DEV Blog 34 - Project Updates

A comprehensive overview of my Advanced Gospel Initiatives

For those of you who missed the worldwide launch party for A Creed of Saints (here) please take a look at the video! It features Britt Gillette and Joe Hawkins and co-author Gary Albyn (here). The four of us had a lot of fun. This is the only time you’ll ever see me raise my hands and shout ‘WooHoo’ LOL. You should have seen the expressions on the guys faces. Priceless!

General sentiment: A joyous moment…

ANNOUNCEMENT — As I promised last week, this DEV BLOG update is dedicated to spinning up a small volunteer team to help with testing and feedback. See the PRMNews updates below! Look at the chat thread and respond if you are interested!

With A Creed of Saints finished and launched—and during our June recovery period prior to starting Book 7 (untitled), I am able to work productively on PRMNews. There are many advancements that have been acheived. One of these is integration of the Brave search engine directly into the PRMNews app. Brother Britt Gillette had the TOP RANKING for “Mark of the Beast” news! See below, first row. LOL! Great job, Brother! This search supports two types of searches (see the combo box) Search and News. These are actually different. The Save Search button makes it possible to recall previous searches. This is so that our users don’t have to enter the same search terms for their interests. See them on the right panel?

IMPORTANT usability enhancement: when you want to replay a previous search, all you have to do is hit the ‘replay’ button and it loads and executes the search again. One of the key deliverables that I wanted to achieve is NOT show a browser which could have ads embedded in them. By using my application architecture, I control what comes into the app experience. I hate ads and you have my commitment that I will never subject users to adds—you have my word on that.

This is what the new Brave Search screen looks like:

Platform Diversification

I am thrilled to announce that our platform diversification efforts are finished! Praise God! We have spread the Post Rapture Emergency Websites among different providers and isolated them to enhance fault tolerance and mitigate risk from a single point of failure. The deployment is worldwide! Please stop and thank the LORD for His work and especially the AGI Nerd team! Next week, you will see that this item will be marked as in production and moved below!

RKPi5 (Raspberry Pi Project)

We are currently burning the RKPi5 and WAMPi operating system into a .xy compressed file that when loaded using Pi Imager app (screen below). With this ubiquitous utility, it allows OUR TEAM to do all the hard work of configuring your Raspberry Pi! Remember, the software is free.

What we do:

1. We ran all the shell scripts (which are still available for free) into a comprehensive solution. There are differences between RKPi5 and WAMPi (enterprise) in this regard.

   1. RKPi5 — includes the full Trixie 64-bit operating system with desktop installed. This allows an optional keyboard, mouse, and monitor to be hooked up to the Pi for admin level access to the Pi. The RKPi5 is targeted to people that know how to plug in a microSD card and power on the Pi. It requires very little technical experience.

   2. WAMPi — on the other hand, is targeted to enterprise users. George and I will describe some of the features at a later time, but by way of illustration, it has an admin dashboard with many options and toggles and controls. One of these is the ability to host multiple static websites and switch between them dynamically. George is brilliant!

2. We have already bundled Rapture Kit 3.1 website content, over 26GB of information into the loader. That means that when you burn the RKPi5 or WAMPi image onto a new microSD card and insert it directly into the Pi5, it will boot and load the Rapture Kit content ready to explore! Previously, you had to manually run the shell scripts and then copy the Rapture Kit 3.1 content files. We handle this for you now.

3. By exporting the finished operating system image, we’ve done ALL the hard work for you!

What you have to do:

1. You must have a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. You can use a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM but your hotspot connected users will not be able to scale as well.

2. You must have 2 (1 for use, 1 for disaster recovery if needed) microSD cards. For the RKPi5 solution, we need to have 64GB capacity. On WAMPi we recommend 256GB to 512GB depending on the number of static websites your team wishes to host on the Pi.

3. You need to download the .xy file which is what you burn to a fresh microSD card. This process is easy and takes roughly 15 minutes depending on your internet speed.

4. Also, you need to download the Pi Imager utility (here) so that you can burn the RKPi5 or WAMPi image to the microSD card.

5. Finally, insert the microSD card into the Pi and boot!!

I still have to update the RKPi5 documentation (here) because we’ve simplified the install procedure. Rodger has a significant role as a volunteer to help validate these instructions and caught a few issues with my own v1. So, expect that website to be updated at some point in the near future.

PRMNews App

I also created a community driven Trending News dashboard. The main Top World News area already accounts for top news. So, this Trending News is supposed to be completely user-driven by the interactions each of our users perform. I apologize about the sparsity of this visual (see below). It will vastly improve as users like, upvote, downvote, or save articles of interest to them. This includes the composite scores used as defined below and which are selectable from the combo box in the upper right of the screen:

The recent interaction weights are:

• upvotes: + 3

• like: +1.5

• save: +1.2

• downvote: -2

• flag_irrelevant: -4 (reserved for news article moderators)

A few key explanations:

• Score uses selected algorithm’s score: Hot, Top, Rising, or Controversial.

