Enemy of Entropy
Quotations and WordPress Plugins
I love quotations, an outgrowth of my love for words and the written word in particular. I’ve collected an astonishing number of them over the years, but I never got around to doing much with them. The ones that are already on this site are a very tiny sample.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately collected all the various text files of quotations from my hard drive, wedding out duplicates, and trying to verify or identify sources.1 Since my brain hasn’t exactly been working at a peak level with the whole flu whatsis plus insane pollen levels in Atlanta, this project has been a nice, no-critical-thinking-required time filler.
Since I do intend to import all this stuff to the database for the site, I had to establish a cutoff point for length. You can imagine how something really long would just go weird over there in the sidebar. But what do I do with all the other pieces, the lovely or thought-provoking paragraphs and poems?
I’ve decided to post them here, gradually. Aren’t you lucky? I’ll try to intersperse them with “real” posts and use a fairly standard subject line and tag for them, so those who don’t like that kind of thing can skip them easily.
While I do have citations for most of these passages, I seldom remember where I read them. If it was in a newsletter you put out, or you posted it elsewhere, please understand that I’m not trying to slight you, and that I’m grateful.
BTW – there are some glaring omissions from all of the WordPress quotation plugins I’ve found. For one thing, they don’t support tags or keywords. For another, they don’t have separate fields for authors or sources, so everything has to go in the same field as the text — meaning you can’t sort by author.2
I don’t know nearly enough to modify the plugins, much less write my own. I’m using Random Quotes, and I’ve downloaded several other plugins to try. The one that seems most promising so far would appear to be written in Portugese, unfortunately.3 If you know of a plugin that includes those features, I’d love to hear about it.
1 One of the dangers of the process is that every time I go searching for citations, I find more quotations to add!
2 Found two that have author and source fields!
3 I’m your standard, monolingual American
5 Comments »
whats is the name of the plugin from which u striked ur words .. ?
Like this:
“For another, they don’t have separate fields for authors or sources, so everything has to go in the same field as the text—meaning you can’t sort by author.“
Please let me know !!
Thanks
I’ve got a list of quotes I’ve collected too! I need to get them organized in some way. Thanks for the information about the plugins — once I get my blog relaunched I need to think about using something like this.
I love quotations, too
Every now and then I just refresh your site to see what’ll come up next.
You know you can read them all, right?
I’ve got to integrate the ones that are in the databases for different sites with the new ones! There are 13,064 in the new file, and I’m trying to weed out duplicates and make sure the attributions are correct.
Ankit, do you mean how did I do the strikethrough? That isn’t a plugin, just the HTML tag <strike>