SAVED BY THE BAKER. These are the perfect peanut butter cookies, warm and perfectly served to me in a timely manner—when The Casual English Bible® website was driving me up the western wall.
I’M NOT GOING TO WAIT and write this later. I’m writing it now, while it’s happening here at The Casual English Bible.®
I want very much to get back to paraphrasing and mapping Jeremiah. But my days are collapsing in on me. There’s suddenly other stuff I have to do right now.
TCEB 2.0
We added a new Bible map subscription service to The Casual English Bible® (TCEB) website, creating what we have nicknamed TCEB 2.0. But something broke the site when we launched it. TCEB 2.0 took 45 seconds for a linked page to load. I call that broken.
We temporarily transferred it to one of my web developer’s servers, and then all we got was a giant error page.
Not good. So I rushed to find a new and faster server. The developer hates Bluehost, which is rated #1 on many lists. He likes Rocket.net and it gets good reviews. So I made the decision and Rocket migrated the site that night.
That evening I calmed myself down by playing my F-key harmonica with Kenny G on Spotify, “Forever in Love.” I want to be ready when he comes to Kansas City and invites me to the stage. I’m working on “Tennessee Whisky,” too. I don’t think he plays that one. If he did, they might have to rename it the “Tennessee Whisky Waltz.”
Morning ajar
I woke up the next morning to a website without pictures. Just a lot of little error messages.
All morning.
The developer was having trouble taking the site live and he was guessing that I need to buy a higher level of hosting. So, I got into an online chat with Rocket. They said: “Looks like the 404 [error message] was being caused by a few rules on the .htaccess inside your uploads folder. I have removed them. So the pages are loading now.”
Shazam. Or Voila. Or Sweet.
And the site finally looks familiar. It’s about noon by then.
But I have an author site, too. And it’s still on the too-slow server at WPEngine. The developer needs to work on jobs for other clients because he has been focused on my problem. So he wants to delay that for a couple of days.
I contacted a freelancer who has helped me in the past. He’s working on it now.
Stinky rotten timing
Welcome to an error-ridden website. This mess started just a day or two after we launched a “Welcome to The Casual English Bible®” campaign.
We were inviting people to subscribe to the new blog service and to take a look at our nearly 1,000 Bible maps.
That was humbling. I didn’t need humbled. I needed peanut butter cookies and milk.
He likes our Bible maps
“Everything I’m doing is because I want to get those maps.”
That’s what a Bible guy told me after showing me some kindness. He said the quiet part out loud.
People, we’ve gotta stop doing that.
Backstory: I’m working with a designer to come up with an estimated page count for the coming Casual English Bible® New Testament, with 50 color maps. I contacted the Bible guy because he has recently been through the process. I wanted tips about printers and paper.
He wanted something, too: my only cash product.
He initially got excited and said we should work together. And he introduced me to a printer and he whispered he could help me with the cost of the printing and help promote my Bible with his Bible products.
Then he asked if he could use my maps in a new edition of a Bible he wanted to print.
No, he can’t.
Those maps are one of a kind, and part of The Casual English Bible® brand. They are going to appear first in that Bible.
Frustrated at the end of a meal we shared, that’s when he said, “Everything I’m doing is because I want to get those maps.”
Do tell.
More to-do at The Casual English Bible®
Marketing search. Now that the Bible site is live and fast as a rocket, I can look for a marketing person to help design a better storefront. This should help people who are searching for 3D-style colorfully illustrated Bible maps they can use in Bible studies, sermons, and social media.
Website optimization. I can also turn loose a colleague who’s skilled in making a website more attractive to Google and to other search engines. If you’re looking for a Bible map, we want you coming to The Casual English Bible.® And we want Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo to bring you here.
Deadline Christmas 2025. That’s a priority now, as we approach what should be the last year of the beta paraphrasing. We should have all 66 books paraphrased and mapped by this time next year.
But that presumes I can eventually get back to work on something other than maintaining the website. If I ever get into a position of hiring someone to help me on a fulltime or a half-time basis, it might be to run the website. But I’m not there yet.
Blogs. Blog articles like this are part of the job of getting the word out about this new Bible paraphrase. Don’t take it personally, but I’d rather spend my time in Jeremiah, then Job, and then finally Ezekiel. Then done. I want to finish this. But we need you with us, too. So come with me. We’re almost there.
In future notes, we’ll talk more about what’s in the Bible. But right now, this is where I am, dealing with the process.
I’m making sausage. And I need some fresh meat. How about a WooCommerce marketing designer and guru to help me throw a spotlight on what I’m told is the world’s largest inventory of instantly downloadable PDF Bible maps.
It’s our niche—to scratch this itch.
Not really. What we want is a Bible for newcomers, folks who haven’t read the Bible much, if at all. That’s what drives this work. The maps are a bonus.
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Steve’s song from the words of prophet Habakkuk
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Bible Gateway
From Silent Night to a sappy poem