Universal URLs

[inventor96]

My Dad and I are wanting to build our own home teaching app for android, and we were wanting to have a link to the first presedency message for each month (audio and text), but we don't want to have an update every month for it. I would like to ask if there's a universal URL that we can have it link to, and the church's servers can redirect it automatically?

[russellhltn]

It appears that

Code: Select all

http://lds.org/ensign/series/first-presidency-message?lang=eng

will get you to a table of messages. But unless you parse the page and pick off the first line, I'm not sure how you'll get the message.

But then, when do the messages change? You wouldn't want to be giving next month's message when you're home teaching on the 31st.

[inventor96]

I took a break from this for a while, but now I'm back to trying to figure out this part of the app.
What I'm wanting to do is be able to download the mp3 and pdf file from the respective servers. Is there a file that always has the same file name and location that I would be able to have downloaded? Some thing like:[HTML]http://some_lds_server.org/some/other/dir/first_pres_message.mp3[/HTML]
(changing the file ext to "pdf" for text format).

[rmrichesjr]

Unless we find that such an URL exists, your idea sounds like a good candidate for a suggestion via the feedback link. It would be very convenient for a large number of people. Home teachers could bookmark the URL and go directly to the message each month instead of having to click through a few other pages. It would also reduce load on the servers by a small amount.

As for when the messages change, they could change on the same schedule as the old site's current month's icon and link. Even if that's a day or two earlier or later than some people would prefer, it would still be a net win on the vast majority of days in the month. For HTML pages, perhaps each page could have 'previous month' and 'next month' links.

[inventor96]

I recall seeing feedback links on the new lds.org site for pages, but not for suggestions, where would I submit this idea?

[aebrown]

I recall seeing feedback links on the new lds.org site for pages, but not for suggestions, where would I submit this idea?

At the bottom of the lds.org home page (and many other pages on lds.org) is a link labeled Submit Feedback. You can click that link to submit feedback, including suggestions, for anything on lds.org.

[rmrichesjr]

At the moment, the feedback mechanism appears to be down. About an hour ago, I tried twice, and both times it failed. I tried again just now, and it failed again:

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request POST /tools/feedback.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

[inventor96]

I was finally able to successfully suggest the "universal url" idea (although it was a while ago), is there a common way to see when it's implemented?

[kisaac]

I was finally able to successfully suggest the "universal url" idea (although it was a while ago), is there a common way to see when it's implemented?

I look at it as the "patience and long suffering" part of the process:)