Daily Devotional - Template and Proof of Concept "Stand Firm"

NB.Mick
NB.Mick Member, MVP Posts: 15,837 ✭✭✭
edited November 20 in English Forum

This is a special PB source - it's an actual source but also the template for anybody to use and build Calendar Devotional PBs that are properly indexed and will work on the homepage (by linking to the daily entries in an eBook devotional which is not indexed and will not work on the homepage). Since this is only an index of links, no copying of the actual book is involved, so this PB and any that is made from these templates for other devotionals can be shared freely.

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Here's the PB for the eBook devotional "Stand Firm Day by Day: Let Nothing Move You" (which is currently available for free and is special in that it not even has calendar days or numbers to index its 365 devotions, so it's really easy to get lost in that book and very hard to keep track which devotion belongs to which day) 

4426.daily devotional linked - Stand Firm.docx

Here's the Excel spreadsheet I used to build the PB source - it can be used to adapt the concept to any other eBook devotional. Making the *.docx from the spreadsheet is simply copying one block of text and pasting into the Word document as text, then doing three "replace all" operations to add some line breaks and Heading style formatting, which makes for the nicely structured ToC.  

4276.Prepare for Devo.xlsx

The links can be easily built by looking at the URLs given by the "copy location as..." feature.

The Stand Firm devotional has every article linked to identified with art=r8.aXX where XX stands for the running number of the day in the year. If the same identification structure is used, replacing the book-id in the PB source is all that's needed. Other devotionals may be structured slightly differently, e.g. the Billy Graham devotional "Unto the Hills" identifies all the devotions with art=rXX where XX is a running number of chapters in the book, i.e. Jan 1 starts at r8, Jan 2 is r9 etc. Easy to work with in the Excel string operation (I ignore the offsets in the URL links, since Logos does the same)

To give credit where credit is due:

  • The actual milestone structure I use is repurposed from DominicM's daily journal (see here for the 2024 version) - thanks, Dominic for this! He is still listed as the original author of the Word file. One could easily expand the template to have a link to an eBook devotion AND a place to journal thoughts.
  • The idea for this proof-of-concept came from a Faithlife group thread in the Logos Homepage group where I answered to a question by Shino John.   

Have joy in the Lord! Smile

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