Excellent - Chris Roberts has written a ESV Bible plugin for WordPress. I’ve had this in mind as a programming project for a while, but I don’t mind someone else getting there first.

For example here’s John 3:16 you can see as a tooltip.

(For Jonathan’s reference: it didn’t seem to work as dynamic creation, but static creation picked it up OK.)

What the world really needs is another blog. With only 175,000 created every day, there is clearly a gap in the market.

Indeed. Still, a quick look at Mark Easton’s new blog, made me subscribe. Here’s how he describes what he’s trying to achieve:

Since 2004 I have been BBC News’ home editor, a title which has some strange consequences. I get sent samples of “premium quality laminate floor-coverings”. I have been asked to review hammer drills. And offer opinions on Italian furniture design.

But my interest and certainly my expertise is not in the world of interiors. In a way, it is quite the reverse. I try to look at Britain from outside, endeavouring to make sense of the dramatic and rapid change affecting the UK by standing well back.
…
What I want to do, (and what this blog is really about), is join some of the dots left by the dozens of stories we report each day. I want to understand our country, to see which direction we are heading in and what challenges lie ahead on our journey.

The one that caught my eye was his commentary on “So have we got our response to child sex abuse in proportion?” Unfortunately he ultimately ducks the question, but he does at least bring out the complexity of the debate.

I almost ignored this post by Tony Morgan, but I’m glad I didn’t:

Make eye contact. Prove you’re talking to me.

Show your personality. Let me see your quirks.

Don’t reveal too much too soon. (That’s awkward.)

Compliment me…but make it sincere.

Be confident.

Ask questions. It proves you’re interested in me.

Create curiosity.

Dare me to try something new.

Don’t yell. Sometimes your whisper is more effective.

Anticipate some rejections, but don’t dwell on them.

Leave me wanting more.

Because of this final line:

(Now apply all of this to your blogging.)

Good advice!

I’m setting up my lovely new Apple MacBook, and one of the good things is the Dashboard. I realised there might be a widget for posting to WordPress blogs, and sure enough there is. This looks heaps easier than opening up pages in Firefox, though it’s not obvoious how I can add tags this way.

Time for a facelift for this blog. (Does that make it a bloglift?) Hope you like the new freicurv theme.

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!

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).

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.

Time to try some blogging.

From a quick look at the always beta blog, it looks like WordPress has lots of opportunity to get creative, and with lots of useful tools. I’ve gone for self-hosting, as my hosting plan allows the necessary PHP and MySQL database.