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.

The question is, I suppose, what are the signs right there in front of us? We listened to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem yesterday, of kingfishers and dragonflies. And we can look at moments of beauty and something in us knows they’re a sign. We catch the softness in an older person’s eye as they tell of someone they once loved, and something in us knows it’s a sign. We see a young couple stand in front of a church full of people and, with their hearts pounding, promise themselves to each other for ever. Something in us knows this is a sign. We see a child dancing barefoot, graceful and unselfconscious and we know, it’s a sign. We see a cherry tree, bursting into flower, singing and dancing its colour to the world and, if we take the time to notice, it makes our hearts sing and dance too. And we know that this too, is a sign of something beyond what we can grasp.

Older people, young couples, children, cherry trees. They all belong to ordinary time. But they’re extraordinary too. Because Jesus, it seems, has no desire to be confined to ’special’ times, but comes to meet us, to grace our lives, right in the middle of the ordinary.

And perhaps we recognise too, those moments in ourselves. The glory of God is a person fully alive, which is another way of saying, the glory of God is a person being who God’s called them to be, which is another way of saying the glory of God is a person being fully themselves. The moment when our hearts sing. The moment when we are so fully ourselves that God shines through us. The moments when, like the old person, or the young couple, like the child or the cherry tree, we are so fully what we’re meant to be, that others look at us and see in us a sign, and know God is right there with them. What the world needs most, perhaps, is our having the courage to be ourselves - to bring our true, unique, God-given selves out from the shadows and allow them to shine. To let our very lives, which belong in this, ordinary time, to be signs of God’s grace, touching the ordinary, and setting it dancing.

• Sunday Week 30 Year C
• Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year C(A)
• Monday Week 18 Year II (Bl. Pierre Favre SJ)

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.

My workaround (hack?/fiddle?/trick?) is to separate the CJK text into individual characters (while leaving single-byte encoded text alone) and use them as the basis for similarity matching. It is clearly not an ideal solution but I would love to hear from the users of WordPress blogs in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese if it is better than no solution at all.

The experiment has a couple of limitations: although not the ideal encoding for CJK languages, this method only works for now on blogs using UTF-8 encoding; also, to get around MySQL’s habit of ignoring words shorter than 4 characters long, each CJK ‘word’ is padded to that length, making for a rather large index.

To try this approach, use the Settings | Similar Posts | Manage the Index screen, set the option, and re-index. This setting overrides the other settings on that screen.

The reference to Pentecost in this post’s title is because today’s Feast celebrates the undoing of Babel.

• Similar Posts and Pentecost
• WordPress Plugins Updated: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments
• Similar Posts: Version 1.03

In previous versions the {image} tag did its resizing just by changing the <img> tag’s width and height attributes. Now, in addition, it serves properly resized thumbnails.

For a long time Recent Comments has allowed you to sort its output by post or by commenter and include group headings in the output list. This capacity has been generalised and extend to all the post plugins. The plugin output can now be sorted according to any output tag. For example, you might want to sort similar posts by date rather than score — to do so you sort by {date:raw}.

Recent Comments retains the ‘group_by’ option (which simply overrides any other sort options) but other sort schemes can be used.

Both the changes above probably need some cleaning up so please mess about with them and find any bugs.

Finally, I have replaced the ‘trim_before’ option with the ‘divider’ option. This will break some existing output templates I am sure but they should be even easier to fix.

• Some Big(-gish) Changes to the Post Plugins
• WordPress Plugins Updated: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments
• Similar Posts for your Content Feeds

So far the day is turning out a lot of fun…

• Oops… Ever-So-Slightly Fifty…
• Saturday Week 4 of Easter
• Conversion of St Paul

• Feeling So Very Forty-Nine

One issue that I have addressed concerned indexing the blog. In an attempt to simplify matters I have made the initial indexing on first activation automatic and I have brought the index management under the settings subpages as some users found the separate Manage page complicated things.

I have had the occasional report of Similar Posts not working when the WP-Cache plugin is installed. I’d like to hear more, either way, if you try to run both. I can confirm that Similar Posts is working fine alongside WP-SuperCache on my development site.

Anyway… as the fireworks say ‘light the blue touchpaper and retire’!

• New Beta for Similar Posts Plugin
• Similar Posts and Pentecost
• Post Plugins Almost out of Beta

There have been particular problems with the installation of Similar Posts on some systems and with the behaviour of Random Posts as a widget (seems to be a language issue). If anyone has difficulties with these or any other bugs please contact me. The best way is via the Bug Report screen in the plugins’ options/settings pages but a comment or email will do if you remember to give me enough information about your setup to help me debug.

