January 2025

Type the Word

Hey Reader,

Hope your year is going well so far! This past month 52 people signed up, the biggest influx of people in any month so far, and Type the Word reached 120,000 verses typed milestone. That's nearly four Bibles worth of verses! 🤯

Great work everyone!

January Updates

The Retypeability Update

The Problem: TTW's UX for indicating what you have typed worked well for your first time through, but lacked a way to reset your progression for retyping through sections of the Bible. If you wanted to retype a chapter:

It's text would be completely dimmed as you typed through it
And your `/history` page would be capped at 100% for that chapter.

This left you manually tracking your progression.

The Solution:

Whereas before the text was dimmed when you had previously typed a verse in general, now a verse's text is only dimmed when you are part of the way through its chapter. When you complete a chapter all dimming is reset.
With any type of progression reset I wanted to make sure that you could still see all the previous times you had typed something. So I added a "Log" at the bottom of each chapter with entries for each time you have typed in this specific chapter.

the new log section at the bottom of each chapter

I also did some similar work in the `/history` page. Whereas before your progression through books was a percentage, it is now a number of boxes indicating how many times you have typed through a specific book.

the new overview section with books being reset upon completion

This overview section is quite information dense so let me break it down.

#1 is How many times you have typed this book with the last box being your current progression through the book.
#2 is information about your history in the book.
#3 is your current progression through each chapter. When you completely type the book, these boxes are reset so you can once again track your progress.

faith.tools

Part of the influx of users this month came from TTW being shared on faith.tools, an online app store for Christian software. In December, I met Cam, the creator of faith.tools and in January, he shared a short blog about how TTW was created.

Cam has a heart for God, and faith.tools is a great way to discover Christian software tools. I highly recommend checking it out next time you are looking for Christian tech of any kind.

Demo Video

Something I realized over Christmas was that I need to do a better job promoting TTW. Most of you found TTW through one of the Reddit posts I made in 2023. I'm really grateful those posts ranked in google search, but I think it's time for a new video.

Video is not something in my skill set or comfort zone. And I am about to start my fourth iteration of this video with some new camera gear I bought. I'm hoping to make something convincing soon. Thanks for typing! You're dedication to typing through the Bible has emboldened me to even go as far as making video. 😉

Fixes

Fixed a bug where TTW was not downloading the last verse of chapters in the ESV translation where verses are omitted. If you have typed these chapters and are not seeing 100% completion I would navigate to them now and check the last verse.
Fixed some bugs in 2 Timothy 1, 3, and 4 where it was incorrectly counting the number of verses on the `/history` page. If you have completely typed these chapters you should now see the correct percentage on your `/history` overview.

A scripture I have been thinking about

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

James 4:13-17

⁹“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,²⁰but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.²¹For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:9-21

I love rhetorical questions in the Bible, and these two scriptures have been ringing in my ears this month. What is my life? I am a mist. I will be gone very soon. Is this how I should be living? Where am I storing up my treasure?

I'm praying that we would use our time well and for God's glory not our own.

Josh

PS. Kings Kaleidoscope has a great song referencing James 4:14. I highly recommend it!