The functionality to delete or deactivate plugins was a much requested feature that was added to the many useful operations that ManageWP can perform for you just a couple of weeks ago, and it really does make this web service indispensable for anybody with more than just a couple of WordPress installations. I was recommending before, but even more so now.

The plugin I wanted to deprecate in my installations was called Viper’s Video QuickTags, very handy in it’s day for embedding youtube videos withing blog posts, but that functionality was added into the core WordPress code several versions ago, which renders the plugin redundant for me.

Plugins and Themes

With ManageWP I could select “plugins and themes” from the sidebar, then chose All Websites, tick plugins, active, and search by keyword: “viper”. That gave me a list of five blogs that still had the old plugin active. I could have deactivated the lot in one fell swoop just like that, but I wanted to make sure all my old posts with videos embedded would still work so, without even leaving the ManageWP dashboard, I went to each affected individual WordPress dashboard in turn, and searched through the posts for the string “[youtube”, that being the way the old plugin recognised source posts needing to have the embed code added. I then removed the shortcodes from each end of the video identifier leaving just the youtube url on one line by itself, which WordPress now interprets as a request to embed video inline. Once the legacy code was removed, I could then deactivate and delete the plugin, leaving me with a nice feeling of having tidied up a longstanding loose end.

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Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP

Many more Kew Gardens photos are amongst my photosets on Flickr such as :

Kew Gardens October 2011

Kew Gardens

Collection of Kew Gardens Photosets

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Kew Gardens

via posterous

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Video: World’s Luckiest Man

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MEP calls for Nuclear Free Europe

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Fukushima nuclear power plant second nuclear reactor explosion – Video

Guardian video of the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami

At 8.8 magnitude on the richter scale, this is the big one.

BBC live coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12709598

A 10 metre high wave has swept ashore flooding buildings and farmlands.

A Tsunami alert is out for the Philipines, Taiwan, Russia and Hawaii.

The major earthquake off Japan’s north-eastern coast has triggered tsunami warnings across the Pacific.

The Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii has widened its original alert to include Hawaii and the rest of the Pacific Ocean.

Alerts were issued as far apart as Australia and New Zealand, Mexico and Central and South America, the Philippines and Taiwan, off the Chinese mainland.

Any tsunami would take several hours to travel across 3,800 miles of ocean from Japan to Hawaii.

The estimated time of arrival was put at around 1pm UK time.

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Earthquake in Japan triggers Tsunami – Video

I don’t really know much about the play “Enlightenment” apart from the slightly worrying description “a mesmeric psychological thriller” and this trailer video here:

I’ll probably come back here and let you know how the play went next week.

Trailer videos for plays are becoming quite the thing, but I wonder how apt it is to make a very filmic piece of media to represent live theatre, which is a very different kind of thing entirely.

Another example is the poster campaign for Deathtrap , another thriller play but also a comedy, which includes showing the outdoor gravedigging scene on camera, when the live stage play takes place entirely indoors in one room.

Deathtrap

Yes, that’s Simon Russel Beale, The current Home Secretary in Spooks, pushing the wheelbarrow with Jonathan Groff in it.

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Enlightenment at Hampstead Theatre and Deathtrap

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Tim Birkhead ‘Wisdom of Birds’ at Do Lectures

It’s not often that a new type of art is invented. These are playful and creative, and certainly make an impact on people in the city.

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Inflatable Street Art

Greater spotted woodpeckers have joined other garden birds as regular feeders at the peanuts such as great tits, sparrows, blue tits, robins and starlings.

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Greater Spotted Woodpecker

Filezilla is a free and open source FTP client software program used for connnecting to a webserver to update websites. Here’s a short tutorial video which deals with downloading, setting up and connecting Filezilla FTP to a website. I describe the twin pane approach, and show you how to download a website file, edit it , test and then re-upload so the new version is live on your website.

This Filezilla video can be watched from right here below as an embedded YouTube video, do try the HD (High Definition) and full screen options:

Or you can download the full original 84Mb video file onto your computer using the free file hosting service at divshare: Download Filezilla FTP Video Tutorial

Filezilla FTP client software is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions.

Good alternative FTP clients apart from Filezilla are Cute FTP for Windows and Mac (small charge) , and on a Mac there are also Fetch and Cyberduck.

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Free FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update Websites

Here’s an amateur  video of a big van bangers race which I think captures some of the excitement and chaos of standing on the bank near the approach to the pits bend.

Another one of a Bangers Destruction Derby

Banger racing is a well regulated contact motorsport.

