Our first surprise was the glorious Inwood Park.  You’re greeted by huge gently rolling carefully tended grass fields, plenty of well-kept pathways,  and an impressive Hudson river view.

Our first park stroll had an athletic theme.  [Maybe I should have put this article in my training blog]  A very buff, shirtless young man was doing some pull-ups.  The personal trainer in me could not resist making some snotty sotto voce comments to my wife about his form.  Lonnie laughed, and added that I should go and show him how it’s done.  I said, no, I’m not like that, and normally that’s true.  The chest-beating one-upmanship crap is so juvenile.  This may be why people always underestimate my fitness level.  She cajoled me, and finally, I said OK.  He was so young and athletic, why not give him the benefit of having an elder show him how to do it right?  I went over, and out of the corner of my eye, made sure that he was watching.  In street clothes and with no warm-up, I snapped off 6 perfect pullups, well over the bar.  I could have probably done two or three more with a struggle and/or a warm-up, but hey, that wouldn’t have looked as cool, and after all, I was on vacation; why work?  So I smoked him, and it was hard to wipe the smiles off of our faces.  As we walked away with bemused expressions, I could see him getting back up there for more pullups – he had to save face, and wasn’t going to let that old bastard show him up.

We continued our walk into the forest area of the park.  At that point, it was hard to believe that we were in New York, period.  We passed the spot that was purportedly where the initial sale of Manhattan to the Dutch took place for around 60 guilders.  Does this look like New York City?

There are some trails that go far into the lush forest.  Now and then, the bucolic atmosphere may be interrupted by one of the struggling joggers that are so common in New York.  We walked up a long hill, heard birds softly singing, looked up through the branches of very tall trees, and saw… a gigantic suspension bridge.

The athletic tinge of our walk returned when we emerged from the forest and found the gorgeous baseball fields.  Batting practice was underway, completely in Spanish.  Earlier that week I had been kicking myself for missing Stephen Strasburg’s storied triple-A minor league debut in Syracuse, my hometown.  Though I still have a chance of seeing him before he’s kicked up to the majors, he may be gone before we return.  But somehow this scene in the park was poignant in a way that the super-hyped pitcher was not.  The players, who I assumed were most likely Dominican, were set up for batting practice, with a cleverly-designed protective screen in front of the pitcher, who was coaching the younger guys.  Though young, the players were all business, with no joking or horsing around.  The first batter was very skilled, loudly smacking most of the pitches with impressive authority, spraying hard line drives and flyballs all over the field.  The fielders were catching the hits with an easy grace.  The temperature was 90 degrees, but didn’t seem to deter them much, if at all, and I wondered if this scorching heat were similar to that experienced while playing ball in the República Dominicana.

After many hits by the hotshot, the coach called up the next hitter.  This was a younger, somewhat gangly boy, who swung as hard as he could, but was a bit of a flailer.  Instead of throwing regular pitches this time, the coach stood only about 10 feet to the kid’s right, and tossed underhand to the youth, who tried to hit them into the field.  He offered a lot of advice to the batter as he threw, and I kept wondering if the kid would smack a foul ball into the coach’s face.  Then the coach walked up to the batter, stood in front of the kid, held out his open hand like a target, and told the kid to swing at it.  This looked scary, despite the coach’s evident skill.  The boy swung, and pulled back just enough to stop right at the coach’s hand, and did that several more times.  Maybe this was the lesson in accuracy and control.

Then the coach had the batter get into a batting stance.  Slowly and patiently, the coach moved the boy’s hands very slightly to change the bat angle, adjusted his shoulders an inch or two, tipped his head just a fraction left and up, and had him change his leg posture ever so slightly, gesturing to illustrate each point, and all the while giving verbal instructions to the boy, who nodded as he absorbed the coach’s instructions.  Every kid should have a wise, patient, and skilled mentor like this coach in their life, I thought.

As the heat mounted further, we decided to move on.  While we walked away from the batting area, I happened to glance to my left, and suddenly realized a foul ball was heading right for us.  I jumped to catch the ball, managing to deflect it before it hit Lonnie.  Feeling lucky, we reflected on the beauty we had found in this park, natural and otherwise, as we left the park and headed into the city heat.

I have about a dozen plugins that I use a whole lot.  But once in awhile you find one that really rises to the top.

Every so often, I am asked by a client to set something up for display of tabular data.  I tend to cringe when this happens; as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, having a non-technical person edit their site content, while terrific in theory, can be tricky in practice, especially when rows and columns are needed.  Clients are often disappointed and upset when it’s a lot harder than using their word processor, and ends up looking like being a mess that requires a geek to fix.

As a CSS geek, I’m not overly fond of HTML tables.  With some of the more militant CSS mavens, table avoidance is almost a religious dictum.  But when displaying spreadsheet-like data, even I will admit that it’s often the most expedient tool, as long as it doesn’t involve stupid things like multiple nested tables.  So with text editors so problematic, I’m always looking for alternatives.  I’ve found a few, and they’ve been disappointing.

