From concept to deployment - building a website from scratch... Without really writing any code.

I promise I was paying attention in church — but this idea kept nagging at me anyway.

The sermon that morning was about making decisions before you need to make them. The pastor's point was that when it comes to temptation, you can't wait until you're already in the moment to decide how you'll respond — by then it's too late. You have to resolve it ahead of time. The point is, I was listening.

Somehow, in true "my brain works differently" fashion, I took that principle and immediately applied it to... building a website. But honestly? There's a real connection there. I'd had this idea rattling around for a while and kept putting it off. It would be too much work to pull it all together. Then, I thought maybe this could be something to throw at Claude (AI).

I got home, opened my laptop, and got to work around 1:30 in the afternoon.

So what is it?

The site is called Verse of the Month and the concept is elegantly simple. Every day, the site takes today's date and uses it to pull a unique cross-section of scripture from across the entire Bible. The current month becomes the chapter number. The current day of the month becomes the verse number. That's it.

So today, March 12th? The site finds every Chapter 3, Verse 12 across all 66 books of the Bible and shows them to you — side by side, ready to explore.

What makes it interesting is that the number of verses you see changes every single day. On January 1st (1:1), every book of the Bible has a Chapter 1, Verse 1, so you get all 66. But on a date like November 23rd (11:23), only books with at least 11 chapters and a verse 23 in that chapter will show up — a much smaller, more specific slice of scripture you'd probably never read together otherwise.

It's more than just reading — it's voting

Once you've browsed the day's verses, you pick your favorite. Your vote gets saved, and you can see how your choice stacks up against everyone else on the leaderboard. It's a small thing, but it adds a fun layer of community to what might otherwise be a solitary habit.

The site supports multiple Bible translations and is already available in English, Spanish, and Filipino (Tagalog), with more languages planned. And it's completely free — no data collection, no selling your information. The daily email reminder is totally optional.

Not bad for a partial day's work

By 10 PM I had a working site. Now, I'll be honest — I didn't write much of the actual code myself. I built this almost entirely by giving instructions to Microsoft Copilot in VS Code and letting it do the heavy lifting. But don't let that undersell what went into it. Knowing what to ask for, how to ask for it, and being able to recognize when something isn't right — that's its own skill. The site is pulling from Bible APIs to fetch verses, posting back to an API to save votes, filtering by Bible category, and serving users in multiple languages. That's what came out of me and an AI having a conversation about scripture.

Go check it out at Verse Of The Month (votm.us) and cast your vote for today. I'm curious which verse resonates most with you.