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 col­lect­ing all the var­i­ous text files of quo­ta­tions from my hard dri­ve, weed­ing out dupli­cates, and try­ing to ver­i­fy or iden­ti­fy sources.¹One of the dan­gers of the process is that every time I go search­ing for cita­tions, I find more quo­ta­tions to add! 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.²Found two that have author and source fields!

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 Por­tuguese, unfor­tu­nate­ly.³I’m your stan­dard, mono­lin­gual Amer­i­can If you know of a plu­g­in that includes those fea­tures, I’d love to hear about it.