But then I just found WP-Table Reloaded.  It just worked.  And worked.  The interface makes it so easy to set up columns and rows.  Cool.  The interface walks you right through it with almost no thinking needed, and no code to write!  It sets up your grid in seconds, and then you just enter your data.  I had a test table set up in about 2 minutes, and stuck it in a WordPress post.  Great… but then I looked at the page I’d made, and it was even better!  The table was already set up to sort on any column, search the table, automatic paging, automatic headings, and even pretty decent non-table-ish default styling!?!  Whoa!!!!!  Try doing all that with a WYSIWYG editor!

But wait, there’s Even More… I went back into the admin part, and found that there were loads of other things I could do to my table, such as adding more rows or columns, titles, footer, re-sort the data, merge cells….  oh, and let’s not forget (what, you say there’s more??) that you can import CSV data (and export!), so I fired up a spreadsheet, did a “Save As” into CSV format, went back into WordPress, imported it, and voila, the whole thing was in WordPress, looking way sexier than it did in lame old [insert your favorite spreadsheet name here].  And if you’re able to write a pinch of CSS, you can get even fancier with the look of your data, but you may not need to – it looks that nice already.  Here’s an example of a chart I made with it, for which I used the very simplest settings.

And one final piece of excellence:  the plugin can be set so that you don’t have to be an full admin to use it!  Why does this matter?  If you’re the admin of a site, you may have other people contributing content, such as authors.  Most plugin authors consider their job done when their plugin is working.  That’s fine, but if the plugin can only be used by the full admin (this is, I believe, the plugin default), then other contributors to the site cannot use it.  Yes, you could change that author into a full admin, but that’s very risky – they could easily mess up your whole site when they have access to everything, even inadvertently.  With the settings of WP-Table Reloaded, you can set it up so that the author user can enter tables (if you want that), but cannot play with the full admin features of the site!  Plugin user permissions are an afterthought to most plugin authors, for whatever reason – maybe it’s just boring to code that part or something.

Tobias Bäthge is the author of the plugin.  He’s a very friendly guy, and I figure his IQ must be off the charts!  He’s simply awesome, and even though his plugin is free, I decided to donate a few bucks to him – stuff of this quality more than deserves some support.  There is so much good free software for WordPress.  I’ve taken advantage of a lot of it, so I’ve been donating when I’ve been able, and also spend quite a bit of time answering questions on the WordPress support forum.

Bravo Tobias, and thanks!

Feature	MODx	Wordpress	Winner
Blogging	very simple blog using Ditto, limited functionality	State-of-the-art, built-in comments, archives, categories, tagging, and much more	WP
Templating	Extremely strong and flexible - almost infinite, MODx beats any system I've used in this.	very flexible, somewhat more work due to need to accommodate bloggish structure	MODx for speed of building, but WP has edge in tons of free themes!
Custom fields in content	the TV (template variable) makes this incredibly flexible, almost any type of content can be stuck anywhere.	Custom fields available. Some php coding required. Widgets can sometimes be used for this.	MODx
Editing	Tiny, FCK, others available	Tiny, FCK, others available. This implementation is prettier, and more plugins available.
Plugin variety and quantity	very good	enormous, many many developers, pre-built stuff for almost anything.	WP
Permissions	good, using document groups and more by using ManagerManager plugin	very good, very granular if using plugins. Caveat that many plugins are only available to super admin.	WP
Document structure	uses flexible folders paradigm	Pages used for static pages that go in menu, Posts for bloggish "latest news" content
Updating system	pretty easy, download/upload	extremely easy: now WP itself, themes, and plugins all updateable and searchable through admin!	WP, with caveat that plugins are a bit more sensitive to WP upgrades
Photo handling	Maxigallery is very flexible, some work to set up and more to template.	many plugins from super easy Auto Thickbox plugin to enormous NextGen gallery.	WP
Multimedia handling	some plugins available, some work to set up	many plugins for audio, video, etc.	WP
Ecommerce	some plugins, can set up manually with Ditto for small site, Foxy Cart for more functionality	various plugins, nothing bulletproof. WP-Ecommerce has a lot of features.
SEO	can be done with TV's per page	good plugins available	WP
Security	updates usually available pretty quickly if problem found.	issues updates fast, but WP is much more popular, so it's a much bigger target.	MODx
Content management	extremely flexible	can be used as CMS, somewhat limited due to bloggish structure	MODx
Moving sites	very easy	somewhat less easy due to fewer relative file paths	MODx

But right now I’m listening to his own Paging Audrey, which is just a beautiful tune, with gorgeous chord changes, melodies, and atmosphere.  And it doesn’t end there – Upside Looking Down and Darkling Down are both outstanding pieces (could the word “Down” be a key element in his success?  Countdown to Ecstasy and all that?  But that’s just a conspiracy theory, and far be it from me).  The writing is of the highest standard, the lyrics are just as cynically clever as always, guitar solos are succinct and funky with no excess baggage, and the most pleasant surprise is that his voice really sounds good on the studio cuts, and is very appropriate for the feel of the tunes.

In my “ad hominem attack on Walter” phase, not only had I been focusing on the things I didn’t like, but was also comparing him, largely unfairly, to his partner Donald Fagen, whose talents are especially abundant.  Fagen has the distinction of scarcely ever putting a foot wrong on record.  With Donald singing, playing, and writing so well, it would be hard for anyone not to suffer by comparison.   I had even wondered if he were the brains behind the operation.

