adorai

adorai is a website that I’ve been developing for at least ten years. The current version of the site started in 2016 and the project had already begun before that. So, you can understand that it’s an important project for me.

It all started with the idea of holding family worship: gathering the family to sing hymns and read the Bible, the traditional routine. Then every now and then someone would forget to bring the Bible or the hymnal, there wasn’t one to lend, sharing was a pain, and then the idea came up to take advantage of the fact that there was already a giant TV in the living room and use it to display the hymns and verses. It worked.

It started in the most basic way possible: a Word document for the hymnal and another for the Bible, with a very large font. Open it, make it full screen, and conduct the worship by searching through those documents and scrolling. It worked for a good while, but it could be better.

The next iteration was a PHP and jQuery website that scrapped hymnal and Bible data from other websites, had a search function, keyboard shortcuts, it was quite an upgrade. Except getting data from other sites didn’t work out very well, so I tried making it static. Then came so many things: I tried using React, I tried using Vue, I tried using Mithril!

At some point the PHP version stopped working, so the React version that was under development had to become the main one, and it’s going strong to this day. I’m trying to refactor it bit by bit, organizing here and there, as I’ve realized this is a better plan than rewriting everything from scratch.

Today the site features Bible and hymnal reading and presentation, focusing on being offline (even if the internet drops, worship shouldn’t stop) with a one-year Bible reading plan, remote control, drawing random content, customization, and a few other features I can’t remember right now. The people who use this site are mostly my family, but a few ministries have used it for a while.