As we look at the world today and its ideological and social struggles, we have to be thankful for the Word of God, which gives us direction and comfort daily and overall brings meaning to our existence. The quest of millions everywhere: from Africa to Korea, from Brazil to India – is to fulfill a need for Life, Spirit and Redemption. We hope to make our contribution towards the goal of bringing the Word of God to every creature. This month these were some of our efforts:
As expected, we have received the 500 Audio Bible units before the closing of the factories for Chinese New Year. Sure enough, we got busy distributing them. Half of those are in Tamil and therefore Raj is in charge to get them to India. He just left for India a few days ago and took with him, in his own suitcase, 50 units. Meanwhile, we are praying for an effective and low cost way to get audio Bibles into that field.
Phil, in Thailand, continued to develop the new WP app. The first samples, or prototypes came out this month and it is looking very promising. It is not easy to work with so many languages, and the real challenge is to make the text and the audio work together, specially since this update will have scrolling audio-text synchronization and verse reading, But so far so good and it is coming along.
Online, we finished a new language this month: Sinhala, or Sinhalese, the language of Sri Lanka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_language). This language is spoken by largest ethnic group in that country and an it is also the official language there. We also made several changes in the design of the webpage, improving some features and making it easier and intuitive to navigate.
On the not so good news, we registered an attack to one of ours audio servers, which lasted for about 2 days, causing most of the data to disappear, according to the report from the company that runs it. Fortunately they had backups and restored it, but we experienced some audio breakdowns and in consequence we received not so few notifications/reminders from our users, as here:
“I’m trying to listen to and download the Somali Bible but continually get an error page for every book of the Somali bible “Not Found: The requested URL /bibles/app/audio/36_1.zip was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.” I’ve tried it on two different browsers. Can you help? “[J.]:
“Hello, my name is K. and I have a terminal illness called ALS and i use a special computer that uses my eyes for everything. like a mouse does on a computer. i have really enjoyed listening to the bible using your website. i listen to the english version of the kjv bible audio, but recently i press the play button and nothing happens. it doesn’t play the bible anymore. did you turn your website off? or is there something you can do to fix it? thank you. i love to listen to the word of God using your website. can you please fix it? “[K]
“Hi, I have not been able to access the audio for the Polish Bible for the last couple of days. Please could you advise? I had been able to access before. This is a great work, God Bless You All, “[YML]
“I found Malayalam Bible Audio “not working” last 2 days, can you check these error. Thanks. “[B.P]
From these comments one can feel how important it is to have a reliable system. We have been working on that but apparently there is progress to be made. We are taking steps to improve the reliability of our audio servers.