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Figure of Eight Banger Racing

Flashmobs and unexpected performances in the mainstream

Simulated Flashmobs and unexpected performances are springing up all over the place. You can hardly venture out on a journey through any of London’s main transport hubs without being hijacked by a troupe of dancers, pillowfighters or Musical Theatre performers. The aim of most of these stunts is to generate buzz, particularly through youTube, which if done subtly and with a bit of luck can reach millions of consumers for a fraction the price of mainstream advertising. At least that was the theory, but T-mobile are currently running an expensive campaign on TV which shows full length video from the Liverpool Street Station event last Thursday. With clips of bystanders reactions mixed in with professional dancers emerging from the crowd, it’s very difficult to judge just much of it was precisely staged and how much is genuine spontaneity. I’m not going to embed the actual advertisement itself here, you can find it easily on youtube but here are some genuine punters interviewed after the event:

So now I’ve just been alerted by Hermione on Twitter to a smaller musical video made in Stansted Airport:

This one is for Lastminute.com and asks “When did you last go to the Theatre?” which is a question close to my heart as you may know already. I’m off to see Phantom of The Opera next week.

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Flashmobs Going Mainstream

The sculpture is made of vertical shiny metal rods arranged in a spiral rising from a rotating plinth which gives the impression from a distance of a waterfall or fountain. The video accentuates this by being recorded next to an actual fountain, providing the soundtrack.

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Elche Palm Gardens with Surprising Water Feature Sculpture

“Oh Lord, please don’t let there be shipwrecks,
Let the lighthouse shine out bright and clear.
But if there needs to be an accident at sea,
Please let that ship be wrecked here.

There’s a path all the way from the clifftop
to the rocks and the sea down below
It’s steep and it’s loose and it’s slippery
You gotta mind how you go.

On a moonless night, you need a little light
We don’t want any accidents, you see.

Don’t let there be shipwrecks
Lighthouse shine out bright and clear
If there needs to be a tragedy at sea
then let the cargo be washed ashore here

Oh the living is hard down this way
the soil is all stoney and poor
We don’t have a port, no fish to be caught
There’s just what the tide brings ashore
And the duty free liquor in store.

Next time it happens, don’t let me be late
or allow too much salt water
to infiltrate

Please don’t let there be shipwrecks,
Let the lighthouse shine out bright and clear.
If there needs to be a tragedy at sea,
Let the next one be here.

- Andy Roberts 2003

Update 19/2/07 : free mp3 available to:
listen and download via last.fm

Also available at MySpace and Sellaband

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The Wreckers Prayer

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Snark One

It was quiet, beautiful and the narrowboat created a slight breeze on that very hot day. Amongst other things, we saw two or three Marsh Harriers, which I’m told are quite rare in the Northwest.

The above video clip is an embedded Flash version, as requested but you may also download a high quality quicktime movie (15Mb) or a smaller one (7Mb)

Marsh Harrier photo by Andy Roberts

Technorati Tags: waterways, Lancaster, canal, waterbus, video, “Marsh, Harrier”, Lune, Aquaduct

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Canal cruise

Shifting Sands – song

shifting sands asf”
I want to get this over and done with. It’s just a demo – ok, a way of getting the song down on tape somehow. Ideally there would be images from Whitsunday Island on the video, and some orchestration with perhaps my friend Alex helping out on the vocals but some vital components of the technical apparatus are still missing. Beggars can’t be choosers.

So here’s the photo I took of whitesands bay, and the cessner light aircraft. Whitsunday Island is an uninhabited nature reserve off the coast of Queensland, Au, near the Great Barrier Reef and I had the privilege to camp there for four nights.

Fantastic. Nothing to do with the song though, which is all about setting off to Bilbao, Spain on my own.

Here’s a later video of Shifting Sands by Andy Roberts:

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Shifting Sands

Now with sound

During the half term holiday I finally found the time and inclination to get the Cybercentre’s DV camcorder out of the box, charge it up and read some of the instructions. The upshot of this is that I can now make half decent sized movies which are longer than 16 seconds duration, but much more importantly adding the extra dimension of SOUND. To celebrate this, I planned and directed a short music performance featuring me in the back garden playing a composition on the chinese lute. I was really pleased with the sound quality captured by the built in microphone, but then it took a long time working out how to get the captured video into a format small enough to put online. This would probably have been much easier on Mac with iMovie, but the cybercentre doesn’t have macs and neither do I at home.So the output file which you can download by clicking on the embedded photo here is a 3.6Mb .ASF file using mpeg4 encoding, which should play in Windows Media Player. Please let me know if you can hear it.

The instrument I am playing was purchased in Beijing during a trip I made 4 years ago ( lots of photos on my Yangstse Gorges site ). Known in english simply as “Chinese lute”, they are made in sizes ranging from a huge double bass version right down to a ukulele size. For fun, I made a flash movie based on my lute which has the genuine sound of each string sampled and you can play it by mousing over the drawing of the strings. See above, go on – try it.

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Chinese Lute