We never saw the peak today due to continuous white-out, but we really enjoyed our first trip to our closest active volcano’s national park. Playing was a blast! There were incredible amounts of snow, perfect for climbing up (hard!) and sliding down (fun!). Lots of people were making snow caves to sleep in tonight. Intriguing, but the thought of having to get out in the cold to go doesn’t appeal to me right now. Maybe next winter.
See our snowshoeing set. More pictures next week!
Thanks to the generosity of the WordPress team and some open source plugin developers, this site has some nice, new, shiny features, some visible and some not.
First, thanks to Mark Jaquith at Tempus Fugit you can now subscribe to comments via email using his Subscribe to Comments plugin. If anyone posts a comment after yours, you’ll know.
Next, thanks to Skippy at Skippy.net, you can subscribe to our blog posts via email using his subscribe2 plugin (see also the link in the sidebar) and display your gravatar in our blog comments using his Gravatars plugin (get a gravatar and then leave a comment to see what I mean). And as a backend service for me, I’m using his WP-Cron plugin to send a database backup of this blog to my Gmail account every day.
Next, thanks to Ricardo Galli and his WP-Cache plugin this blog serves a cached version of each page rather than dynamically generating each page from the database with every request. The result is a much faster page load time for you and extra bandwidth savings for me.
Also in the mix is the Related Posts plugin from Alexander Malov and Mike Lu. At the bottom of every post is a short list of (possibly) related posts for your endless reading enjoyment.
Finally, thanks to Ryan Duff at RyanDuff.net and his WPContact-Form plugin, you can now contact us! (See also the link in the sidebar.) The great thing about it is that we don’t have to expose our email to spammers or obfuscate a mailto link (inaccessibly, I might add) with JavaScript. You get what you want and so do we.
WordPress is amazing. Last year I customized an installation of version 1.2 to serve as a simple CMS for my church. Now with version 2.x and all of the new plugins popping up, it’s almost unnecessary to hack WordPress anymore. For the price of a few minutes of searching Google and a few hours of installation and tweaking you can have a professional content publishing system that meets the demands of most small businesses. It’s a very exciting time to be a content producer (and/or to be a web designer).
(Or one who uses parentheses.)
Kathleen found The Tale of the Unknown Island by José Saramago (translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa; illustrated by Peter Sis) at the library and blazed through it. “You’ve got to read this,” she said. And I did. At 51 very small pages, it was a quick read. But it’s one of those stories that could take a lifetime to fully appreciate.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is quoted as saying “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This is as true in life as it is in writing. And so it is with Saramago’s tale. What I appreciate most about the telling of the story is that Saramago seems to have crafted each sentence to say no more or less than it should, and all of it in an engaging, run-on prose style that pushes the story forward, a style that is both humorous and sensible at the same time, and he marries that with a story about a protagonist who is on a simple, yet profound, quest.
You, sir, are only interested in islands that are known, And unknown ones too, once they’re known, Perhaps this one won’t let itself be known, Then I won’t give you the boat, Yes, you will. When they heard these words, uttered with such calm confidence, the would-be supplicants at the door for favors, whose impatience had been growing steadily since this conversation had begun, decided to intervene in the man’s favor, more out of a desire to get rid of him than out of any sense of solidarity, and so they started shouting, Give him the boat, give him the boat.
Could the process of building web applications in an environment you enjoy really be that simple? There’s only one way to find out. Read, then build.
37signals, the Chicago-based, web contructioneer firm, has just released its latest book, Getting Real, in PDF-only format. I’m in the middle of it and loving it. If 2005 was about tagging, Ajax, and Web 2.0, 2006 will be about putting the Getting Real principles into practice wherever web sites and applications are built. At least, one can hope.
They aren’t saying anything new. They aren’t saying things most of us haven’t read or thought about before. But they’re saying it. They’re bringing the ideas of simplicity, focus, and transparency back to the table. And given their reputation and credibility I think it’s worth sitting up and listening for a while.
Copyright © 2005–2008 Loveoirs | 
RSS