OK, as promised, here is some more info, from Mum & John’s perspective.
This is basically a cut’n'paste job from an e-mail they sent to family and friends (with permission I hasten to add ;>)
“”For those of you ancient enough to Radio 4 be familiar with Alistair Cooke’s “Letter from America” this is likely to seem a pale comparison. Certainly less erudite and not as well crafted – but hopefully it will inform and maybe even amuse, though the political comment will be markedly absent!
This is Carol’s second visit to this amazing country and my first. As we flew in at night the lack of any settlements for hundreds of miles prior to landing in Astana was perplexing. It was hard to comprehend such vast tracts of land without population. Then Astana appears on the Kazakh Steppes resembling a modern Emirate city. Disney could not have bettered it! When Carol was here last she arrived through the back door, via the old capital of Almaty, then a twenty three hour train journey across a hot and dusty terrain. She made the trip for her son (Chris) & daughter in law’s (Irina) marriage. Jokingly she had said as she left to Irina’s father that he was to have a new airport built on her return. He did – and a pretty impressive airport to boot! It is so refreshing to see architecture which is not afraid to be adventurous, particularly in the teeth of such extreme weather conditions. Thankfully on this trip it has been kind to Carol & me, between 21°C & 30°C. The temperature can famously vary between -30°C in the winter to +40°C during the short summer months.
Continue reading “A Little Later Than Intended”
Tags: Alistair Cooke, Almaty, America, Astana, Babushka, Bayterek, Caviar, Chris, ChrisD, Clydach, Eynak, Family, Friends, Genya, Heathrow, Horse, Irina, John, Kazakh, Kazakhstan, Letter From America, Mum, Oleg, Radio 4, Steppe, Swansea, Taxi, The 'Lighter', Uzbekistan, Valery, Wallace & Gromit, Weather
Dec 08 2006
This Week, I Have Been Mainly Using
OK, as promised a long, long time ago, here are all the Plugins & Widgets used on this site. Some links are not directly to the author’s site, as a few domains have expired, or their servers are too flakey to rely on…
About Me – A wonderfully simple, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin widget.
Adhesive – This plugin’s effect will be familiar to forum readers, as it keeps a particular post ‘sticky’ at the top of the page, rather than naturally slipping down the page as newer posts appear.
Akismet – This is wonderful! It has prevented me from having to manually check almost 100 spamming comments so far. There are alternatives, and other approaches, but it has certainly saved me a lot of grunt work…
All Consuming – This is responsible for showing which books I’ve read recently, and which I’m currently reading. I noticed a bug/feature in an earlier release, and the author kindly gave me credit for noticing how to fix the error. This problem has now been solved properly, but it was good to see my thoughts actually helped someone…
Auto-Hyperlink URLs – If I forget to assign a formal hyperlink to an internet address, this plug-in tries to help.
Commenter Spy – not quite as scary as it sounds, just gives me a shortcut to find the approx. geographical location of a commenter’s IP (or more accurately, their ISP).
GetWeather – The 3 weather reports on the right hand side of each page are generated from this plug in.
IM Online – As in I’m online and IM (instant messenger). Shows whether I am connected to the internet with Windows Live Messenger and Skype.
King RSS Widget – WorkInProgress – will edit my post once I’ve used this plugin properly.
King Text Widget – VERY, VERY useful widget. It allows you to basically convert any script or normal plugin into a widget. Currently used extensively on this site, at least until ‘proper’ widgets are found for each purpose.
Manage Me – Makes managing multiple posts/comments a lot easier in the admin area for this blog. (Author’s relevant post used to be found at http://www.stilglog.com/wordpress-plugins/manage-me/ , but site is down, as of 10/04/2009 at least)
No Ping Wait – Currently disabled for trouble-shooting purposes, but this plugin allows me to carry on working immediately after Publishing a blog entry, rather than waiting for a response from each service I ‘ping’ to inform them of a new entry here.
Simple Cache – Prevents identical data from being constantly reloaded. As an example, the weather report for Cheltenham, Swansea & Astana aren’t likely to change every 5 minutes, so this plug in checks the last time the data was retrieved from GetWeather’s servers, and if it was recent, will simply serve the cached data.
VideoPop – This allows me to post videos with a simple pop-up player, rather than requiring people to know too much about file types etc.
WhoLinked – Displays which sites link to this one.
Word Stats – This allows you to easily post (& automatically update) the vital statistics of your blog. It can be downloaded from Google.
Zap_NewWindow – This one makes sure that if a reader clicks on a link in one of your posts, the site will open in a new window, so you don’t lose the reader. There is an annoying pop-over ad at his blog right now – close it, then close the new window/tab to see the real text.
Sidebar Widgets – Without this, none of the widgets mentioned above would work!
The theme currently used on this blog is Ainslie Johnson’s Chameleon 1.1.
Oh, and btw, this post’s title refers to a Fast Show quote, in case it makes no sense to some people…
[EDIT]
OK, having compiled this list, I remembered a couple of things I wanted to try out, so you can now add the following two to your list of things to check out if/when you have a WordPress blog…
Inline Ajax Comments – This means you can check the comments on a post without leaving the main page. Took me a while to trouble shoot the insertion of two simples lines of code. I finally realised that the ‘Show Comments’ text would only actually appear under posts that already had a comment! (Used to be found at http://kashou.net/blog/inline-ajax-comments/ , currently the whole site just appears to bring graphic up)
WordPress Mobile Edition – Trying to view this blog on a PDA or SmartPhone just takes too long (GPRS speeds not being that great in Kazakhstan at least) & results in a difficult page to navigate (even with a good browser like NetFront on a PDA), so I decided to give this plugin a try. It seems to work like a charm, picking up both IE & NetFront on the iPAQ…
[EDIT2]
24/2/07 Update
Do Follow – Allow commenters own sites to get the juice they deserve :>
Search Terms That Led To This PostPostPost – A way of automatically adding content (in my case adverts) after your posts. (Also has a lot of other options available)
WordPress Related Links – I’m still not 100% on whether to keep this one or not. It adds links to related sites at the end of my posts. Will have to monitor sometime, and check it isn’t just earning someone else a lot of money from my drivel :>
Google Sitemaps – I’ve had this installed since the first day this blog existed, but never got round to using it for some reason. As I had to re-create all my article web sites, and so re-submit their site maps, I decided to give this plug in a go.
Cloudy – Finally, a plugin & widget that does what I need, without having to remember to edit some PHP next time I wipe a file accidentally. The word cloud you can now see on the right, in the second column, is the result.
i have been mainly using now (1)
Tags: About Me, Adhesive, Adverts, Akismet, All Consuming, Astana, Auto-Hyperlink, Blog, Chameleon, Cheltenham, Cloudy, Commenter Spy, Comments, Country, DoFollow, GetWeather, Google, Google Sitemaps, GPRS, IM Online, Inline Ajax Comments, internet address, IP address, ISP, King RSS Widget, King Text Widget, Manage Me, Messenger, NetFront, No Ping Wait, PDA, PHP, PIE, Plugins, PostPost, RSS, Simple Cache, Skype, Spam, Swansea, VideoPop, Weather, WhoLinked, Widgets, Word Stats, Wordpress Database Backup, Wordpress Mobile Edition, Wordpress Related Links, Zap New Window
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