In the current version of Press This (press-this.php in your wp-admin directory), at line 601, there is the PHP statement

$content = '';

and at line 614 you’ll find

remove_action( 'media_buttons', 'media_buttons' );

Replace that whole section of code (including the lines quoted) with the following:

$content = '';
 if ( $selection )
  $content .= "<div class='quotedcontent'>$selection";
 if ( $url ) {
    $content .= '<p>';
    if ( $selection )
       $content .= __('via ');
    $content .= sprintf( "<a href='%s'>%s</a>.</p>", esc_url( $url ), esc_html( $title ) );
 }
 if ($content != '')
    $content .= "</div>";
 remove_action( 'media_buttons', 'media_buttons' );

All this is doing is putting the div tags before the content you pulled in via Press This, content at the start, and after the URL (if there is one).

Now, when Press This is used, the whole of the inserted content will be in a div with the class ‘quotedcontent’.   So that just leaves you to style it in your CSS file.

This article makes a lot of sense.  precis: rounded corners have a more friendly feel because sharp things, generally, hurt; so we’re psychologically conditioned against sharp corners.  Obvious when someone points it out!

via 36 Surprising Ways to Boost Creativity For Free | Greatist.

And some of these are really quite interesting thoughts.  Must try some of them!

I’ve left the blog alone for a while, but something suddenly occurred to me today.

I’ve been looking at things which allow me to ‘reblog’ stuff, or pin articles from the web – Pinterest or Sigmanote style – but nothing has quite worked for me.  Pinterest is too image-led; Sigmanote was better but doesn’t allow for a blog-post style note; Tumblr I can’t organise as I like (and at some level I’m not that comfortable with sharing a domain name with masses of porn, even if it is nowhere near what I’m doing).

Then I realised: there’s this thing called Press This in WordPress which allows me to link to, and excerpt  stuff from net articles, pull in images, and add comments.   It’s not perfect (I could do with it adding div tags round what it brings in so that I could give it  different style, and so clearly differentiate the excerpted stuff from my posts and comments), but it’s there, easy to use, and workable.

So this blog may go from negligible activity to quite a bit.   And I’ll be reorganising categories and things, more along the lines of the ones I’d started to set up in Sigmanote and its friends.  I may even get round to working out how to get Press This to add a div….

One stood out from the others – not just on price (which is very good; arguably you can get as good a deal elsewhere, but you have to be very careful to do so), but far more because of the way it works.

Because it works as a community, even if it has a dependency on a commercial provider.

People may be aware that I’m a critic of the way in which the ethos of modern capitalism has led to damaging changes in society to create a ‘client class’ – people who will work for relatively little – certainly not a family living wage – and use that relatively little to buy what is thrown at them by aggressive marketing.  I prefer models like distributism, which empower and humanise the individual rather than treating people as cogs in machines.   But is must be accepted that there are some aspects of life – and communications networks are one of them – where the capital costs involved in  the development of the network, and the scale of its maintenance, makes the human scale difficult to achieve.

Enter Giffgaff.   Giffgaff is part of the O2/Telefonica group; so far so bad, or at least so much the same as everyone else.   But what makes it different is this: for the bulk of its support and development, it uses the community of its users.

There’s no call centre; no warehouse where people are underpaid to resolve the same basic question time after time (and often to fail to resolve anything more complex), people treated as machines as an excuse for not having good enough machines in the first place.  Instead you can search the community forums, and find your answer; or if you can’t find it, you can ask.

The community of existing users will respond, in an average of about 3 minutes, with advice and guidance – and usually the answer you need.  For doing so, they gain payback – think of it as something like the Co-op ‘divvy’ – points which are converted to cash or phone credit six-monthly.

If it’s something which really can’t be resolved without enterprise-level intervention, you can email an agent; if something from the community needs intervention with the agents, there are ‘educators’ (hmm, unfortunately that sounds a bit Orwellian) who will do that.

Users don’t have to get involved – they still get a good deal, in exchange for not having the supposed convenience of a call centre – but there is an incentive to do so.    Recruiting new users also gains payback.

This approach is an enormous strength in terms of service provision; but more, it’s an approach to a major-infrastructure based system which could be applied in other cases; and an approach which has a tendency to empower users, rather than to depersonalise them.

