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TempleStudy.com Now on iPhone, iPod Touch, Android & Blackberry Devices

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TempleStudy.com on the iPhone

TempleStudy.com on the iPhone

In honor of my purchase of an iPhone a few days ago, I decided it was time to make TempleStudy.com more mobile.  Now you can access and read TempleStudy.com in a much more reader-friendly way just by visiting the website in your browser on your mobile device.  The website will automatically detect the type of device, and will reformat the design of the site to load much faster, and look much nicer, on the small screen.

Hopefully this will make TempleStudy a much better experience for you folks who live on-the-go.  Of course, you can always fetch the RSS feed too, but that doesn’t offer as much functionality.  With the website on your mobile you can browse categories, tag clouds, do searches, leave comments on posts, subscribe to posts, and more.  Be sure to check out the menus on the navigation bar.

On a side note, I love now being able to stream General Conference talks to my car on the way to and from work.  I truly believe these emerging technologies are helping the work of the Lord roll forth in remarkable ways.

New Ways to Read or Listen to TempleStudy.com

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RSS icon

RSS icon

I’ve updated the ways that you can read posts and subscribe to TempleStudy.com.  So you now have multiple methods of reading posts here:

I’ve also added support for Odiogo, which converts TempleStudy.com posts into audio podcasts.  It’s a computerized voice, and isn’t always pretty (because it reads every footnote and related post text), but could be useful for those who don’t have time to read, but could listen to the articles while exercising or commuting to and from work.  It could also be a way for those who are visually impaired, or have other disabilities, to access TempleStudy.com:

TempleStudy.com is also now multi-lingual!  If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see a widget in the sidebar titled “Translate This Website.”  You can now choose from any of 40 different languages from the dropdown box, and this entire website will instantly be translated into that language.  Translation is provided by Google Translate, so it won’t be perfect, but it works.

I’ve also made a change to the homepage.  As I noted a few days ago, I changed the homepage to be a full-page embedded video of “Between Heaven and Earth.”  It is a great introduction to LDS temples and what our temple worship means to us.  I’ve changed that slightly now.  Now the video will only be displayed to new visitors to the website.  Returning visitors will not see the video.  (Thanks Naomi!)

Thanks again for everyone’s support of TempleStudy.com.  You’ve greatly blessed my life, and the lives of many others.  Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Note: If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, please see this great intro YouTube video called “RSS Feeds in Plain English.”

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.