StandardWorks.org: Daily scripture reading using RSS

Yes­ter­day I spent a good amount of time work­ing on StandardWorks.org. This web­site will (even­tu­ally) pro­vide an easy to use and highly cus­tomiz­able scrip­ture read­ing RSS feed. This web­site will also remain ad-free, forever.

UPDATE: Visit http://www.standardworks.org to gen­er­ate a feed with­out hav­ing to do all the crazy­ness below.

There are only a few parameters:

• start: The date you want to start read­ing in m/d/Y format.
• stop: The date you want to fin­ish read­ing in m/d/Y format.
• vol­umes: Comma sep­a­rated list of vol­umes you want to read.
  • 1 — Old Tes­ta­ment (KJV)
  • 2 — New Tes­ta­ment (KJV)
  • 3 — Book of Mormon
  • 4 — Doc­trine and Covenants
  • 5 — Pearl of Great Price

The RSS script auto­mat­i­cally fig­ures out how much you need to read each day, and gen­er­ates a feed to remind you of your daily reading.

So what makes StandardWorks.org dif­fer­ent than a sta­tic read­ing chart or other RSS scrip­ture ser­vices? At the moment, just a few items:

• The daily read­ing assign­ment is based on the num­ber of words in the assigned chap­ters. Have you ever tried read­ing, say, 3 chap­ters a day? It is pretty easy until you hit a crazy long chap­ter that takes twice as long to read. With StandardWorks.org, that won’t hap­pen. We fig­ure out how many words are in the vol­umes you want to read, how many words you need to read a day, and then assign your chap­ters accord­ingly. Please note that we only assign full chap­ters (we don’t encour­age stop­ping part way through a chap­ter), so some days may still be slightly shorter or longer than others.
• We tell you roughly how many pages you need to read per day. For exam­ple, the above read­ing assign­ment will take about 3.1 pages per day to com­plete. Cur­rently this infor­ma­tion is based on stats for the entire stan­dard works and not just the volume(s) you are read­ing, but this will be cor­rected in a future update.
• We let you pick when you want to start and stop. Want to read the Book of Mor­mon in 6 months? Or the entire stan­dard works in 1 year? Or the Doc­trine and Covenants in 12 days? Our RSS gen­er­a­tor gives you a lot of flexibility.
• We let you put more than one vol­ume of scrip­ture on your read­ing schedule.

I have lots of fea­tures in mind that I want to inte­grate (such as some non-standard works like the Jour­nal of Dis­courses), and already a few minor issues I want to cor­rect, but please let me know if you have any sug­ges­tions or find any bugs!