Nutsmuggling

I have to share the joy, Adam Betts is using my Plugins List in one of his pages.

For those not familiar with his work, Adam is one of the coolest designers in the the Mac icon/UI scene; to mention a couple of his projects, he’s the father of the Adium duck, and contributed to the layout of a number of fantastic Apps, including the web templates of Delicious Library 2.

Thanks Adam, it’s nice to be featured in your website, albeit peripherally! And thanks to all the users who shared the love for Plugins List. I really must expand it a bit and deliver a 1.0 version, and I will

Davide

The most characteristic feature of the French capital, to untrained Italian eyes, is the magnitude of its boulevards and buildings; almost any building or street is wider or taller than you’d expect. The town looks like it’s been designed for perspectives rather than for simple “stares”; it looks magnificent in its geometry, but a closer inspection reveals an excess of white walls and uniformity, to my liking at least.
An example is the Pantheon. It can only be described as huge and tall, a perfect icon of the Empire’s grandeur. And then? Nothing special, just a colonnade, a dome and three huge, empty marble walls. Marble is nice, but in small quantities; such wastes of plain marble seems to me a symbol of superficiality: “I’ll give everything for a shiny surface, that’s enough for me”.

Huge buildings abound in the city, which is laid down as a neat grid on the map. This urban structure is the result of the radical restoration of the urban structure brought by Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was apparently obsessed by straight lines and uniformity. Of course we Italians shouldn’t be bothered by straight lines, our Romans hated bends and did their best to build cities as grids. But then something happened, called the Middle Age, and some sanity, disguised as chaos, infiltrated into the rigid pattern of Roman towns. So now most Italian art cities feature small alleys, unequal buildings and an overlapping of historical layers that few spots on the world can sport. My eyes, probably accustomed to this variety, are sort of offended by Paris’s clear-cut boulevards and building of equal style and height.
Of course it is exactly this Paris, the Paris of the boulevard, that most tourists love and admire. Still, too much white for my liking, and the pale blue of the roofs gets a bit boring after a while.

Then there are special places. The magnitude of the cities allows the existence of sub-towns within the city. Montmartre is charming, if you manage to avoid the crowds of tourist of the alleys at the top. Saint Germain and the Latin quarter are also very nice, and I like them precisely because of their smallness and for the chaos of their streets and people, which greatly contrasts with the neatness of the main boulevards. Bastille is also a nice area, whose shopping street resembles a bit British and Irish towns.

Then there are some magical spots. The Louvre’s pyramids make a nice contrast ti the massive building:

The view of the Notre Dame cathedral from the Seine is something.

I loved the Orsay, a train station restored in a modern style and turned into a museum, here grandeur is at its finest, and mingles well with history.

The Seine can be seen from behind the massive clock of the former Orsay station:

Here’s a slightly over-saturated view of the Luxembourg Garden:

And of course there are thousands of nice restaurants, where you can eat almost everything that comes to your mind.

My overall impression is that Paris is city that manages to stay beautiful despite the efforts to make it grey and white of its chief urbanists. It is no doubt a place to be seen, although I am not sure I’d like living there. Apart for the restaurants.

Davide

Hello folks,
I have just released Events Manager 1.1.
It’s a minor release, but it contains a couple of important bug fixes, so you are all encouraged to upgrade.

Bug fixes:

• There was a bug which made caused Events Manager to overwrite all loops in the events page; very stupid by my part, but I needed some testing to spot it.
• The events page list was not included between <ul> elements, and thus the Events page didn’t validate. Now all of that has been fixed.

• The default list widget format missed a crucial <li> element at the beginning; again, pages using the widget did not validate. If you haven’t changed the widget default format and are using the list widget, you’d better change the format in the widget options, setting it to:

  <li>#_LINKEDNAME<ul><li>#j #M #y</li><li>#_TOWN</li></ul></li>

• I added some CSS styling to make sure custom style sheet doesn’t interfere with the Google Maps style.

Minor features added:

• I have added four conditional template tags, which allow theme designers to style accurately the events page template. Now you can tweak your template to events pages and plan an alternative layout if no events are available; see the Conditional Template Tags section of the plugin documentation.

• I have added a “no events message” option, to let users customise the message displayed when no events are available.

Important note

A couple of users signalled a weird behaviour. A green background appeared in the place of their maps. I’ll call this the Green Screen of Death^TM. If your Google Map key is correct, you should see the map in the admin section; if so, in all likelihood, there’s a problem with your theme. Open the header.php file, which should contain the <head> section of your template; if you haven’t any header.php file, just find out where the <head> section is. Check if the <head> section contains this:

<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://davidebenini.it/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />

<script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-1008744-3");
    pageTracker._initData();
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

<!-- begin lightbox scripts -->
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://davidebenini.it/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-2/Themes/Brown/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />');
//]]>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://davidebenini.it/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-2/lightbox2/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://davidebenini.it/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-2/lightbox2/scriptaculous.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://davidebenini.it/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-2/lightbox2/lightbox.js"></script>
<!-- end lightbox scripts -->

If the previous line isn’t there, add it before </head>. Now the map should work allright. If this is a theme of yours, you’re done; if not, you would do the theme designer a kind service signalling the problem with an e-mail.

Enjoy,
Davide

Notes

1. “https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
   document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E” [↩]

I have just released Events Manager 1.0, which is now downloadable from the official Wordpress Plugin directory. this means that you’ll be automatically notified whenevr the plugin gets updated, and you’ll be able to automatically update your install in one click.

The 1.0 version actually corresponds to 1.0b5, but since a couple of weeks passed without any bug popping out, and I had to move the code to the official repository, I pushed the plugin out of beta.

If you have’t tried it yet, download Events Manager.