SamadhiMuse

I haven’t posted much this last week or so. It’s been too busy with our business and other things in my life. But, I promise that the site is not dead. There is much left to be done and much will be accomplished as soon as life slows down a bit.

I was thinking tonight in meditation (not suppose to be done but it happens) and I got to wondering why one can’t select multiple categories and then only see the pieces that share that pattern of categories. For example, I might want to see all the poems that involved Rose in Long Beach in 1982.

I not sure if a WordPress plug in exists that will add this capability to a WordPress Blog. If it does, I’m going to find it. If it doesn’t, I may write it. I think a lot of people would find a use for this capability.

A long-ago girlfriend wrote me an E-mail about this site. She was irritated that a Google of her maiden name turned up some of the stuff she’d written me 20 years ago. And she was right. I should have removed all instances of ‘Mary Smith’, for example, and replaced them with ‘Mary S.’ to protect people’s identities. So, I immediately corrected the problem site-wide and apologized for my oversight.

Just worked out how to (1) sort all the poetry listed in ascending order so that folks can read the poetry in the order it was written and (2) sort the posts in the ABOUT THIS SITE category in the normal descending order which makes sense for chronological Blog entries.

The most recent ten items posted will always appear now near the top of the right side column.

New entries to this item, “ABOUT THIS SITE”, will not appear on the list of new postings.

I’ve added a small plug-in into the Blog which causes it to display all posts in Ascending order which is how poetry should be read; from the oldest poem on a subject to the newest one.

This serves well everywhere except in the this “ABOUT THIS SITE” area where I’m Blogging about the site and here I want the posts to read in the normal descending order. I’m still working on that.

There’s a second problem as well. When multiple poems are listed out in Ascending order, the button you click to move to the next (newer) group still says “Previous posts” because it still thinks we’re doing things in descending order. I’m working on that issue as well.

I’ve been reading a lot of my older stuff as I’ve been grinding through it to get the categories right. Phew - some of it is really really bad. I was very self obsessed during a lot of my life and definitely went on pity jags for months at a time.

Please be aware, dear readers, that the fact that I’ve posted all this stuff doesn’t mean I’m deluded that it’s all good, or even palatable. A lot of it is, simply, swill. perhaps, later, I’ll work out a way to establish a path through the forest of work to the pieces here and there among them that I actually consider to be passable.

Over the last two days, I’ve been connecting up categories for the initial 752 poems. The date and people categories were mostly created and linked correctly by the plug-in when it dropped the poems in but the places categories all needed to be tweaked by hand.

I’ve also found out (bummer) that while the initial vertical layout within poems of blocks of text and intervening blanks lines looked fine after the plug-in installed the poems, it doesn’t survive the first edit session.

However, if I readjust the vertical layout during the first edit session, then it seems to remains stable thereafter through subsequent edits.

I’ve also typed in one or two poems in addition to the 752 either because I liked them and they were at hand or because they were over on the samadhisoft.com site and I wanted them to live here on samadhimuse.com.

Once all the categories are correct for the initial block of 752, I will begin to transfer more poems onto the site.

I originally purchased the samadhimuse.com domain name nearly a year ago but I had to wait until I had time to sit down and work my way through how to write a WordPress plug-in. Luckily, I’ve spent most of my professional years in the IT industry so I had the background to be able to do this.

With approximately a thousand poems already entered into computer format, I didn’t want to retype them all in again. The purpose of the plug-in was, then, to convert these many poems from the ASCII format they were in into one which could be dropped directly into WordPress posts and have them cross-referenced and dated appropriately and automatically.

Essentially, as of today this plug-in is functional and I’ve used it to transferred the first 752 poems onto the site. These poems span the period from 1968 to 1989 but do not, by any means, represent all my work from that period.

Many more poems from these years and others await transfer. And, in addition to all those which have been previously copied into computer files, there are many more yet which still exist only on paper and which I need to type in. This project will, as you can imagine, be an undertaking which will span years.