Draft: Oct 24, 2011

Whenever I am traveling in the USA, I consider Starbucks to be my regional office, whatever region I may be in at the time. It's hard to beat a corner office for the price of a cup of coffee!

As I would work on various website projects I would often engage in Bible discussions with fellow patrons, many of whom were also working on with their own computers. In this informal setting, I found it most effective to draw them out by asking how they arrived at a particular religious conclusion from the scriptures. As we would be reviewing and discussing these verses I longed for a way to easily find and compare these verses with my translation of choice, the New World Translation. After not finding a solution, I decided to look in to creating a solution.

I wondered how this could be accomplished. What if I could create a Bible Search Engine. It would 'know' how to extract and index Bible verses. Then it would be a matter of presenting the verses that were found with links to the official source Bible for convenient reading in context.

How about going a step further and presenting search results in a way that would enable comparing these verses with other Bibles available online? In all cases, it was hoped that this specialized approach to Bible search would not meet with objections from Bible Publishers. Albeit totally unofficial, it appeared that there were no concerns as long as whole Bible books were not being published. More recently there was even a request from a Bible publisher to have their version of the Bible added to the search! So development proceeded.

That was four years ago. I remember trying a wide variety of Bible-related names but all the obvious names were taken. The name I initially came up with was xBibles and registered the domain in July of 2007. The x as in x number of Bibles. Later it seemed that the x in xBibles had more of negative connotation. The next name that had a form of the word Bible AND that was available was Biblize.

A great deal of time was spent learning out to programically crawl/download online Bibles in various formats and write parsers to intelligently extract books, chapters and verses. And then it required figuring out how to best index theses Bible verses to be searchable.

At first the site was built using an open-source platform known as LAMP. As I began to wrestle with hundreds of thousands of verses from scores of Bibles, I began to take note of a suggestion made by another developer to try Python, another popular and powerful programming language. So once Biblize was in a 1.0 stage, I started cutting my teeth on Python. The wisdom of this choice soon became clear. I then devoted intensive effort to 'wrap my head around' this new platform. As a result, my productivity grew substantially.

As I began to make progress on porting PHP, the language Biblize was written in, to Python, I began to reconsider the name Biblize. Every time I would mention the site, I had to basically spell it out. I also took a closer look at the root meaning of the word. It literally means to "speak a phrase in a way that makes it seem as though it came out of the bible". Not good!

Meanwhile, I registered the domain xchg.com back in 1995 and was not being used. It was short and sweet and very Web 2.0'ish. Why not just use that name? After all, if the name Google can become a household name, why not Xchg?! So I decided to change the name to Xchg.

One thing is for sure, I vastly under estimated how much work would be required to develop this site. Along the way, I found it helpful to hire specialists to assist me with various functionality.

It has been very gratifying to see hundreds of people using the site on a daily basis. Last check, the average user is spending over six minutes using the site.

But there are so many more Bibles to be added. More work to be done to improve ease of use. More devices to support. Much more work to do.

Bible lovers from around the world can finally have a way to find and compare verses from more Bibles in more languages... including the New World Translation in all languages that are made available online!

Since this project has no affiliation with any religious organization, it is hoped that individuals like yourself will step forward to assist in provided the much needed support for this project. Please see: Be a friend of Xchg.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated in this regard. Please click the Feedback button located on the front page. Thank you!

More to come...

Lead Developer
Orgtec