Recently I've been trying to find examples of good modern Chinese music. It's been a hard search. Most Chinese music appears to be made entirely for the karaoke market. The reason for this is probably one of simple economies - the karaoke market in China is huge. Almost everyone takes part in it, both men and women, young and old. Karaoke centres are vast buildings with hundreds of private rooms where people go to sing on all manner of occasions - with friends, lovers, even on business.
TV is also full of karaoke-style shows. At any moment of the day it is likely that somewhere there is a TV station in China broadcasting amateur singing. It's taken very seriously, with big competitions and major prizes. Often a popular karaoke singer will go on to start a successful pop career. It even goes deep inside the state with CCTV7 broadcasting the unintentionally funny army karaoke show (or at least, that's my interpretation of it).
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This is a biggie so I'll try and not write too much. HeadSpace is now running at version 3.2 and has had a thorough overhaul and feature boost that is designed to push it past other meta-data plugins. This includes:
- Modularization - everything is now a module and can be enabled or disabled and re-ordered. You can decide exactly what meta-data you are interested in and how it should look
- Site modules that affect the whole site and add Google Analytics, Mint, StatCounter, Crazy Egg, and more
- Much better tagging, with a smart auto-suggestion that matches similar words
- New modules for custom 'more tags' and no-index capability
- Mass-editing mode that allows you to edit all your meta-data from one page
- Importers - now you can easily import data from other meta-data plugins directly into HeadSpace. This includes UTW, SEO Title Tags, and All-in-one SEO
Phew!
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I'll admit a certain liking towards end-of-the-world movies. For me there's something irresistible in seeing what happens when everything goes wrong and Bruce Willis doesn't manage to save the day. It was with delight that I watched 28 Days Later, a 2002 movie by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland about a horrible blood-spitting disease that strikes Britain. Maybe it was the bleak London vistas, maybe it was the unrelenting music and in-your-face video, or maybe it was just the fact that it was a great budget movie that packed a big punch.
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It would be easy to assume that everyone on the internet speaks English. The majority of software is produced in English simply for the reason that doing so gives it a larger potential audience (or, maybe more appropriately, gives it access into the American market). However, you shouldn't assume this means everyone reads and writes English at the same level, or that non-native speakers wouldn't want software in their own language. There is a world of speakers outside of English and now is the time to tap into them.
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This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and attempts to show how to produce a translation for an already-prepared theme, plugin, or WordPress itself. Even if you have little PHP or HTML skills you can still contribute to making WordPress a truly international experience by providing localizations for existing themes and plugins.
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Pings and trackbacks are a way for weblogs to communicate with each other and say 'hey, I talked about your site'. They allow you to see how far your site has spread, and exactly who is reading your content. By default, WordPress mixes pings and comments together, clogging up the conversational flow and making it hard to follow what people are saying.
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This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and will show you how to install a WordPress theme. While this is a relatively simple task it is one of fundamental importance to WordPress and is often overlooked. As such it is a potential cause of problems to beginners, and not being able to successfully install themes will prevent you from customising your weblog and taking it beyond the default style.
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This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and will show you how to install a WordPress plugin. While this is a relatively simple task it is one of fundamental importance to WordPress and is often overlooked. As such it is a potential cause of problems to beginners, and not being able to successfully install plugins will prevent you from accessing the very large world of WordPress plugins.
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I've started a series of WordPress guides which I've titled 'Inside WordPress'. My aim with these is to explain different aspects of WordPress from a practical point of view. That is, they will be focussed on showing you how to do things rather than telling you what to do. I've already made a start with several guides explaining some of the more simpler aspects of WordPress, as well as some going a little further. The guides will not always be aimed at beginners and, if there is enough interest, I already have plans to dig deep inside the belly of the beast.
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In a curious turn of events I was recently interviewed by Dane Morgan of Blogstrokes. Dane posed a lot of great questions, resulting in answers such as:
Giraffes… hmmm, I’ll make it orange.
Should you wish to check out the interview then head on over to the interview page.
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