And at the end of the day, it delivers a service which actually costs less than its traditional rivals, scotching the suggestion that any human-centred business approach has to be more costly.

It may be the part of the jigsaw which has not been fully resolved in much distributist debate.

Take a look at giffgaff.com.  Oh, and if you’d like to try it, use this link to order your SIM – that way you use the system to give me something for pointing you that way.   It’s all part of the philosophy of rewarding community.

And we came to the last proposed amendment; the chair was taken over by a Steering Committee member, for no amendment could be debated from the chair. And Rob, the chairman had serious views on this one.

The new proposed constitution had replaced the word ‘chairman/woman’ with the word ‘chairperson’.

Rob rose to his feet; in his hand he held a large stuffed teddy bear. He introduced the bear. This, as he pointed out, was a toy, but some people got attached to their toys and thought of them as real, so let’s call this a person. But now let’s look closer: it’s a teddy bear. It’s an ‘it’. It’s not a male or a female. It’s got something important missing – no, perhaps not what you’re thinking.

What’s missing is a major part of its identity, the part that, if it had it, would make it he or she; or even allow it to be uncertain about which. The part that applies to living, thinking, reasoning, being humans.

I haven’t got that bit missing, he said. I’m a man, not just a person. My predecessor in the chair of this Union was a woman, not just a person. Mr Acting Chairman, he said, I oppose this change on the grounds that it is a lie and a belittling of humanity.

Perhaps because it was late; perhaps the various-tasting smoke drifting over the meeting; perhaps because of the teddy bear, but just perhaps because his words hit a sense of identity in those listening, the word ‘chairperson’ was struck out and replaced by ‘chairman/woman’; the majority for doing so was massive.

I have little doubt that now the constitution of that union has a place for a ‘chairperson’, genderless, identity-impaired, inhuman. For that’s what we now expect, and how a society has grown away from valuing people as complete people.

It may seem an abstruse point of language, but it’s fundamental. Every time a man or woman is used as a ‘person’, his or her identity is devalued, and part of his or her humanity ground in the dust.

I have to day I’m quite enjoying Code Year, although its promise to send a weekly email to prompt starting the next session has proven rather patchy.

Of course, I’ve written basic Javascript before – or perhaps to be  more accurate, more often picked up code ideas from other people and modified them – and as far as I’ve got so far, the concepts have not been especially new.   But working steadily through the process (which is written as a series of exercises gradually embedding and explaining concepts, using an interactive code window and output console within the exercise web page) is embedding the knowledge more fully.

And then there’s the motivation factor: I’ve no particular intention of writing all that much Javascript at work, and the ability to code is unlikely to be a major factor in any future job applications.  But the ability to do more with my own websites, and the desire not to get left behind as the year of code progresses, adds a motivation level difficult to achieve in working through just any web-based JS tutorial.

There’s been criticism of Code Year – basically that it doesn’t train people to be professional programmers; and of course it doesn’t; it gives people a basis of understanding of a programming language, which they can take further or not, as they wish.  Perhaps it takes away some of the mystique of programming; perhaps too it will give some a taster from which they will see that professional coding is a far deeper skill.

To me it’s a Good Thing; not everyone who starts on it will benefit, but for some it may be a step towards understanding that computers are there to be programmed, not to control us; and towards understanding that we can control them.      It’s certainly several steps above the ‘How to use MS Office’ propaganda that passes for ICT in many secondary schools!

This walk was a shortened version of one we have in a book; in all it’s just over 4 miles, and took us around 2 hours, with plenty of time within that for looking at views and climbing the tower at Crich Stand itself.  Puns available: the Cliff Inn, and the Derwent Inn at Whatstandwell (though it was closed today, despite its notices saying otherwise).

