RefTagger from Logos

This week Logos launched a very nice tool for making the Bible references on your website much more useful to your readers by converting them to hyperlinks to the version of your choice at BibleGateway and giving you the option of adding a small Libronix icon linked to the version of your choice in the Libronix Digital Library System (or the user’s default version).

It’s called RefTagger, and it consists of a few lines of customizable JavaScript code that you add to your website or blog template file(s) (in the footer as close before the closing body tag as possible). Once it’s there, it will do its thing automatically on all your site’s content, old and new. One of the benefits to using JavaScript is that it doesn’t make any changes to your pages or posts, so if you decide to switch versions or make some other adjustments to the options, you can do it in one place and have the changes instantly globally applied. Also, if you remove RefTagger, your site will return to its previous state without your having to do anything other than removing the script.1

RefTagger should work on just about any of the blogging services like Blogger,2 WordPress, Movable Type, etc., as long as you can edit your template file(s) or add code some other way to your footer.3 If you use the self-hosted version of WordPress, the one you download and install from WordPress.org or via cPanel’s Fantastico, you can use our handy plugin and not have to mess with any code at all.4

The folks at Grace to You have added it to the Resources section of their website. Check it out. You can also see a good example on my site in the post “To Him Be Glory Forever.” Here are the other places that I know of where it is being used:

• Logos Bible Software Blog (e.g., here)
• Todd Bolen’s Bible Places Blog (e.g., here)
• Mark Hoffman’s Biblical Studies and Technological Tools (e.g., here)
• Jeff Brown’s By Grace Alone (e.g., here)
• Matthew J. Davis’s BIBLEFreak (e.g., here)
• Joe Miller’s More Than Cake (e.g., here)

Give it a try. From what I’ve heard, there are lots of other cool features and functionality coming to RefTagger in the near future.

1. The one downside to JavaScript is that it won’t appear in your RSS feed. [↩]
2. For instructions on adding it to a blogger blog, see Mark Hoffman’s helpful post. This is the easier of the two ways to add it to a blogger blog. The other way is to edit your template file. [↩]
3. It doesn’t seem that WordPress.com lets you edit your theme files. [↩]
4. One of the benefit to plugins is that you can change your theme without having to add the script to your new theme. [↩]