• Hot uses recent weighted engagement if there is recent activity; otherwise it falls back to lifetime popularity.

• Top uses lifetime popularity score, which is simpler: (upvotes 3) + (likes - (downvotes 2). Saves and flags are not included in lifetime popularity.

• Rising is a recent weighted engagement velocity normalized to a 24-hour rate, plus recency.

• Rewards articles with both upvotes and downvotes, especially when they are balanced.

• The table sorts by selected score descending, then by total engagement count as the tiebreaker.

I wanted to surprise my users with a FUN integration to the USGS (United States Geological Survey) data. On an interval, we go fetch this source for any updates. I wanted to bring such news to you inside the app. This feature shows over 10k events already! What is super cool is the 2-D map on the left is a bubble chart where the size of the bubble is the size of the magnitude! And on the right is a depth chart where those same earthquakes are ranked descending on depth.

If you look at the bottom right, there is a slider where you can control the density of the data. For example, you can set this to 6.0 and only those earthquakes with a magnitude of 6 or higher will be on the charts. The slider is updated in realtime! It’s fun to play with. You can’t see it, but there is a grid with columnar sort support with each row having details about the event. This includes an external link to the USGS website where the event is maintained.

Long Term Roadmap

[IN PRODUCTION] Rapture Kit 3.1

[IN PRODUCTION] Keychain Rapture Kit

Go to Keychain Rapture Kit (here)
Go to Facebook (here)

[IN PRODUCTION] Book 6 - The Dax Hunter Files - A Creed of Saints

We need help! We want more comments from confirmed buyers of the books to help boost A Creed of Saints. One of our long term readers that read the finished work got “chills” when they read the last chapter. The Watchman Community will be amazed at how we’ve held to the prophetic implications of what is happening today. We fully integrate the Gospel and model what it looks like to be left behind. We can’t wait for it to be released soon.

Please help us boost this book when you can!

Please support Gary Albyn … it helps me too. I should mention that there is no financial benefit to me. Gary is a personal friends of mine. I just want to step up and help out to the best of my ability.

Support Gary Albyn at these outlets

Gary’s personal website (here)
Go to Barnes and Nobles (here)
Go to Amazon (here)

Bible Bench [ON HOLD]

Bible on Blockchain [ON HOLD]

Web 3.0 Projects [WAITING BOARD OF DIRECTOR APPROVAL]

My prayer requests:

1. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge and praise God for His sustaining work in helping me deliver so much work this week. I wanted for further thank you for praying for me to obey the no-work-on-Sunday rule. If you look at the record of my activity in my repositories, you will note that after February there was only 1 such unit of work. I don’t remember what that was exactly, but thank you Silver Saint (you know who you are) that slapped me upside the head regarding working on Sunday. LOL.

   

2. I want to praise God for the successful deployment of various redundant cloud providers and many Rapture Kit based: Post Rapture Emergency Websites! I cannot tell you how much Brother Kevin stepped-up to put his shoulder in. It has removed so much stress—something which I have been carrying upwards of 5 years for the domain inventory to be productionized. Now we’re set! I give God the Glory for what He has done through my Brother and other AGI Nerds! Speaking of which, Joel is working on an advanced part of our technical stack—please pray for his final steps to get it into production. He has been an amazing contributor to our Advanced Gospel Initiatives.

3. I also have a praise for the launch of A Creed of Saints. Gary and I worked for over 7-months to bring the book out for release. You can find it (here). Pray for us to rest our minds and recover. It was a lot of effort. I think I read through the book 4 or 5 times already. What a privilege to participate in this great mission! I can’t thank Brother Gary Albyn enough for letting me co-labor with him.

4. This morning, I have written what I call User Onboarding and other documentation so a small group of users can begin helping with testing. Even though I am really experienced, it always takes a group of committed people to test everything. Just a note, from a software development point-of-view, I’m running nearly 3k tests when I certify the application logic. And I do what is called unit testing where I make sure that the app is following the intent and specifications I’ve designed for a fantastic experience. Please pray for the onboarding process and the team that will be coordinated by myself and Brother Steven Sessions. More on this testing process later. I’m not done with features yet! But you can signup in the chat area to express you’re willingness to participate.

5. Finally, it has been months since I deployed the entire technical stack. I have deployed once before, but there is more work to do. Please pray for favor!
   

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

#Maranatha

YBIC,
Scott