Seasonal Plume

Quite a few new things have been added over the past few days, such as the Name Dropper plugin (albeit slightly modified for my uses) for social bookmarking, the DoFollow plugin for disabling the “nofollow” attributes in external comment links, as well as upgrading the Now Reading plugin; I’ve also started using FeedBurner, but you can still access the feed using the old URL (http://seasonalplume.net/feed/).

I’ve also started another “aside” category (like my snippets and website category asides) for book quotes I find that I feel like quoting. Each of the items currently shown on the front page also have proper excerpts now,and I shall continue to write them with the main entries as I go along.

Lastly (and probably only of interest to us geekier readers) if you try viewing the blog without any stylesheet whatsoever, there’s now an explanation plus some important headers for main sections.

I upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.1.3 for Seasonal Plume, plus tweaked the CSS a bit in order to fix a small bug that makes the content nudge down a bit whenever you hover over the “table of contents” link on the navigation up top. Should be fixed now and still working with other browsers. :)

I was actually hoping to get a social bookmarking plugin thing going but it’s not cooperating with my contact form at the footer. Will have to look into it a bit more.

I’d like to sing praises of the Now Reading WordPress plugin, which was just what I was looking for. In any case, I’d like to finally officially put up my library, and it’s now linked on the main navigation. ♥ I love how the plugin works. Yay! I haven’t integrated the widgets yet with my miscellany section, but it will get there soon. Book reviews will still be posted here in the main blog, and linked/included on the book page itself. :)

On to the actual plugin review — the plugin was very easy to install (no PHP files to edit), and easy to get used to as well. Clean interface, plus almost all information you would need in a library plugin — book status, rating, review section (even if I’m not using it), when you started reading and when you finished. Plus meta tags for everything else! I had fun adding a few meta information of my own, like the language of the book I’m reading (English? Filipino? Translated from what language?) or the series it belongs to. I could probably keep going on and on with the meta information, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. ;)

I did modify my installation a bit to serve my needs a little; such as:

• return the post ID connected to the book; this was important to me because I didn’t plan on using the reviews section of the plugin, but keep posting my reviews here in the blog (since I review not just books but writing tools/sites/etc as well); I needed the post ID in order to be able to add the actual post into the book’s page (with the help of the Get-a-Post plugin)
• allow for books with no finish dates in the average_books function; since I plan to store past books (as opposed to “books from this point onwards”) as well in the library (like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice) and I wouldn’t know when I started/finished them as it’s so long ago, I needed to modify the function to make sure it excludes those books from the computation
• fix usage of the $echo parameter for the book_rating function; I do a lot of if() statements in my templates (if there is this information, if there is that, etc) and since I was showing rating information, I needed this to work

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the plugin isn’t robust enough on its own — not at all! It’s just a little more customization to meet my specific needs.

Speaking of customization, this plugin was fun to customize to fit my theme. There’s a bit of a challenge in the sense that there was a lot to look out for, but oy vey, I was quite pleased with the end result. Actually, it made me feel like I wanted to change/redesign my website layout to fully utilize the wonderfulness of the plugin’s customization ability!

I obviously don’t have any complaints, but if there’s anything I’d be interested in seeing in the future, it would be the two following things: a link to the Amazon detail page once you turn up search results for the book in the WP admin panel, to check if it’s the edition you want (especially important for books that don’t have cover images); second, the ability to easily update the “edition” of a book. I’m guessing that this might be easily done by updating the ISBN in the database, but I haven’t looked too deeply yet into how the plugin is made to be able to say it for certain. I’d love that feature since I’ve added a few books I’m still looking for, and I might not get the editions I wanted.

I’d definitely recommend this plugin to any WordPress blogger who’re looking to incorporate their reading habits into their blog. It’s fun, powerful, and most especially easy to use.

P.S. If anyone have got plugins for this plugin (imagine that, even plugins for a plugin! *squishes it*) I would love to hear about them. ♥

I’d been doing a fair number of reading lately, and I’m slightly ahead with four books read on the third week of the year; the fourth was a re-read, which made reading quicker. I’m tracking progress on my library page, which (for now) unlinked on the main menu and updated manually. (I plan on using the Now Reading plugin for it, but until I have time to sit down and sort itself out, the manually updating WP page will have to do. (I also actually feel like changing the actual layout, but we’ll see.) Much thanks to Vega for pointing it out!) So far, I’ve read the following:

1. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (finished January 3)
2. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (finished January 13)
3. The Amulet of Samarkand (book one in The Bartimaeus Trilogy) by Jonathan Stroud (finished January 15)
4. Dusk (Po-on) by F. Sionil Jose (finished January 17)

I mean to write down my thoughts of each book in particular soon. :) As for the last, it was a re-read as I wanted to finally finish the Rosales novels by the same author, and in chronological order, Dusk is the first. I’d read Dusk before, but haven’t read the rest, although I know I had picked up My Brother, My Executioner sometime but have not finished it. I’m now reading Tree, the second book according to chronology.

I’m liking the fact that having a goal for the year (50 books) is spurring me to rediscover my love for reading. I’ve always loved reading as a child all the way ’til I was in high school, but when college came and I was caught up in the Whole New World of software, web development, and of course Having A Boyfriend™ — I did not read as much as I should have (nor write, for that matter). I read here and there but I probably read only five new books a year; quite a disgrace.

Now I’ve started to slip back into reading, and I like it. My boss/friend Pao and I were talking on the way to Makati one day early this week, where I told him about my plan to read 50 books this year, and he said that it was something he regretted not doing as a child — read more books. He said he thought that reading is something you develop an interest for when you’re still a child, and once you’re grown it’s difficult to get into if you weren’t keen on reading when you were younger. And I think he’s right, and I’m grateful my parents let us have all the books we wanted (within reason) when we were kids. (My mom used to get angry with me, though, because once we bought a book from the bookstore (usually Nancy Drew) I would read them on the way home, and I’d have finished it already by the time we got home as the travel time then was around an hour and a half. Hee.)

It’s curious, though, about how people exactly get/develop that interest in reading. My older sister and I are avid readers, but our youngest, quite sadly, doesn’t. She tries to keep up with us — she’d propose we sit around and read, but after a few minutes of sitting/lying/etc still and reading, she’d start talking, or get bored with her book. I think she’s getting more interested in books now, which is great; she always wants to go to the bookstore and sit around and read. The thought intrigued me, though — how do people develop that interest in reading? Is it developed, or handed down, or a product of your environment, or…? Maybe it’s all three (or whatever else).

How did you start reading?

Yay for website revamps! Finally, the website’s WordPress installation is all upgraded, and I’ve finally done a new theme for it. Just in time — I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to update the layout before NaNoWriMo hits. I’ve been working almost all day on getting the theme up, as I only came up with the layout idea mid-morning. Battling WordPress and my plugins were also quite a challenge, but they’re all good now!

(I still have to reorganize my categories and tags — seriously, the way I use both? It’s pretty much haphazard, and it’s a mess.)

Also, in prep for NaNo, I’ve installed a word count meter right here — you can see it at the bottom of the page. I reallyreally hope I’d be able to keep writing once the second week hits. I wouldn’t be surprised if I slack off, really, but I’m hoping for the best. Tomorrow I will probably either work on a few more websites, or do more Nano-thinking.

I should write some more, but I’m bushed.