This morning I got up and within no time had a topic for blogging in mind. I set to work writing my brief introduction to the material that I wished to covered when I realized that it would be nice to embed a Google Trends graph into my WordPress Post. It seemed like so trivial to do. After all, Google nicely provided the javascript code to neatly embed it, but it  turned out to be quite a bit of work to discover how to apply it in the context of a WordPress blog.

It wasn’t nearly as easy or convenient as it should be. The WordPress editor appears to not give one the ability to insert just any old HTML and JavaScript into your post – which is inconvenient when one wants to stretch beyond the capabilities of its Visual Editor, but one doesn’t want to fully roll up one’s sleeves and get down to messing directly with the PHP code under the hood.

My first thought was naturally that some plugin had been written that would make this task easy. A customized bit of WordPress shortcode perhaps? Or maybe an editor extension with a popup field editor for receiving JavaScript to embed. But alas I searched through several plugin candidates and didn’t find any of them at all suitable other than one that was a “Lite” version supported for advertising, and I didn’t really wish to embed ads into my post.

By this point, I’d lost the opportunity to get an early start on my blog post, and it was time to get the day going with breakfast for Melinda and me. I made us some oatmeal with cinnamon and brown sugar (for me) and walnuts (for her) with our usual coffee. We then had a short while to get ready for the rest of the day before heading out to have lunch with my mother-in-law and her husband. Then, we returned home and spent over an hour gathering old clothing and unused kitchen appliances for Good Will. Finally, we also cleaned out a ghastly amount of junk and clutter that had been lurking underneath our master bathroom sinks – mostly under mine. It felt good to clear out all the space and put useful things back inside in a nice and organized manner.

Next, we headed out to Good Will, followed by a stop by Whole Foods where we picked up groceries for the week including the stuff necessary to prepare one of our favorite dishes from Alicia Silverstone’s Kind Diet receipe book – Rustic Pasta.

While Melinda was getting the pasta together, I played DJ via Spotify and Airplay and also tried to find some way around my problem of embedding JavaScript inside a WordPress post. I found some code examples for Google Maps and after several false starts through testing out plugins, I decided to get down in the dirt and write a tiny plugin of my own to accomplish exactly what I needed. In the end, writing a plugin to do it was quite, quite simple. I should have done it from the start, but really it shouldn’t have required me to write any code. Just because I can write code, doesn’t mean I should have to when using blog software.

Although my obstacle was now removed, I didn’t have time to write the post as dinner was about ready. We enjoyed our last bottle of wine that we brought back from our trip to France late last year. It was a 2008 Gevrey-Chambertin, and we both found it quite good – especially with our meal. Afterwards, we decided to get ourselves caught up with Downton Abbey.

We watched the Christmas Episode of Downton Abbey that capped season two and then watched the first episode of season three which aired on PBS just last week. I am pleased to say that we found that the writing has improved immensely and returned to its excellent from from season one. The Christmas Episode was quite wonderful in every way and the season three premier left us eagerly waiting for the new season to unfold.

However, we didn’t realize what we getting ourselves into and found ourselves staring at half past midnight when we finished up! Melinda was rather tired and I found myself once again trying to quickly pound out 500 words on this blog. I decided to hold off on what I had intended to write about because I felt that I could more quickly write something more descriptive and stream of thought than trying to write something more thoughtful as I had originally intended.

Fortunately, it will keep for another day!