Песнь Возрождения is a Russian hymnal that a lot of Slavic churches have used for decades. The full collection runs to 3,300 songs. It exists as a thick book, and the problem with a thick book is that finding song 1,847 while everyone is already standing is not fast.
This one is a community project rather than client work. Nobody paid for it and nobody is going to. It got built because it should exist.
The Hard Part Was the Data
The interesting engineering problem here was not the website. It was getting 3,300 songs into a structure that a computer understands.
A hymn is not a blob of text. It has numbered verses, a chorus that repeats between them, sometimes a bridge, a musical key, an author, a translator, and an arranger. If you store the whole thing as one field you can display it and nothing else. You cannot offer a repeat chorus toggle, you cannot render a clean print layout, and you cannot search verse text separately from title text.
So every song is stored structured, with verses and chorus as separate addressable pieces. That single decision is what every feature below is built on.
Search That Works the Way People Remember
People arrive at a hymn three different ways. They know the number. They know the title. Or, most often, they only remember one line from the middle of the third verse.
The search handles all three. Number lookup is instant, titles match on partial input, and full text search runs across the lyrics, so half a remembered line is enough to find the song. There is also an alphabetical index for browsing when you are not looking for anything specific.
Built for the Room, Not the Desk
The controls above the lyrics exist because of how this actually gets used:
- Presentation mode for putting the words on a screen without needing separate software.
- Repeat chorus toggles whether the chorus prints between every verse or once at the top, because different congregations sing it differently.
- Larger and smaller text. This is the feature that gets used most, and it is there because a hymnal is read by people whose eyes are not twenty five.
- Print view that produces a clean sheet instead of a webpage with navigation bars on it.
- Dark mode, which matters more than usual when the device is in someone's hands in a dim room.
- English and Russian interface, so the younger half of the congregation can navigate it too.
Why This One Is Worth Talking About
It is the clearest example I have of the thing I actually believe about building software: the interface is the easy half. The value came from taking something that already existed in an awkward format and modeling it properly, and every useful feature fell out of that structure almost for free.
If the songs had gone in as plain text, this would be a website with 3,300 pages on it and no way to do anything interesting. Same effort, almost none of the usefulness.
It is live at pesnvozrozhdeniya.com, free, with no ads.