Month: September 2016

Goodreads widget follow-up

And just a few minutes after my last post, I’ve figured it out: The Goodreads widget wasn’t working, because I had Privacy Badger enabled in my browser. Well, that answers a lot of questions.

And now that I can see what the Jetpack Goodreads widget does, I see that it is likely just a wrapper around the HTML/JS widget that I could have added directly in a code block. I’m going to leave it on the page for now, but I might drop it later.

Sigh. Well, back to that whole iced coffee idea. And lunch. Yeah, lunch sounds good.

WordPress widgets — On This Day and Goodreads

After updating to WordPress 4.6.1 recently, I also updated all my plugins, and decided to spend some time messing around with the site a bit.

First, I found that updating the On This Day plugin broke something; it started showing a PHP error. After looking at the code a bit, I figured out that just changing something in the widget config would fix the problem. If I was more ambitious, I would actually go ahead and see if I could fix the error in the PHP code, and maybe even see if I could get the original author to merge it in. But I don’t have the energy for that right now. We’re in the middle of a late summer heat wave, and I’m not up for PHP debugging right now. Maybe next week.

After messing with that a bit, I noticed that Jetpack had added a Goodreads widget recently. I like the idea of showing what I’m currently reading in the sidebar, so I added and configured it, but couldn’t get it to display anything. This is possibly because I have my Goodreads profile set to private. (Or at least partially private.)

I’d previously messed around with adding a Goodreads widget, using a general-purpose RSS widget, but (for some reason) had never added it to my live site. Looking back at that, I see that there’s a key associated with the RSS feed URL, so that’s probably the issue with the Jetpack widget; it doesn’t have the key (or anyplace to enter it in the widget config). And looking at the RSS widget that I’d experimented with previously, I see that I’d have to expose the key on my site to use that one. So I guess I should leave my “currently reading” list off this site, since I’m not sure what else somebody could do with that key.

Goodreads also has a customizable HTML/JavaScript widget that I could use, and which probably works with private profiles (without exposing the key), but I’m not sure I want to add that right now, since I don’t want to go down the road of starting to add miscellaneous JavaScript widgets all over my home page. (Been there; done that.) So if you want to know what I’m reading, you’ll have to add me as a friend on Goodreads, I guess.

After some spelunking into the Goodreads account settings, I’m a bit confused about all this though. I’m not entirely sure which stuff in Goodreads is public and which is private, and I’m pretty sure the “currently reading” list isn’t private. So I really think this is a rabbit hole I shouldn’t have gone down at all.

The weather app on my phone says it’s 86 degrees out, and feels like 96, so I should really stop messing around on the computer and go get an iced coffee or something.

Opera

I recently finished watching all of the Inspector Morse episodes that are available on Netflix, and that’s gotten me off on an opera kick. On the show, Morse is a big fan of opera in general, and Wagner in particular. I’ve never been that interested in opera, and have generally avoided Wagner, as his work seems a bit intimidating at first. But Morse got me curious.

I decided to start with Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde. I was already somewhat familiar with these two, based on having read P. Craig Russell’s adaptations of them, years ago. (Though, now that I’m looking at his opus list, I only see Parsifal. Weird. I could have sworn he did Tristan und Isolde too.) And (for no particular reason) they sounded less intimidating than some of his other operas.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I initially found copies of them that I could listen to via Amazon Prime Music. That got me started, but the versions I found there didn’t sound that great, so I wanted to actually buy copies of them. That led me down a rabbit whole of searching through Amazon, iTunes, Arkiv Music and various classical/opera web sites to try and figure out which versions of these works to buy. In the end, I settled on buying a $5 performance of Parsifal from iTunes, and a $20 4-CD set of Tristan und Isolde from Amazon. I’m sure there are better versions, but these were affordable and had good reviews.

I’ve been listening to the $5 Parsifal for a couple of days now. I like it a lot, though I don’t know nearly enough about the work to be able to say anything other than “it sounds nice.” The sound quality at some points isn’t great, but I’m not sure if that’s the recording or my crappy earbuds. (I need to listen to it through better headphones or speakers at some point.)

I ripped the Tristan und Isolde CDs last night, but haven’t listened to them yet. The metadata that iTunes pulled in for the CDs is really scattershot, so I want to clean that up, which led me down another rabbit hole, messing around with tools like MusicBrainz Picard and stuff like that. The process of cleaning up the metadata and copying the files over to my Volumio box is going to take a while, so I may not even get around to listening to it until the weekend.

I really need to find video versions of these operas, with subtitles, that I can sit down and watch, so I can actually learn the stories, and get a clue as to what all the yelling (sorry, singing) is about. I couldn’t find any interesting opera material at all on Netflix, though maybe I’m not doing a good job of searching. I found a version of Tristan und Isolde on Amazon Prime Video, but with no subtitles, apparently. And there’s a good bit of opera material on YouTube, though I’m sure some of that is unauthorized.

The Metropolitan Opera has its own streaming service, but it’s not cheap: $15 per month. I can’t imagine watching enough opera to justify that. Medici.tv looks interesting too, but is also expensive ($13/month). So I don’t think I’m going to sign up for either of those. I’ll just stick with what I can get through PBS and other free options for now.

I’m not really sure how long this opera kick is going to last, but I’m finding myself somewhat interested in the new season at the Metropolitan Opera. They’re doing Tristan und Isolde later this month, as their first opera of the season. I’ve never been to an opera, and I’m not getting any younger, so maybe that would be a good thing to try, at least once. On the other hand, sitting still for four hours while people yell (sorry, sing) in German is a lot to ask.