The 31st of July seems well past but maybe there is still time to remember Inigo with a link to Thinking Faith and a fine article by Ron Darwen: “Will the Real Ignatius Please Stand Up?“.
James Hanvey’s appreciation of Prince Caspian, “Waiting for Aslan“, also caught my eye.
1 comment August 3rd, 2008
If, as I am, you are a fan of all things Whedon you might like to check out Dr Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog. Genius!
Add comment July 19th, 2008
I’ve just posted a plugin update with some requested features and an obscure bug-fix (or a fix for an obscure bug?).
6 comments July 12th, 2008
Edel McClean offers these reflections:
Readings: Amos 2; Matthew 8: 18-22
I’m perplexed by today’s gospel reading. I don’t want this to be my Jesus speaking. I want to catch a softness in his eye. I want him to smile. I want him to be a wee bit easier on people. But Jesus isn’t going to do my bidding. I have to grapple with my confusion instead.
Let’s picture the scene. Jesus, a strangely attractive young rabbi, emerges out of the back end of nowhere. He wanders the hills and valleys of Palestine. He walks among a disenfranchised people, in an occupied state. He walks through their towns and their villages, over their farmland, and on the shores of their lake, and he cries out a new message. A message of a new world order, where the mourning are comforted, the meek inherit the earth, those hungry and thirsty for what’s right feast until satisfied. He doesn’t just talk. He puts it into action. He lays hands on people and they are healed. He looks, smiling, into the eyes of a leper and says ‘Of course I want to cure you, be cured’. With a word from this man’s lips, the sick are made well. The air that surrounds him is so packed full of promise of a better life and a better world, that it seems to be exploding in bursts of golden fireworks over his head.
4 comments June 30th, 2008
I’ve released a new plugin, Image Shadow, which creates soft, realistic drop-shadows (frames too) for the jpeg images in your posts.
Thanks to David at PhotoLinkLove for the inspiration. You can see the plugin in action with the beautiful photographs on his blog.
7 comments June 28th, 2008
I’ve just posted new releases (v. 2.5.0.10) of the various post plugins. There are some bug fixes and several developments to Similar Posts including an optional new algorithm for choosing key terms to match and the ability to override automatic matching by making manual links between posts. I’ve also taken account of the new post-versioning system in WordPress 2.6.
Add comment June 28th, 2008
I’m realising how differently plugin development goes when my plugins are hosted with WordPress Extend. Having the SVN repository has really simplified some things and made maintenance a lot less time consuming but I’m finding a big downside. My plugins seem to be perpetually in beta! I guess before I could upload a new feature or a bug fix and, if there was a problem with it, I could sort it out before more than a handful of users had been inconvenienced. Now, however, every new version gets wide distribution and every error has a wide public.
Yesterday, for example, I was puzzling over one person’s problem installing Similar Posts. It seemed the plugin activation code wasn’t working. I couldn’t see why until I noticed he was using WordPress 2.0. I installed the same version locally and quickly discovered the problem was with the function ‘plugin_basename’. Apparently it didn’t work correctly on Windows servers until WordPress 2.2. So I thought ‘Easy! I’ll create my own version that does work’.
1 comment June 4th, 2008
Why does this release of Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts and Recent Comments get a clean new number instead of being called a beta? I guess it’s arbitrary! I can’t stop tinkering so in a sense the plugins are perpetually in beta but on the other hand bug reports are drying up (apart from the ones I keep introducing!).
I want to concentrate some more on Similar Posts for a while and try out some ideas that have emerged from reading on the subject. It is a challenge to find good matching algorithms that can be made speedy enough in PHP and not too demanding in memory usage. A few months ago I had a great system running but had to drop it when I moved from my local development server to my live hosted server which immediately froze from lack of memory.
3 comments May 16th, 2008
Edel McClean offers these reflections:
Readings: James 1:1-11, Psalm 118, Mark 8:11-13
The liturgical title for today is Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time. A quick look at ordinary in the dictionary tells us ‘unexceptional, plain, uninteresting’. It seems a little like what the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of in our gospel today. They seem to think he’s a little too ordinary and they come demanding a sign. Prove to us that you’re exceptional. Give us something remarkable. Do something out of the ordinary. And then we’ll believe you.
Of course, what the Pharisees were getting was anything but ordinary. They were getting a sign. They had Jesus. Standing slap bang in front of them. Not just any old preacher, but, if we follow Mark’s gospel, a man who had just healed a young child, made a deaf man hear, and fed four thousand people. And still the Pharisees say, we want more. They’re unable to see the sign right there in front of them.
2 comments May 12th, 2008
Similar Posts v.2.5b28 has just been posted.
Working on Similar Posts I have learned more than I care to know about the vagaries of MySQL, PHP, and Unicode. One particular issue that has so far resisted my attempts has been the satisfactory handling of content in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (CJK).
Similar Posts uses the full-text indexes provided by MySQL to compare one post with another and the MySQL index is word-based. The CJK languages (I am told) are not based on discrete words — at least not words delimited by ‘white space’ — so they pose a big problem to full-text indexing.
2 comments May 11th, 2008
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