Having given a good listen to Walter’s own excellent material, it’s clear that I was overly critical, and worst of all, I was fairly snotty about it.  Why not give Walter’s recent album, Circus Money, a listen – you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was, especially if you’re a big fan of Steely Dan.  (OK, the cover art is a bit creepy)  It reminds me why I like to binge on Steely Dan music on occasions when I’m visiting Hyde Park, NY, right near Bard College, where Donald and Walter went to school.

Sometimes it’s very good to be wrong, when you find out that things are much better than you thought they were. So Walter, I apologize for my negative remarks, and I hope that you continue to produce such high quality music, whether on your own, with Donald, or with others.   You rule, Maestro!

WordPress has been the premier open source tool for blogging for quite some time now, and people are also discovering that it can be used for other types of sites.  The developers (and plugin authors) have done a superb job adding features and making the system easy to use.  While this has allowed people with moderate computer skills to use it, an inevitable byproduct of such popularity is emerging: a lot of people cannot figure out various parts of the system, and they are having trouble getting technical support, even though there is a nice free support forum where people can join for free and ask questions.

You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that I like WordPress.  The number of sites I’ve made with it is well into the dozens.  Because I like WP (WordPress) so much, when I have time, I go to the forum and answer people’s questions to give a little bit back.  But it seems that the number of people needing help may be outstripping the number of volunteers who can answer them.  Because I’m not being paid to do it, frankly, I am selective in what type of question I will answer.  If someone doesn’t make an effort to clearly describe their problem, pass.  If they have a rude or annoying tone, same thing.  If the problem doesn’t sound fun to work on, or at least interesting, no go.  And of course, there are many questions that I can’t answer, even with quite a bit of experience.  It’s a big, complex system, and there are many, many plugins that are not part of the core software.  In spite of all that, the hardcore gurus on the WP forum do a superb job.

I ran into one funny type of grievance last week.  The person had an interesting question, and said that they had been able to do fancy tag styling with another system, and how could they do that with WP?  I answered with a suggestion that did not produce the identical result, but gave them some of what the other system did, and with a bit of extra CSS work, could end up with the same visual appearance as the other system.   Her response was along the lines of “well, thanks, but I just can’t believe that WP can’t automatically do the same thing as System X…”, and went on to describe how angry she was about it, and how bad WP must be.  I just shrugged and wanted to say, “then why not go back to System X”, but instead, I voted with my feet.  I’m offering free support – why spend any more time with someone who is ungrateful, angry, and won’t ever be satisfied anyway?

It’s kind of sad now – as newcomers flock to WP, I see some forum questions that are so basic that they sound forlorn: “My site just crashed.  What do I do now?”

While making the rounds trying out a variety of content management systems, I keep running into a particular personality type:  someone for whom a particular system has essentially become their mother, so System X has become the paradigm that everything is judged against, and as such, any other system will automatically be found lacking.  Kind of like the iPhone fanboys.  Just typical group dynamics.  There are so many systems available, paid or free, and there’s probably something out there for almost anybody who wants to build a site.  WordPress does tick a lot of boxes for me, yet it isn’t the only system I use.  Different jobs may require different tools.

For a newbie, WordPress will work very well for someone of this description:

• They like WP’s bloggish format, structure, and flow.
• They have good basic computer skills.  They want to write articles, and can do basic word-processor-style editing, know how to save files, how to use menus, how to install things, etc.  They don’t mind sticking to the basics when editing something:  headings, paragraphs, some formatting (such as bolding), and maybe adding some photos.
• They can find a WP theme design that looks good to them.

A newbie to WP will probably not enjoy it if:

• They like to do a lot of customizing, and want to make significant changes to WP’s typical structure, but lack the skills or desire to write at least some code and possibly deal with things like functions and the API.  I actually have a friend who is extremely adept at web development, yet even he finds that the prospect of editing PHP code keeps him away from using WP.  Many newbies find this out way too late.
• They want to produce complex multimedia content. A simple WYSIWYG editor is no good for this. Some plugins may make this easier, but the forums are littered with questions from beginner users baffled by trying to handle video, fancy photo galleries, audio, etc., often not even able to handle simple installation of plugins or things like file uploading.  Also, the web is not Microsoft Word, nor is it Adobe Acrobat.  People get upset when they find that their content online doesn’t look exactly like their document, and also are puzzled why people wouldn’t want to download their 4 megabyte PDF that contains all their sales literature.  I would argue that no Content Management application will ameliorate a lack of basic knowledge in web technologies.
• They’re not self-sufficient.  Thought there is sometimes good help out there, using open-source software generally requires a user to be resourceful.
• The commonality in the items above is that they all require advanced skills, and though newbies often want to accomplish these things themselves, they will really need to hire a professional to pull it off.  I suppose the main factor here is cheapness – it costs money to get professional help.

Bottom line:  WordPress is great out-of-the-box for the user with regular needs, yet it will reward the very advanced user with endless customization possibilities.