Don’t know! But I liked [Maggi Dawn's view](http://maggidawn.typepad.com/maggidawn/2007/10/writers-readers.html) on the relationship between writers, readers, conversations and blogs. She reported:
> I’ve read a bit lately that some Emerging Church bloggers (especially of the persuasion) have become disillusioned with blogging on the basis that it is not truly conversational. I am kind of surprised to read this in a way, because I never thought it was. Did you, honestly?

and then concluded that
> If you’re a blogger because you are a writer, you’ll write anyway.

I wouldn’t have said I was a writer, but I think this blog will be more about my need for expression than my need to be read. But we’ll see!

> “Death by powerpoint”

It’s a phrase that’s become a cliche. But we know what it’s like. Long screeds of bullets on a background that’s chosen to be _interesting_, in text that’s a bit too small to be read from where we’re sat near the back.

For many years I’ve tried to find training on how to make PPT-based presentations alive again - whether in work or church. (This isn’t the post to get into the discussion about place of sermons; for now it’s enough to say that as more preachers are using powerpoint to supplement their words, there’s more opportunity to see poor examples of the art.) I first tried to find a course to go on that was more than either a standard presentation course, or a “How to use PPT” course. And failed.

My first real lead was hearing about Cliff Atkinson’s book **[Beyond Bullet Points](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735620520/ref=nosim/librarythin08-20)**. What he said really resonated with what I’d been suspecting - use fewer words, and more pictures. But I wasn’t prepared for his major theme: you need to **tell a story** in each presentation, and to do so with some passion. To do this well, borrow from Hollywood: you need a setting, protagonists, an imbalance, the balance, and the solution. Since reading it I’ve tried to follow his suggestions, though I’ve had rather few presentations to do recently. Were they better as a result? I think so, though I’m not the best judge. But if nothing else I spent more time preparing them, and more time trying to work out what I felt about the topic, not just the facts of the case, in order to find the story.

Mike Workman helped me after a recent sermon by saying that I needed to put “more of myself” and “more passion” into it, which backs up part of this.

The **[Presentation Zen](http://presentationzen.blogs.com/)** blog has also helped me more recently. Garr posts examples of good and bad presentations he’s found, and gives some analysis, plus plugs for good books. The latest one of his recommendations I’ve started reading is **[Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling Powerpoint Presentations](http://www.librarything.com/work/3793272&book=21861009)**. Its more technical and detailed, and isn’t really to do with Powerpoint at all: what he says should apply to any visual medium you’re using. There’s lots of stuff that’s new to me, mostly related to the psychology, such as why a blue background is better for text than a red background. Half is focussed on graphs and other complex graphics, which I guess isn’t relevant for most people. Interesting, but my recommendation is for **Beyond Bullet Points** if you can only read one book. But do read [Garr's post summarising the 8 principles](http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/08/i-spent-the-wee.html) as well.

So why does one creep and the other need support and manual training?

Ideas or suggestions on a virtual postcard (ie, add a comment!) please.

The [ASBO Jesus blog](http://asbojesus.wordpress.com/) has added some great new cartoons recently. Given our debates at PCC about the 6.30 service and its music style, this made me sigh with recognition …

(Via [jonnybaker blog](http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/).)

Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get up and do some recycling and shopping as Sainsbury’s opened. Turned out I wasn’t nearly the first in store, with 20+ cars there before me.

Anyway, en route I heard Jeanette Winterson on [Radio 4's Saturday Live](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/saturdaylive/saturdaylive.shtml) talking about [The Stone Gods](http://www.librarything.com/work.php?book=21869785) (sounds good), by way of obsession with laundry, which she attributed to being a Libra - just like Lady Macbeth. Odd from such an intelligent woman! Particularly as she noticed that no horoscope ever mentions cleaning or the laundry …

I was pleased to find a cardboard recycling point at the Sainsburys there now as well. Means we should almost avoid going to the main ‘tip’ at all. Just embarrassing that despite the plastic bags in the boot to re-use, as usual I forgot to take them into the store.

Another case of the first plugin I tried not working well. This was **Quote Rotator**, and it didn’t display anything, due to some error deep in the script.aculo.us JS it was using. It didn’t look soluble in a few minutes, and then I noticed in the code that it was supposed to change the quote in place every few seconds, which would be too distracting, and it didn’t have a mechanism to turn it off. So time to try a different plugin.

I settled on **Stray Quotes** which has worked nicely. Nothing too clever - just quote per page load. I’ve updated the CSS slightly to make it look nicer. All I have to do now is write a little script to upload the large heap of quotes I’ve collected. Another excuse for some programming

Thought I’d try out the **[Autolink](http://cjbonline.org/plugins/) plugin** for the blog. According to its very brief documentation, it can tell automatically link to movies by adding a \[movie\]…\[/movie\] pair.

Hmph. Can’t get it to work It complains that my Google API Key isn’t valid. I’ve only just got one, so I don’t know what’s going on. I got a Base API key; maybe it needs to be a particular API key I’ll have a look at the code …

So, AutoLink is using the Google SOAP Search API, which is now deprecated. It’s been replaced by the Google [AJAX Search API](http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/). But this appears to specifically stop the programmer from getting at an individual search result easily. You can “clip” things, but that produces HTML fragments that need embedding, which I think would be rather difficult to integrate. At least given my current knowledge of writing WP plugins (which tends to zero).

**’Tis done :-)** I have finished the upload to [LibraryThing](www.librarything.com). Visit our profile, or the view of the books more directly at our catalog. Now the book covers on the right hand side of the blog should show something, as they’re fed by LT as well. Tres nifty!

Argh, but it took a long time to finish off the code, as I was banging my head against this

> Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded

error for several hours. Turns out to be a PHP script limitation, not a cURL POST timeout thing. A quick set_time_limit() call later, and all was well.

So, it seems that lots of people don’t like the *WYSIWYG editor* in WordPress, so I thought I’d have a look at some alternatives:

* [Texy!](http://texy.info/) sounded good, but it failed to activate at line 235, and I couldn’t see any obvious reason why. Maybe it’s not compatible with WP 2.3?
* [Markdown](http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/) is something I’ve wanted to try for a while, and it seemed to install fine. The [syntax page](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) is difficult to read, but I’ll try to use it for a few weeks until it becomes natural.

This is a __first post__ to try out Markdown.

I’m pleased with myself. For a long time I’ve been wanting to get our library of books uploaded onto www.librarything.com, partly because it looks like a good 3rd party service offering that is going to do a better job than I am, and partly because it can show your books as collections of covers.

The downside is that they don’t have an API (programmatic interface) to add lots of books that I can use. They do have an import form where you can add multiple ISBNs in one go, but I haven’t yet got the ISBNs for quite a lot of our books, and for some that I do have the ISBNs don’t turn up in Amazon or their other sources of info.

So I decided to write some PHP to poke the existing “advanced manual add” form with the contents of my book list, held in XML.

Last night I got the POST operation working, after much more effort than I was expecting. Turns out the documentation for the various PHP libraries that deal with HTTP POST operations aren’t as good as I’d like - particularly the PEAR one. In the end I went with cURL, which then took an age to install properly as you have to do odd things with libssl32.dll and libeay32.dll and the windows/system32 directory. Grr. Turns out I needed to have cookie authentication turned on, but otherwise it was fairly straightforward once I figured out the http_build_query function.

Anyway, I’m writing the rest of the code today, so its not yet finished, but the results should be available at our profile - or the view of the books more directly at our catalog (sic).