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New TempleStudy.com Store!

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I’ve built an online store for TempleStudy.com using Amazon.com, and today is its grand opening!  I did this primarily for three reasons:

  1. Readily available Temple-related Products:  All the products that I’ve been able to find that have to do with LDS temples or ancient temples from Amazon.com I have individually selected and gathered together, sorted, and categorized.  They include temple products from many categories including books (44 items), home & garden (191 items), office (18 items), toys & games (29 items), music (22 items), apparel (8 items), jewelry (32 items), DVD (6 items), and miscellaneous (26 items).  If you are looking for a temple-themed book, tie tack, stationery, photograph, music, game, or other such item, the TempleStudy.com store is a great place to start looking because I’ve already narrowed down the search for you.  The store itself currently includes a total of 376 temple-related products, but there are also many more products available from the “Listmania!” or “Similar Items” links on the right-hand side of the store which change and rotate automatically as you browse the store.
  2. No Anti-Mormon Material: You can browse the entire TempleStudy.com store without a worry of running across any critical propaganda, which can often become a distraction from the positive, faith-promoting material that you’re looking for, and many times it is hard to detect from the cover or description alone.  I have hand-picked every item here, and have filtered out all of that diversion.  Have peace of mind when you are looking for just the right temple product.  Note, however, that I can’t choose what appears in the Listmania! or Similar Items lists.
  3. Supporting TempleStudy.com:  A portion of each sale from this store will go to help support TempleStudy.com.  [Read more…]

Added ShareThis to TempleStudy.com

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I have added a new feature to TempleStudy.com.  It is called ShareThis.  This is a really great tool for sharing things about the temple that you read here with your friends, family, coworkers, associates, ward members, and anyone else you might like to pass along these articles to.  Each article now has a little green icon with the words “ShareThis” at the bottom of every post.  Clicking on this icon will allow you to share TempleStudy.com articles via:

  • Social Web – share or bookmark the article on Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, and a host of other social bookmarking sites.
  • Post – post the article directly to your profile or blog on Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, LiveJournal or others.
  • Send/Email – share the post with others directly by email, SMS (cell phone text message), instant message MySpace friends, or instant message AIM friends.

I hope you find this new tool useful, and that you will help spread the word about TempleStudy.com and help others learn more about the LDS temple.

Listen to The Book of Mormon (and other books or blogs) from your Phone

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Do you ever find yourself away from a computer with a lot of time on your hands?  Maybe your eyes are just tired from reading too much from the computer screen.  Jott Networks has just recently introduced a new service called Jott Feeds that allows any RSS feed to be read to you over your phone.  It’s very simple:

  1. Sign up for a free account with Jott.
  2. Walk through the simple steps of adding an RSS feed to your Jott Feeds.
  3. Call the Jott number from your phone – 1-866-JOTT-123.
  4. When it asks “Who do you want to Jott?”  Say, “Jott Feeds.”
  5. When it asks “Which feed?” say the name of the feed that you assigned in step #2 (i.e. “Book of Mormon,” or “Temple Study”).
  6. In just a few seconds you will have the feed read to you over the phone by an excellent text-to-speech engine.
  7. To advance to the next post in the feed press 3.  To go back press 1.  To select another feed press 0.

I have added a TempleStudy.com Jott Feed badge in the right-hand sidebar for easily adding a Jott Feed of this site to your Jott account.  Now wherever you are at you can listen to TempleStudy.com with just your phone.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

The excellent thing about this service is that it works with any RSS feed.  This means that you could listen to any of the following from your phone from wherever you might be:

This works best with feeds that have full content, otherwise it will just read a summary.  Also, make sure you have plenty of minutes on your phone plan if you plan on using this very much, or use it during your unlimited off-peak hours.

Sharing Temples & Apologetics from the Bloggernacle

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What the Shared Items look likeOne feature of TempleStudy.com that you may or may not have noticed is the “Shared Items” feature in the right sidebar. It looks something like the image on the right, if you scroll down beyond the “Top Posts,” “Favorite Posts,” “Recent Comments,” and “Recent Posts.” These shared items are links to those posts from the Bloggernacle that I think are interesting, usually about temples, apologetics, or other fascinating subjects that I think you might enjoy.

I use Google Reader (it’s the best, of course!) to browse the Bloggernacle, and whenever I come across a story I like I click the “Share” feature and it automatically adds a link to the story in this section of my sidebar. It’s a quick way to let you peek over my shoulder to see some of the more interesting articles I’ve been reading recently. I currently browse 72 blog feeds from the Bloggernacle. It’s a lot to take in, but I think I’ve got a good system now to sift the wheat from the chaff.

In fact, there is a whole web page devoted to the items I’ve shared with you. You can see it here. This page even has its own RSS feed, if you want to track my shared items in your own reader. In other words, you can track my tracking. Geeky, I know… Occasionally I may comment on an article I see, in which case at the beginning of the shared article you will see my name followed by my comment backed in blue, like this:

Google Reader also gives me the opportunity to share anything else with you from the web as I so choose. So if I come across a web page or something that I find interesting, and if it is not pertinent enough to deserve a full post, I might also add it to the shared items list and perhaps a few comments to go along with it.

Let me know if you like or use this feature of TempleStudy.com in the comments.