To flesh out the briefer details on Everytrail:

• 

  The Canal at Whatstandwell

  Start from Whatstandwell Station, where there is a pay & display carpark (currently £2 for all day)

• Cross the railway and then the canal using the two linked bridges.  Continue along this path to the road.
• Cross the road, turning right, and and almost immediately turn left up Hindersitch Lane.  The road bends sharply left: continue along it until you find The Green on your right
• Now turn into the Green and continue along this road as it in turn bends left.  At the end of the lane there is a narrow path straight ahead; take it.
• You emerge onto Top Lane.  Turn right, and within about 40 yards turn left at a footpath sign.
• Follow this footpath upward through woodland, continuing straight ahead as it crosses two larger tracks.  Once it emerges onto open land, it soon splits into two – take the right hand fork.
• Follow this to the edge of the houses, then turn right end follow it round to the left to reach Coasthill – this is the left turn before Wheatsheaf Lane
• Now continue straight ahead along this lane and then across fields – there are one or two bends and diversions.
• 

  Crich Stand

  Eventually you reach the road near the Cliff Inn.  Turn right (uphill) and pass the Tramway Museum entrance, continuing to follow the road round to the left

• Follow the road straight ahead as it rises towards Crich Stand (actually a side turning from the road which bends right)
• Once at Crich Stand, follow the signed footpath which leads off to the right of the immediate approach to the monument.
• This path curves continuously leftward round the quarries, and then drops down to cross the end of the tram tracks; then it works its way down through woods until, having become a farm track then a track by some houses, it reaches a road, Leashaw.
• Turn left, then immediately right onto another footpath.
• This path meanders downward  through fields, then through woodland among old quarry workings, now just cliffs.  After a while it reaches the Cromford Canal
• Turn left onto the Cromford Canal, and follow it back to the carpark.

I’m not quite sure how it’s that long since I last posted.   Yes, life has been full; but has it been that full?   It’s probably just not having created a habit.

Let’s have a belated New Year Resolution, then; a post a week, even if it’s a short one.  That may help.

I’ve a plugin loaded in WordPress, which looks at what I type and suggests linked blogs and media.   It’s slightly encouraging to see that it’s pulled up a number of blogs with recent posts on restarting blogging!

Alençon Basilica

The Basilica of Nôtre Dame, raised to this status by Pope John Paul II in recognition of its role in the life of the family of St Thérèse of Lisieux, is a strange mix of two styles. At one end the Gothic windows form a tracery along the walls of the nave; beyond this the solidity of an 18th century tower and transept (which replaced the former tower, toppled by a storm). The newer end is solid, unbreachable stone, like a fortress; the older exuberant and confident. The mixture somehow leaves a sense of change and uncertainty.

We sat outside a bar across the square from the Basilica and drank a beer, while perusing the leaflets provided by the tourist office. The English in the leaflet about the Basilica itself likewise leaves a sense of change and uncertainty; it’s once been translated well, then had extra bits added!

Inside the Basilica the side chapel dedicated to St Thérèse and her sense of peace and gentleness lies immediately opposite that of St Jeanne d’Arc, whose image is military and patriotic; two deeply contrasted derivations of the Christian life face each other, each unashamed. The information boards are clear and gently understated.

Mass is celebrated at what appears to be a wooden altar in front of the original stone one, as though the practice of the priest facing the people during Mass is still regarded as a temporary phase; the omissions and slight variations in the liturgy perhaps also indicate an uncertainty over the Roman Liturgy itself, and are even more confusing to the visitor already working in a foreign tongue.

The congregation is reasonably numerous but aging. The homily focussed on the feeding of the five thousand as a sign of the unity of bread, word and mission. One senses a contrast between the older, quieter people at Mass inside and the noisier and younger life of the square outside; but the clangour of the bells announcing finally that we were dismissed into the world to take Christ out into its carelessness brings the two into unity. If those bells did not ring out the town would not be the same, and one senses that the town knows that.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (via Wikipedia)

We stayed overnight at the Hotel du Dauphin, St Pierre des Nids, for which an unashamed recommendation. The room, recently redecorated, still perhaps no more than a room, but comfortable and fresh; the food is excellent and the service from the owners, Olivier and Sonia, is welcoming and cheerful. In the morning, we strolled round the village and gained the sense that there is more to do around here then we knew – we will return.

Then back to the city to visit the Martin’s House, where the parents of St Thérèse lived, and where the little flower herself was born. A smiling nun with a good grasp of English is called to show us round, and does so with a mixture of history, spirituality and personal joy which is quietly inspiring. The réalisation of the museum is very well done and brings the past alive, preserving something of the life of the family amid the shrine which has grown up alongside it. There is perhaps little of St Thérèse herself here – the house saw only some of her early childhood, though there are glimpses of her life and character – but the daily holiness of the lives of her parents stands out clearly.