Logos Bible Software

This past weekend, Logos Bible Software had a booth at the Desiring God Ministries 2008 National Convention. I don't know that I have ever mentioned it here before, but I am a big fan of Logos and their products. I love print books, see my church office if you have any questions to that end, but having electronic books is infinitely useful when on the move.

I purchased a copy of their Scholar's Library Edition a couple of years ago when I was in Seminary. I wish I had the money at the time for the Silver or Gold edition, as they both contain a lot more items. I also added the BDAG Greek Lexicon while in seminary. The cost for the BDAG was the same, and it saved me from carrying a 20lb book every day to Greek classes! Shortly after seminary I added to my collection again buy getting Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. I have been using a print copy of Grudem's Systematic Theology since my first year at Bethel Seminary. Having an electronic version gives me faster searching capabilities, and again saves me from lugging a big honkin' book around.

The next thing I will be adding to my software collection will be from Dr. John Piper's books (www.logos.com/piper) that are available in Logos. Long term I would like to add the full collection of Dr. Piper's books, but for the short term I'll add just a few. I'd also eventually like to add Dr. Piper's sermon library as well. Thankfully, for the short term, Desiring God makes all of Piper's sermons available online for reading.

And if it makes you feel any better, Mark Driscoll uses Logos too. Logos loaded a copy of pretty much everything they have onto Mark's laptop. Driscoll spoke of it recently, but I don't remember where I heard him talking about it.

Reference Tagger
Another Logos program that I use is their Reference Tagger. RefTagger is a great program for bloggers that I added right when Logos made it available. Mine is linked to the ESV version, but you can pick other translations of the Bible if you prefer.

RefTagger is a free web tool that automatically turns all of your Bible references into hyperlinks to the passages at BibleGateway.com. RefTagger can also add an icon that is hyperlinked to the passage in Libronix and a tooltip window that displays the passage when you hover over the reference. So if your website says, "My favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28," RefTagger will instantly turn it into this: "My favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28."

Readers are able to have immediate access to any of the Bible passages that I mention.

From Logos:
All you need to do is copy the customizable code that we provide for you below and paste it into your website's template file(s), and it will instantly be applied to your whole site—all past and future content! Because RefTagger uses JavaScript, it doesn't make any changes to your site's files. If you decide to remove RefTagger from your site, it's as simple as deleting the code from your template file(s).This page explains how to add the program for a Blogger blog.

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