Murray’s Blog

As you may have noticed, this site has gotten a much-needed (interim) face-lift. The old Wulan theme was nice in its simplicity, but it was ultimately broken.

I spend a couple hours this morning browsing through the big ol’ WordPress Theme Viewer to see if I could find something that would serve my purpose, and I’ve got to say I’m amazed at the amount of sloppy work out there! I went through almost 800 themes looking for something that had (a) Clean Design and (b) Complete Functionality.
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I was writing a blog post earlier today and I suddenly found myself wishing that I could enhance my WordPress blog to give a word count in my blog entries. A cursory examination of the available plugins revealed a stark lack of any good plugins. (There were a couple peoples’ blogs where they said “I just wrote this plugin” but there wasn’t even a stupid link to download anything.)

So as a bit of a diversion, I wrote my first formal WordPress plugin to add this functionality. (And if you notice either on my main page or the single-entry view page, there’s a Word Count now showing!)

I even went a bit further and explored “internationalization” and figured out how to nationalize the plugin so it could display that “Word Count” label in French or Spanish. (The two languages I know well enough to translate. Maybe I’ll look up my Russian later.) And being the geek that I am, I’ve got to say it was incredible fun spending a few hours on my weekend to toy around and put this together. I love being a geek!

I’ve setup a static software page for my MTW Word Count Plugin.

I’ve written in the past about the wonders of (free) OTA (Over-the-air) digital television. It’s an oversimplification to call this HDTV, because there are many digital signals that broadcast specifically non-high-def or “standard definition” digital television.

For a quick refresher about the wonders of digital OTA television (also called ATSC) here are some of the neat features:
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