As I mentioned yesterday, the church has opened up the new.lds.org site for everyone.  It really is a great site!

This morning I got a chance to play around with the new site and used the scripture study feature for the first time.  It took me a little while to find my way around and I thought it would be helpful for some folks to have a little intro.  So I made a video up.

Overall I am pleased with the scriptures.  I sent them a bit of feedback.  I’ll post it here.  Feel free to add your thoughts.  Perhaps you have found ways around the problems I was having.

Feedback:

• The biggest problem I have is the method for marking.  It is sometimes hinky to get the highlighting working.  You are supposed to just hover over the verse to make the highlighter open up.  But it doesn’t always work.  I think there should be a “Highlighting Mode” that you can activate when you are highlighting verses that allows you to click and select a part of a verse and then the menu pops up afterward to choose the color, add a note, AND add a tag (tag is not currently one of the options).  T
• Right now after you highlight anything it pops open a menu where you can edit the highlight, add a note, and add tags.  I think that should not automatically pop open even time.  It distracts from the scriptures.  Or at least make an global option for each user where folks can decide if they want it to have that pop open each time.
• I woud love to be able to highlight multiple verses at once (passages)
• When tagging, I would like a way to browse current Tags
• Multiple Versions of the scriptures.  Sometimes you want to just read the BOM and highlight all the places where it mentions a topic.  It would be great to have multiple copies of the scriptures for different times, and purposes.  Maybe you could use tags or folders for this as well if you could set a default tag or folder for when you were marking.  Or filter and show the markings based on the tag as you read (ie. Only show Tags: BOM Christ Reading 2010).

What are your thoughts?

Some New features (from Joel Dehlin)

* Great new search (try out the facets!)
* Prophets and Apostles Speak Today
* Church News and Events
* Church Organization
* Temples
* Humanitarian Service
* “Our Heavenly Father’s Plan”
* New e-store
* New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory
* My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.

You can read the article from Joel at the link below. Go and check it out. I think I read in the forums somewhere that the church is looking at a January 1, 2011 launch date for taking over the main site.

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Zoodles website link

Zoodles is a Glubble like product.  It lets you create a family profile and add each kid, but it is focused on education.  What’s more, it has this amazing reporting back-end that allows partents to look at what the kids are learning based on areas like reading, math, science, etc.

I was looking around for a game tonight on my phone to entertain (and educate) my 5 year old preschooler and just ran across this on my android phone.  It is a free download to install.

I was very pleased when she opened it and it had a ton of the Starfall games (another great website for young preschool learners) right on my phone.  She had a blast.

Unfortunately it costs about $5/month to track what the kids are doing, but it lets the kids keep playing even if you don’t have an account to see what they are doing.

Of course I went ahead and set up profiles for all the rest of my kids and they had appropriate stuff for them as well.

I’m so losing my phone for the next couple of weeks to the kids… and I’m okay with that.

- Reunion App
- GedView
- FamViewer

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http://store.lds.org/

You can see the post at the link below.

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“New FamilySearch has over 760,000 registered users. That figure comes from Elder Allan Packer of the Seventy, you can hear this one and more at lds.org, go to Serving in the Church, then Family History, and look for the talk given April 26th. It’s in video format, .wmv.

FamilySearch Indexing said a couple weeks ago they are on track for having 200 million names indexed by the end of the year, about the end of June they said that about 345,000 indexers have done just over 100 million names so far this year.

lds.org gets about a million unique visitors a month. mormon.org has been increasing in traffic even before the rollout Thursday of the new version, no firm figures but that is also in the hundreds of thousands, and both sites are among the top sites among religious pages on the Internet.”

“For Facebook stats, lds.org has over 300,000 fans, and there are pages for each of the magazines, the Youtube channel, and others. Some of them list the other pages on the left and you can see the number of fans each page has at the moment by visiting those pages.

Mormon Channel has 43,100 fans as of this moment. Among religious broadcasters that have a Facebook page, it is in third place for stations, and third place for owners.”

You can read the whole post at the link at the bottom of this article. What other cool technology stats do you know about the church? Any lds.org folks here that can shed light on the current state of things, especially with all the recent new websites, and mormon.org relaunch?

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The one feature I still want to see is a simple notepad in one of the tabs, and the ability to easily add scriptures and passages to the notepad when building out a topical study, or in preparation for at talk.

You can check out the latest version release at the link below.

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They are also on twitter @ldslifehacker. (they friended me there @mormontechie… that’s how I found them).

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YouTube – New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar.

You can see his comics at the link below.

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