End of the Philo Blog, Birth of the RPBS blog

I have been meaning to comment for some time on the sad news of The End of Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria Blog, announced at the end of March. It seemed sad to me because Torrey's blog was one of the earliest of the biblioblogs and he was on the panel with us at the SBL session on blogging in November 2005, when the panel for that session effectively chose itself. But it's good to see that with death comes new birth, and the R B P S Blog (Resource Pages for Biblical Studies Blog) comes onto the scene. I am greatly encouraged by this development because I have continued to think about the future of the New Testament Gateway, and I am encouraged that one of the pioneers of the gateway site (RPBS predates the New Testament Gateway by a good couple of years, and the New Testament Gateway is now over a decade old) is still working on his site and thinking of fresh ways to keep it vibrant.

Tyndale Tech Latest

Over at Tyndale House in Cambridge, David Instone Brewer sends out occasional Tyndale Tech emails, which feature items of interest and advice concerning computers and the study of the Bible. After a short while, David uploads the emails to the web, and the January 2007 email has recently appeared:

January 2007: Searching for Academic Research on the Web

As always, it is full of useful and interesting items. David recommends his own TynCat, a particularly helpful resource, and points to the new searchbox available for it for IE7. One thought for future development: how about a Firefox search plug-in for those of us who stopped using IE7 some time ago? (Actually, I still use it to watch the cricket on Willow TV but only because they've not made it available for Firefox yet). I took five minutes to try to create a Firefox Search Plug-in for TynCat but had no success with it and don't have the patience to try again. But I, for one, would be happy to have a successful search plug-in to add to my browser.

Update (Sunday, 23.55): In comments, Holger Szesnat notes:

I have written two quick and dirty TynCat search hacks for Firefox (author-search and title-words-search). They work for me, so presumably they'll work for others as well.

Save the following two files (tyncat-author.xml and tyncat-title.xml) to your firefox 'searchplugins' directory:

http://www.biblicalhermeneutics.net/tyncat-author.xml

and

http://www.biblicalhermeneutics.net/tyncat-title.xml

If you wish, adapt the XML code to a USA location (mine for is UK).

Thanks, Holger. They are working well for me.