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When I first came back from Peru, I would wake in the middle of the night and not know where I was. I would stare and stare into the darkness of the bedroom and swear that the walls were made of adobe and the doorway to the bathroom was really a stone hallway leading somewhere.

This morning when I woke, I wondered what day it was, and realized that it was two weeks ago today that I rose at 4 am to wonder the ruins of Machu Picchu, the evil mosquito bites on my calves still slightly itchy and healing.

In the misty light of that beautiful early morning, we walked up and down and down and up the steep, stone staircases of this ancient city. For awhile, I wondered by myself in and out of labyrinth like rooms and hallways, and I imagined fabric, gold, silver, tables, chairs, dishes, pottery, people, children, and the thatch roofs now returned to the earth. I wondered what it was like to be a peasant here, to be carving and placing these giant stones, harvesting the grain, weaving the textiles, and shepherding the animals. I imagined the wind and lightning and torrential rain and the demand to donate three months labor each year to the Emperor.

When we returned to the retreat center in Pisac, the place we’d first landed and the place from which we’d depart, from all these impressions and experiences, all I wanted was to read poetry. It seemed the only appropriate thing to do, and I craved it like I do a piece of chocolate at that time of the month. I wondered Pisac looking for a bookstore and could find none. What I most wanted for some curious reason was Pablo Neruda. I settled on a book left abandoned at the retreat center called, The Dogs of Babel, that was strangely satisfying: me, at a loss for words, seeking the words of a dead poet to fill my heart, and finding instead a story of a linguist trying to teach his dog to speak.

Tonight, as the snow falls and the smell of soup and fresh baked bread fills the house, I climb into a hot bath with The Essential Neruda and turn pages randomly until I find, to my surprise, Neruda’s canon on Machu Picchu. Ah! This is what I had craved in Pisac. Pablo Neruda climbing Machu Picchu, writing of love, the lives of long dead peasants, the power of the Urubamba River and storms and lightning, of bloodshed, and these rarefied heights.

The editor of the book carried a selection of translations of Neruda’s throughout his South American travels and even up to the silver stones of Machu Picchu, finally landing in Chile where he conceived the idea with a young Chilean woman to create a new set of translations in honor of Neruda’s 100 year birthday (in 2004).

The quote at the beginning of the book is:

“On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.” — Pablo Neruda

Only a few poems from the Machu Picchu canon are in these selections, and a later book was written about the craft of translation based on this one translator’s experience with the Machu Picchu canon. That will be next on my Amazon wishlist. For now, I’d like to share with a few passages that took my breath away and one full poem. If you’d like Spanish original, let me know. They, of course, should be read in their original Spanish:

From Heights of Machu Picchu: I

“From air to air, like an empty net,
I went wondering between the streets and the
atmosphere, arriving and saying goodbye,
leaving behind in autumn’s advent the coin extended
from the leaves, and between Spring and the what,
that which the greatest love, as within a falling glove,
hands over to us like a large moon.”

Heights of Machu Picchu: VI

And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the atrocious thicket of the lost jungles
up to you, Machu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.

Mother of stone, spume of the condors.

High reef of the human dawn.

Shovel lost in the first sand.

This was the dwelling, this is the place:
here the wide kernels of maize rose up
and fell again like red hail.

Here the gold thread was fleeced off the vicuña
to clothe the love affairs, the tombs, the mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.

Here in the high carnivorous lairs the feet of man
rested at night next to the feet of the eagle,
and at dawn
tread with thunderous feet through the rarefied fog,
and touched the soil and the stones
until they could recognize them at night or in death.

I stare at the clothes and the hands,
the trace of water in the echoing hollow,
the wall worn smooth by the touch of a face
that with my eyes stared at the terrestrial lamps,
that with my hands oiled the vanished
timbers: because everything, clothing, skin, jars,
words, wine, bread,
was gone, fallen to the earth.

And the air came in with orange-blossom fingers
over all those asleep:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
of blue wind, of iron cordillera,
that were like soft hurricanes of footsteps
polishing the lonely boundary of the stone.

From Heights of Machu Picchu: X

“Macchu Picchu, did you place
stone upon stone, and at the base, rags?
Coal above coal, and at the bottom, the teardrop?
Fire into gold, and within it, trembling, the heavy
red raindrop of blood?

“Give me back the slave that you buried!
Shake the hard bread of the wretched poor
out from the ground, show me the servant’s
clothes and his window.
Tell me how he slept when he lived.”

[This poem should be read in its entirety. It is so Neruda – his deep compassion and activism for the poor, and he could feel the lives of the poor that were used to build this “great” civilization.]

This was a very fun site to work on. The Rabbi who lives next door to me wanted a cool site from which to post his Podcast and have it automatically feed to iTunes. Using Blubrry Power Press made the whole process easy and effective. Rabbi Goldfeder liked the album cover of Innervisions, so we used that as our design inspiration. If you’re into lively discussion about all things related to Judaism, subscribe to the podcast!

Amy Brenna of Brenna Workshops needed a quick and easy way to publicize her workshops, allow students to register for a workshop as well as blog about her workshop topics. We used a WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes and modified the header, sidebar and headings. We integrated event registration using EventBrite.com to create a robust registration system that allowed for a variety of payment methods and price tiers.

