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How to add automatic Bible verse hyperlinks to Blogger

This is just a quick post outlining how I added automatic Bible verse hyperlinks to my Blogger website. The idea behind this is that it will automatically pick up any text which appears as a reference to a passage of Scripture (e.g. Eph 1:5) and will show a pop-up box displaying the full verse text. 

There are a number of free plugins which are specifically designed for this. A few that I found when I went looking were BibleLink, BLB ScriptTagger by Blue Letter Bible, and Bible Gateway's Ref Tag Tool. 

In the end, I went with the Blue Letter Bible plugin because it looked the simplest to add to my website and it was the first one that I tried that worked. I also like how the Blue Letter Bible site incorporates a bunch of other features (e.g. lexicons) which makes it very convenient for the reader if they want to dive deep into specific words in the verse. 

If you also want to add automatic Bible verse hyperlinks to your Blogger website, here are the steps to follow: 

1. Go to the "theme" section in Blogger

At the top of this page you will see an orange button saying "Customise". Don't click directly on the button, but instead click on the drop down arrow beside it. 

2. Select "Edit HTML"
This will take you to the HTML page. Next up, you want to

3. Locate the <head> tag
Using the find on page function (CTRL + F) is the quickest way to do this. 

4. Copy the script code from the BLB website
Navigate to https://www.blueletterbible.org/webtools/BLB_ScriptTagger.cfm and copy the script code. 

5. Paste this code below the <head> tag

6. Edit and customise the script
The BLB webpage details what the different sections mean. I chose to update the translation version to ESV and left the other settings at default. 

7. Enjoy your new Bible links!
Because the code is embedded in the header section, it works on any page of the website. Pretty neat! 

In the future, I plan to expand this post to explain how to add Bible verse tags from other websites. One of the downsides of BLB tagging is that the BLB logo is quite large, and the pop up box isn't very aesthetic at all. However, as mentioned, the BLB website has a lot of free language resources, which probably makes it more useful for the reader 

If you are interested in this feature, please contact me and let me know! 
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