• Post Plugins Almost out of Beta
• Still Fighting the Official Plugins Directory…
• Post Plugins Updated

I pored through more opaque code than is comfortable and eventually decided I should try and build an easy, reusable solution. Here’s the end result (download code):

class PluginSubpages {
  var $pages = array();
  var $parent_page = '';
  var $current_page = array();

  function PluginSubpages() {
    $this->__construct();
  }	

  function __construct() {
    $this->parent_page = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
    $p1 = strpos($this->parent_page, 'page=');
    $p2 = strpos($this->parent_page, '&');
    if ($p2 === false) {
      $this->parent_page = substr($this->parent_page, $p1+5);
    } else {
      $this->parent_page = substr($this->parent_page, $p1+5, $p2-$p1-5);
    }
  }
	
  function add_subpage( $title, $slug, $view ) {
    $this->pages[] = array('title' => $title, 'slug' => $sm��Vr�wf�Wrr��Gf�Wr��Т�Р�ТgV�7F���vU�g&���6�^ug( $slug ) {
    if (!isset($sm��Vr���Т&WGW&�GF��2��vW5�ӰТ�Тf�&V6��GF��2��vW22GvR��Т�b�GvU�w6�Vru����G6�Vr��Т&WGW&�GvS�Т�Т�ТF�R�v����W��7FV�B6�^ug');
  }
	
  function display() {
    echo "\n<ul id=\"submenu\" style=\"display: block\">\n";
    $base = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?page=' . $this->parent_page . '&subpage=';
    $this->current_page = $this->page_from_slug($_GET['subpage']);
    foreach($this->pages as $page) {	
      if($page === $this->current_page) {
        echo "<li><a href=\"$base{$page['sm��Vru���"6�73��&7W'&V�E�#�GvU�wF�F�Ru�������Ɠ���#�Т�V�6R�ТV6��#�Ɠ���&Vc��"F&6W�GvU�w6�Vru���#�GvU�wF�F�Ru�������Ɠ���#�Т�Т�ТV6��#��V����#�ТGF��2��7W'&V�E�vU�wf�Wru҂��Т�Р�Ч�Р�

There’s one nasty trick in there which I’ll come to but first … how to use it.

You’ll already have the code to register your admin settings page:

function plugin_option_menu() {
  add_options_page('Plugin Options', 'Plugin', 8,'plugin-file', 'plugin_options_page');
}

add_action('admin_menu', 'plugin_option_menu', 1);

function plugin_options_page(){
...
}

Instead of filling ‘plugin_options_page’ with all your settings code you use PluginSubpages to delegate the hard work.

function plugin_options_page(){
  echo '<div class="wrap"><h2>Plugin</h2></div>';
  $m = new PluginSubpages();
  // register the subpages
  $m->add_subpage('General', 'general', 'plugin_general_options_subpage');
  ...
  $m->add_subpage('Other', 'other', 'plugin_other_options_subpage');
  // show them!
  $m->display();
}

Each of the subpage functions behaves independently, e.g.,

function plugin_general_options_subpage(){
  $options = get_option('plugin-general');
  if (isset($_POST['update_options'])) {
    ...
  } 
  ?>
    <div class="wrap">
    <h2>General Settings</h2>
    <form method="post" action="">
    ...
    <div class="submit">
      <input type="submit" name="update_options" value="Save General Settings" />
    </div>
    </form>  
    </div>
  <?php	
}

Now about that ‘nasty trick’… PluginSubpages->display() spits out the HTML for the menu as an unordered list. How should the menu list be styled? I could include specific inline CSS styles for the menu but I thought it would be better if the subpage menu looked like the preexisting admin menu.

This is the evil bit. I found that giving the subpage menu the id of ’submenu’, the id of the admin menu I could steal all its styles and the subpage menu would fit into its surrounding seamlessly. The only catch is that CSS ids cannot be duplicated — each must be unique. In practice, though, every browser I tried coped without a squeak. Just don’t expect your admin pages to validate if you use this technique.

• How to Give Your Plugin Settings a Submenu
• Moving Your Blog: A WordPress Plugin to Permanently Redirect Your Posts
• Recent Posts: WordPress Plugin

• When they say that you should name your tags/releases using only numbers and periods they mean it. I was using 2.5 bxx not thinking a space would cause an issue but of course it did when the automatic updater kept giving up on the zip files it downloaded. From now on, 2.5bxx until I can drop the beta designation.
• That stray space thing managed to keep hidden for a few days because I couldn’t even get that far. I’ve been grumbling that my installation instructions were not showing correctly and trying, in vain, to get help… well, a little while ago as I was poring over the readme.txt for the umpteenth time I was struck by lightning (OK I’m exaggerating) and thought to check the encoding of the file. I don’t know how but the readme.txt files I’d uploaded were encoded as utf-8. The Readme Validator hadn’t caught the problem but it was enough to make the directory ignore the files.

So no spaces in release tags and just plain old ANSI in the readme.

• Novice Notes on the Official Wordpress Plugin Directory
• WordPress 2.5 and Automatic Plugin Updates
• Still Fighting the Official Plugins Directory…

Glen Hansard - Falling Slowly

I don’t know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can’t react
And games that never amount
To more than they’re meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You’ve made it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can’t go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I’m painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You’ve made it now

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You’ve made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I’ll sing along

• Once
• Saturday Week 15 Year I
• Tuesday Week 18 Year I