Ron Graham’s Report
— for Apr-May-Jun 2017
This page reports my voluntary ministry activities for the information of those who take a special interest in my work.
Dear Brethren... This report covers the second quarter of 2017.
Preaching at Bundaberg
During April, and May 2017, I presented 10 Sunday lessons in Bundaberg. These were individual lessons on various topics.
I have preached more than 1000 times at Bundaberg since commencing the pulpit work there 11 years ago. In recent years we have been reducing slowly our visits to Bundaberg. A few weeks ago, we further cut back our visits to Bundaberg from three Sundays to two Sundays a month. But as it turned out, that was not to last.
Unexpectedly, we had to bring three children including an infant into our home to be cared for over an indefinite period. In view of this, it became impractical to continue our visits to Bundaberg. So I decided it was time to retire from the pulpit preaching and to concentrate on the simplybible.com website.
On Sundays we now go to Maryborough. The children in our care feel comfortable going there, since several children familiar to them attend along with other children. This church meets in homes with a simple form of worship and teaching that involves the children.
Website PDF Project
As mentioned in previous reports, I am working on a project to make it easy for users of simplybible.com to download the contents of a page as a pdf file. This means that study pages on the website are being duplicated as pdf documents.
The term "pdf" means "Portable Document Format". As the name suggests, it is able to present a document in a form that almost any computer, tablet, or smart phone can store, display, and share.
A web page on simplybible.com is written in "html" meaning "hypertext markup language". A document in this format may have many files that it refers to and these are stored separately from the html document. This makes it awkward to save and share a webpage because you've got several files instead of just one. A pdf document is one file only that contains all the text, styling, and images within itself.
So if we want the lessons on simplybible.com not only to be seen, but also to be saved and shared, then making pdf versions of the lessons available is a sensible way to go.
The pdf document displays what would be on paper if the webpage were printed. On simplybible.com when someone prints a page, it prints as a special version without navigation buttons, sidebars, and some images —in other words only the lesson content prints out. The pdf document displays the same content as that, and it can be printed just as the webpage itself can.
So you see that a pdf document is a very handy option to give simplybible.com users. This project should be as good as finished in the next quarter. More than 1000 pdf files have been done and made available on the site. There are now 280 left to do.
When I enter the pdf filename on a webpage, the startup script automatically causes a download button and link notice to appear prominently at the end of the article. So I don't have to make the links by hand which saves me much time and tedium. Otherwise there would be over 1300 links to make!
As an indication of how users are receiving this new facility, 2,224 pdf documents were accessed by users in April, 4,085 in May, and 18,332 in June. That last number for June is suspect because it is largely comprised of 16,399 for one pdf document, "What is the church?". I can't imagine why such a high figure for that one document would be real. Let's treat it as a "glitch" or a hacking attempt.
New on simplybible.com Website
In the quarter, I added 13 more pages to the website. Three pages were additional lessons for the “Disciples” series. The other 10 pages were for the “Bible Lists” series. These are fact sheets in the form of simple lists useful for Bible study and research. There is no trivia in these lists.
Website Usage
The figures for page views (total of pages opened by visitors) increased over the quarter: April 160,995; May 143,136; June 133,438 (Source Awstats).
That is an average for page views of around 144,000 a month or a daily average above 4,800. The figure for April of over 160,000 pageviews was a record.
For the twelve months to the end of June, the number of page views exceeded 1.6 million: 1,642,291 (Source Awstats).
The most popular pages during the quarter were:"Index to the Parables" 3,562 pageviews June, "Paul’s Journeys" 3,455 pageviews May, "The Last Word Amen" 10,942 pageviews April.
Pageviews per Nation
As an indication of the site's outreach, here's a list of the countries in June in which more than 1000 pages were viewed. (There are of course many other countries where less than 1000 pages were viewed.)
United States 52,413; Australia 9,135; Nigeria 6,029; Great Britain 5,825; India 5,179; Canada 4,786; Philippines 4,597; France 4,147; Russian Federation 3,771; South Africa 3,244; Ghana 1,856; Poland 1,742; Brazil 1,663; Kenya 1,541; China 1,351; Ukraine 1,078; (Source: Awstats).
Website 2017 Upgrade Progress
The current upgrade to simplybible.com is now 75% finished. In the quarter I upgraded more than 300 pages. This leaves 280 pages to be upgraded. Those should be done next quarter.
As explained in previous reports, one of the features of the upgrade is that each series of lessons has its own independent startup script. These scripts have now been written, about 80 of them, and they are all up and running. As the last 280 pages are upgraded, they will be connected to their new scripts.
Independent Review
Here is how webstatsdomain.org reports the website: "Simplybible.com is ranked 389,944th in the world (amongst the 30 million domains). This site is relatively popular among users in the United States. It gets 37.8% of its traffic from the United States. This site is estimated to be worth $11776. It has 3 backlinks. Simplybible.com has 47% seo score." Three stars awarded (out of five).
Thank You
Thank you for keeping on helping me in the Lord’s work, and for your prayers, and your interest and confidence in my work on the website that reaches and teaches thousands of people. By sharing with me in this work, you make it possible for me to do what would be impossible to do alone.
Love and best wishes in Jesus.