Plugins can be a major boon. They can add variety to a site, integrate third party software, collect feedback, improve navigation, or add features. Occasionally they may become integral to the way a blog is run. But they can also become a burden or a major stumbling point. The recent WordPress 2.5 release made a large of plugins for the software incompatible, and outright broke a few. In those cases where plugins simply provide some added extraneous functionality, such breakages might not be a problem, but where they form an integral part of a blog the potential changes can bring a site to a halt.
On Saturday I went to a meeting with Krystyna Janda presented by The National Creativity Centre Foundation, in the National Gallery in Dublin. The meeting principally took the form of a questions and answers session, conducted by the famous Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, ahead of the Irish première of Krystyna Janda’s monologue adaptation of Vedrana Rudan’s Ear, Throat, Knife.
Whilst the interview was pretty interesting, given Janda’s extremely busy and varied career, the translating at the event was a little under par. The predominance of Polish speakers in the audience meant that the poor translator didn’t always get a say until after a few questions had been asked or answered, and her pretty difficult task of translating her own shorthand wasn’t helped by Mr Zanussi interrupting occasionally to demonstrate his own knowledge of English, and I was frankly embarrassed for the poor translator. Most questions focused dealt with Janda’s career in acting, both on stage and on the silver screen, from her early roles in films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) or working alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, to her more recent work with the Polonia Theatre in Warsaw. Many of the audience’s questions focused on her family life, work in politics and music, and just where she finds the energy to keep it all going. Not sure if she answered that sufficiently, but she did suggest that there would be more going on in her blog in the future.
Courtesy of Caro, here’s my contributory few lines from The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg, page 123, three sentences from the fifth one on:
And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. The trouble is that face with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message.
Although it may be customary for resolutions to start after New Year’s, most things surrounding this blog and its author work in a slightly different time zone to everything else. Nevertheless, it was my intention to make an effort to post more on this blog, partly since it might otherwise fall into disuse, partly in order to stretch these fingers more and let a little blood into parts of my brain that are getting a little dusty. The content will be much the same—i.e. as random as ever—but the aim is to post something once a week, albeit supplemented occasionally by interesting links and silly YouTube videos. That might also include some crazy literary wonderings. We’ll see.
Another blunder on the prestigious UK quiz show University Challenge yesterday, as Birmingham took on Magdalen College, Oxford in a very close contest. The question went something like this:
Jeremy Paxman: “Which hydrated ferrous salt used to be known as green vitriol?”
Answer: “Iron sulphate.”
Jeremy Paxman: “No, just sulphate.”
That’s akin to asking who composed Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and rejecting the answer “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” because the card read “Just Mozart.” Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and it should be no surprise that the question master makes a few given the breadth of subjects on display, but Paxman’s general manner makes it difficult to forgive him on this account. Paxman quite happily berates students for not knowing things in his particular field, or indeed for having any knowledge of popular culture, God forbid. In addition, as most people know, the show is filmed and edited in one continuous performance, and might last an hour rather than the televised half an hour. Plenty of time for someone to prevent such rediculous answers from being aired. As someone has already commented, this isn’t the first time such a poor mistake has been made, and no doubt neither will it be the last, until someone finally stands up for themselves or Paxman is brought down a peg.
There are times when I wonder how I ever survived without Knoppix as a tool for fixing PC problems on the fly. And give someone a CD and some basic instructions, and you can soon have a live terminal up ready to fix a whole host of problems. Yet I find being able to talk to the person on the other end often vital for solving problems, and more importantly, it can be a reassurance for when you make a cock up!
It’s been a full month since I last posted anything, which is a little too infrequent even for my liking. A combination of holidays, downtime and general idleness is to blame, but there are a few posts in the draft box which never quite got finished, and maybe one or two new things will crop up in the coming days. Also going to give the WPPA plugin a bigger trial and add a few more photos from around and abouts.
That is the question; as the well known soliloquy roughly goes. A Mind @ Play is now a year old, and not a day wiser, as far its author is concerned. Courtesy of GeneralStats, I can see that in the past year (excluding this post) there’ve been 57 posts, 18 comments/trackbacks, together a total of 31,400 words, and over 8,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. But to what end?
This isn’t intended to be another one of those ‘blogging about blogging’ posts, but occasionally one has to ask why we blog at all. I wouldn’t claim to be anything near an expert on the subject, but it would appear that the more successful blogs do just that: ‘blog about blogging’. Nor should that sound derogatory, some of them do an exceedingly good job of it, but there are only so many times you can read the ’top 10 ways to get more readers’ et al. But then these people tend to come from the professional end of the blogging community, those who aim to earn something through their work. There were and are no such intentions with this blog, and if there are any advertisements on this site I can only say they are unintentional.
This certainly isn’t my area of expertise, but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to integrate the Language Switcher plugin with a widget-enabled theme. As this hasn’t yet been implemented, I copied wrote the simplest of Widgets which will list the available languages on your blog in the sidebar.
There really isn’t anything special here, but for people even more hesitant with code than I am, pop this file into the wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress installation, and then enable it via the Plugins admin page. You should then find the Widget available in the Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets admin page. At the moment, the Widget will display your available languages listed only by name. I’m still learning how to allow this to be changed from within the Sidebar Widgets page.
After a little more research and experimentation, I’ve updated the little Language Switcher widget to enable the user to choose whether to display flags and/or names for the available languages when setting up the widget, and change the heading in the sidebar if required.
Click here to download Language Switcher Widget v1.01.
