Category: 
So… I think I’ve finally gotten this site and afewgoodlenses pretty well situated, and it’s time to switch my focus back to the kind of content I’ve wanted to develop all along. As my regular readers might have guessed from the flurry of activity around here lately, I’m between classes. I won’t be starting up again until mid-October, so that has given me a few months to do all this, and hopefully crank up a regular level of writing (and photoblogging!) that I can maintain fairly well once classes resume. I’m not sure if it will actually work out that way; I find it pretty hard to keep the blog updated when I’m in a class, so let me just say I have a goal of trying to do that, and we’ll see what happens. Priorities, you know….
I had forgotten about one last plugin that I had already deployed on afewgoodlenses until this evening when I was reading some comments left on my most recent delicious links post by Cooper and Rod. The Get Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies lets you embed code in your sidebars (or elsewhere on your site) that fetches and displays as many comments as you want from your posts. As with many of the great plugins I’ve written about so far, Get Recent Comments provides a comprehensive set of configuration options you can use to tailor the appearance of the comments. Among other things, you can configure the number of comments you want to appear, the maximum number of comments to display from any single post, and the number of characters to show per comment. You can also restrict comments to only those posts from certain categories and display Gravatars for folks that have an account there. You have complete control over the appearance of comments via several templates provided with the plugin that you can change as you wish or just use the defaults. In my implementation in the sidebar to the right of this article, I’ve used the default templates, and selected my favorite setup option — which groups the comments under the post title so that visitors can see the flow of comments on a particular article and get there very easily. This is definitely one of the top plugins in my opinion, especially because of the options it provides.
In the coming days, I’ll pick up up on a a couple of article series that I’ve not finished yet. I developed a number of articles (already posted here) from my research into Oakland Cemetery,and have one more that’s nearly complete and will appear here shortly. I doubt that this next one will be the last one, since my explorations extended out into my neighborhood and took me down several paths into Atlanta’s early history, and I doubt that that I can stop writing about it all any time soon.
I wrote an earlier article on the book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies, which examines the relationship between time and technology, and discusses its effects on modern life, modern society, and culture. I finished the book a long time ago, and many of the author’s ideas still resonate for me. From about twenty notecards I accumulated while reading the book, I plan at least two more articles. There are some areas where I disagree with Menzies’ conclusions that I’d like to explore also, and I’ll be interested in any reactions my assessment of this book generates here. It will be fun to debate what Menzies has to say, since she puts forth some very compelling questions about how technology effects us that I believe should be explored. I also stumbled across a companion book along the same lines, but with a more personal focus, called The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity
I also just finished reading Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos
I’m also planning a series of articles that will contain reflections on my undergraduate history classes and the amazing learning experience that has turned out to be. The series will be called “Excerpts from My Education” — where, at least in part, I’ll use many of the forty or so papers I’ve written for the classes so far as starting points for articles. The first one, possibly two weeks down the road, will cover the class I just finished, Pacific Asia: Culture and History.
As always, thanks for stopping by, thanks for reading … and … stay tuned!
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...
I’m starting up again next week so my time as always willbe spurtish.
it’s looking good around here.
I instituted one of Millo’ themes, which still needs some adjustment so we’ll see.
I am glad to see you writing more often.
Hey, Cooper, thanks.
I checked out the Milo theme on your site, it looks great.
Bye for now….