like RefTagger is amazingly easy.

Simply navigate to Plugins > Add New (i.e., http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/plugin-install.php) and search for RefTagger. RefTagger should show up as the top search result.
Click “Install” on the far right, and then click “Install Now” in the window that opens. It takes just a second or two to install, and then you’re taken to a screen where you can activate it.
Click “Activate Plugin,” and then navigate to the RefTagger page under the Settings menu to customize it, if you’d like.

If you’re playing it safe and running WordPress 2.6.3 or earlier, here’s what you need to do to set it up.

Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reftagger/, and click “Download.” Save the zip folder, and then extract the contents.
Fire up your favorite FTP program. (FileZilla is a nice free option.) Then navigate to the place where you installed WordPress. It’s probably in a folder called “public_html” or “www.” Locate the “wp-content” folder, and then open it. You’ll see a “plugins” folder inside. Open it, and then copy the RefTagger.php file that you extracted from the zip folder into that folder.
Log in to your WordPress admin panel, and then go to your Plugins page. Find RefTagger in the list of inactivate plugins, and then click “Activate.”
Navigate to the RefTagger page under the Settings menu to customize it, if you’d like.

Method 2: Adding the Code Manually

Log in to your WordPress admin panel, navigate to the “Design” page, and click on “Theme Editor.”
Find your theme’s “Footer” template, and click on it to open it.
Scroll to the bottom, paste the customizable RefTagger code immediately before the </body> tag, and click “Update File.”
Navigate to the RefTagger page under the Settings menu to customize it, if you’d like.

WordPress.com users, are you feeling a little left out? We want to help, but there’s only so much we can do. The good folks at WordPress.com are willing to consider adding built-in support for RefTagger, but they need to see that there is enough interest. One of the things that they look at is the number of times that our plugin has been downloaded and installed. If you have friends using WordPress.org, encourage them to download and use the plugin.

Finally, a word to those of you who create WordPress themes or help churches and ministries get websites set up with WordPress: please consider adding RefTagger as a standard part of your theme or site set-up process. It’s a great way to improve the service you provide to people—at no cost to you and with very little effort.

Logos Bible Software for Mac

Phil Gons | Fri, November 7, 2008 | Training

It’s been more than a year since we’ve shared any official news about Logos Bible Software for Mac here on the blog. We’ve intentionally been quiet because we wanted our next announcement to be more than just a minor progress report.

Well, since we’re posting with a title “Logos Bible Software for Mac,” we must have some big news. Yes, in fact, we do. We’re thrilled to announce that we’re just about there and are ready to start taking pre-orders.

Place Your Pre-Order

Those of you who have been waiting patiently can now pre-order one of our five Mac base packages.

Current Logos users who want to crossgrade and move their existing Logos Bible Software digital library over to our new Mac software can purchase the Logos Bible Software for Mac engine for only $59.95.

Special Promo

Wait! Before you buy the Mac engine, you might be interested to know that you can get it for free.

Here’s the deal. If you spend $250 or more on live products at Logos.com or over the phone (800-875-6467) in a single order during the month of November, we’ll send you the Mac engine for free as soon as it’s ready.

Find out more.

Watch the Demo!

Want to see it for yourself? Watch the demo video below.

What Should I Buy Next?

Phil Gons | Wed, November 5, 2008 | Products

The best way to get started with Logos Bible Software is to purchase one of our base packages. Not everyone has the same budget or needs, but the bigger packages are definitely the better value. For those who are serious about studying the Bible and are convinced of the value of building a digital library, there’s no better place to start than Scholar’s Gold.

But once you have your base package and are ready for more, what should you buy next?

That’s the question that a new Logos user asked in the newsgroups recently:

I bought the Scholar’s Gold edition. Can you suggest any other good resources I would want to add to it?

I use it mostly for speaking/preaching so I enjoy having lots of good commentaries.

With around 9,000 resources, it’s good to have a little guidance to find out what others consider most useful.

Several longtime Logos users responded with their recommendations. Here are some of the things that they suggested:

Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary
Hermeneia
Word Biblical Commentary
BDAG and HALOT (available at a discount in a bundle)
Theological Journal Library
Robert Reymond’s Systematic Theology
Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology
Cornelius Van Til
Pillar New Testament Commentary

I’d concur with most of these recommendations and probably add the Essential IVP Reference Collection and the new Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament Bundle. I’d also point out our Top 10 lists, our Commentary product guide, and our Pre-Pub system.

What would you recommend? What are your top picks for moving beyond a base package?

Now Your Visitors Can Customize RefTagger

Phil Gons | Tue, November 4, 2008 | Apps & Web Tools

If you manage your own website or blog and use RefTagger, you get to choose the default Bible version that is used for the tooltips and the links to Bible.Logos.com. But your readers probably don’t all have the same favorite version as you do. Wouldn’t it be cool if they could all see the Bible passages in their preferred version?

Now they can with the RefTagger control panel. Every one of your visitors gets to chose their favorite Bible version and decide whether or not they want to see the links to Libronix. All you have to do is add one of the small control panels anywhere on your site—like in your sidebar—and your readers will be able to set their own preferences. The control panel uses a cookie to remember these preferences every time they return to any page on your site.

Try It Out

The control panel is now in the sidebar here on the blog, so test it out to see how it works. Watch what it does to these Bible verses: 1 Thes 2:13; Exodus 5:5ff; Rev. 1:1-3.

Add It to Your Site

Set up is a simple, two-step process. Just click on one of the sample control panels to get the necessary code and instructions on how to add it to your site. We provide you with eight different options to choose from, but we invite you to style the control panel any way you’d like to match the look of your site.

If you have RefTagger on your site, consider adding the control panel to make RefTagger even more useful for your readers.

Spread the Word

If you frequent a site that uses RefTagger, drop the site admins a note and encourage them to add the control panel. We don’t have contact information for all of the 4,000 sites using RefTagger, so we need your help to let them know about this cool new tool.

Last Chance—Get the Sermon File Addin Free!

Phil Gons | Fri, October 31, 2008 | Training

We’ve decided to extend the special offer on the Sermon File Addin through the weekend, so if you haven’t yet taken advantage of this tremendous offer, it’s not too late!

If you missed the earlier post (which mentions a number of other specials as well), for a limited time we’re “selling” the downloadable version of the Sermon File Addin for the whopping price of $0. That’s right. It’s totally free. No tax. No shipping. And no waiting.

The Sermon File Addin allows you to turn years of old sermon manuscripts into a powerful, organized, searchable Libronix book file. You can create a second book of all of your illustrations as well. Not only can you search and interact with your new books like the other books in your Libronix library, but you’ll even see your own sermons and illustrations show up in the Passage Guide. If you haven’t seen how it works, be sure to watch the two-minute demo video.

Get Started Today

If you’ve already picked it up, it’s easy to start importing your sermons from a variety of common file formats. In these five tutorial videos, we walk you through the simple process.

Sermon File Addin (Part 1): Importing Your Sermons and Illustrations