Event Management

For event management, I just discovered this fabulous looking plugin:

Events Manager by nutsmuggler, netweblogic

Events Manager is a full-featured event management solution for Wordpress. It supports recurring events, venues data, RSVP and maps. Has a sidebar widget and shortcode for an events list, calendars and description, as well as template tags.

Events Manager integrates with Google Maps and provides an RSS feed, to keep your subscribers updated about the events you’re organizing.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/

EventR

EventR is a simple plugin that allows people to sign up for an event. There are no payment options. It simply keeps track of attendees. It provides a shortcode for inserting the registration form on a post or page.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eventr/

Event Registration Plugin by David Flemming

David updated the interface, so I’m excited to see how the current version works. It accepts Paypal payments for event registrations, has an attendee list, a sidebar widget, CSV export, and more.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/event-registration/

EventBrite.com

I have used EventBrite.com which works great, and I’ve pulled their code into posts for ticket sales, registrations, etc. EventBrite provides a lot of management tools and options, along with payment options, including Paypal. I really appreciate all of their features, but I’d ideally like to do this all within a WordPress admin interface — like the wp e-commerce shopping cart but geared toward event registration.

I’m using the Event Calendar 3 plugin combined with Event Brite on Amy Brenna’s Workshop website. This combo works fabulous!

For simple Event display (no registration), these two plugins:

Post Event Plugin

Post Event allows you to define event information (date, location, schedule…) directly in the post edit page. All event information is automatically displayed in the post page (single.php), including Google Maps AND iCal link (integration in your agenda) without any code modification.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-event/

Event Calendar 3

Event Calendar 3 allows you to add an event date to a post and then automatically posts that event in the event category (which you’ve specified in the settings). This plugin works great! You can display events via the standard Category page, and the events display in date order and are removed automatically when the date has passed. It also has a sidebar widget which works great. I’m using it on BrigitteMars.com, GoldHillTown.com, and Amy Brenna Workshops. So, far, it’s the best Event plugin I’ve used for a simple event list, but it does not include RSVP, registration options. It just posts the event description and date.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/event-calendar/

I’ve been following Market Like a Chick’s blog for a few months now, and I enjoy her very thoughtful articles on blogging, WordPress, and marketing.

I am an accidental blogger and don’t have time for thorough and thoughtful articles, but I do like to note useful tips, tricks, plugins, and themes I come across.

Today, I received this feed from Market Like a Chick on “10 Must Have WordPress Plugins.” In terms of “must haves,” I agree with her list as these are plugins that you really need to ensure that your blog is running efficiently and gets ranked with Google.

Please see her list at: http://www.marketlikeachick.com/10-must-have-wordpress-plugins-for-the-non-techy/

I would amend this list by saying that the All in One SEO Pack and XML Sitemaps do make accomodations for canonical URLs (ensuring you don’t get decrimented by Google for duplicate content at a www and non-www address  — e.g. if the site’s pages are indexed as both http://www.mydomain.com and http://mydomain.com). So, I’m not sure if Enforce www. Preference plugin is necessary if you have All in One SEO Pack and XML Sitemaps set up correctly.

Anyway, happy reading. Please see my list of Best WordPress Plugins for more plugin ideas. These plugins are by no means “must haves,” but they will help you with presenting your content just the way you want with greater ease.

I just discovered this great sort post plugin for WordPress that allows you to customize how posts are sorted for each category through a clean admin control panel in the Posts area.

Check it  out at: http://www.reflectionmedia.ro/2008/12/wp-post-sorting-plugin/

I use the Category Posts widget on a lot of sites to show a list of post titles beneath a category name in the sidebar. It automatically displays posts in descending order from the most recent post to the oldest posts. To change this order, you need to edit the cat-posts.php file in the category-posts plugin directory in the plugins directory.

Here’s the line of code to change:

I promised my friends I’d start documenting all my little Wordpress hacks as I went along, so we’d both remember how to do things. Of course, I’ve done this before but had to Google yet again to get the answer, which was outdated for WordPress 2.8.

A lot of people don’t want the RSS Comments Feed and WordPress.org link in their Meta widget. Here’s the default display:

To modify what displays in the default Meta Widget in WordPress, open the default-widget.php (wp-includes directory in the root directory of your WordPress install) and look for the Meta section and highlight and delete the links you don’t want. Be sure to have a copy of the file in case you make a mistake and delete more than you should.

Thanks to Big Foot Marketing for pointing me in the right direction: http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/2007/11/08/editing-a-widget-changing-the-meta-widget-in-wordpress/

I created this website for the former director of the Women’s Wilderness Institute who is now coordinating outdoor travel for women abroad. I used to volunteer with the Women’s Wilderness Institute developing their membership database. When Laura Tyson emailed me about this trip, I was excited to help with the website.

This design was quickly implemented using the Panorama WordPress Theme with some customizations to the colors, graphics, and headings. This site was designed for this particular trip in October 2009 to Peru but may morph into a general outdoor women’s travel site in the future.

I’ve recently been using a wonderful WordPress plugin called “Map Press” that allows you to easily insert a Google Map into your WordPress posts. However, I’ve noticed some mistakes in the maps and nowhere in Google to report them.

It turns out that map mistakes actually need to be reported to the map’s copyright owner. Google just serves up these maps created by Tele Atlas or Navteq.

You can look at the bottom of the map to find the copyright owner and then report the mistake via their websites:

For Tele Atlas: http://www.teleatlas.com/Support/MapFeedback/index.htm

For Navteq: http://mapreporter.navteq.com/dur-web-external/