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Thisis a use of the “blockquote” function which can be found on a button in the WordPress editing window. If you can’t find it on the “visual” tab – it sometimes disappears when certain plugins are installed – it will still be visible via the “HTML” editing tab.

In the United States, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatregoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found an increasing number of ways to be entertained. A handful of circuses regularly toured the country; dime museums appealed to the curious; amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured “cleaner” presentations of variety entertainment; and saloons, music halls and burlesque houses catered to those with a taste for the risqué. In the 1840s, minstrel shows, another type of variety performance, and “the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture,” grew to enormous popularity and formed what Nick Tosches called “the heart of 19th-century show business.”^[5] Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while “Wild West” shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America’s growing urban hubs.

In the early 1880s, impresario Tony Pastor, a circus ringmaster turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature “polite” variety programs in several of his New York City theatres. The usual date given for the “birth” of vaudeville is October 24, 1881, when Pastor famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed “clean” vaudeville in New York City. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor’s experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.



B.F. Keith took the next step, starting in Boston, where he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the United States and Canada. Later, E.F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, managed the chain to its greatest success. Circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudeville’s greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses thata cha remedied the chaos of the single-theatre booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years.

Albee also gave national prominence to vaudeville’s trumpeting “polite” entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos (e.g., those that used words such as “hell”) were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week’s remaining performances or were canceled altogether. In spite of such threats, performers routinely flouted this censorship, often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered.

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There are a ton of free stock photography out on the internet. A lot of them suck. Either because they don’t have really decent photos on them, because they’re hard to navigate, just a sham to get you to sign up for some premium photo service, or any number of other issues to frustrate the user. Heres a list of 5 that I use and recommend.  They are all worth the few minutes it takes to sign up for an account.

First off, there is some confusion between the terms “free” and “Royalty Free”. So, to clear things up, “Royalty Free” photos are photos that you don’t need to pay the photographer a royalty (or licensing fee) each time you use the image in a project.

In other words, you may pay once for an image, but you can use it repeatedly – if you want free to acquire and royalty-free you need to look elsewhere. And don’t forget United States government websites – which, because they belong to the public, aren’t protected as intellectual property.  For more image resources, check out the “Images” category on this site.

Our thanks to WickedMoo – whose wonderful banner is reproduced below:

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• Randa’s 10 favorite free fonts
• The Ultimate Premium Theme (I’m not telling – and it’s a complicated answer, anyway)
• If you need some inspiration – check out Randa’s portfolio

RandaClay.com

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• MiniPosts and
• Irrepressible Fragment (about which I hope to be posting shortly)
• BiblioPress

It’s also worth mentioning that the PiePalace blog is worth reading for its own sake – recent coverage of Canada’s national discussion/debate on torture has been quite informative. But – onto Time Release. If you’re not able to post daily – but are occasionally able to write more than one post – you can check “queue for Time Release” in this box, which will appear in your post editing window:

We’ll assume for present purposes that you’ve set Time Release to release a post every day from the queue. If you post on Monday, Time Release does nothing. If, on Tuesday, you fail to post, Time Release will publish the first post in the queue, using as zero-hour the time of day at which it was installed. That is – if you want a new post every day at 8:00 A.M., make sure your WordPress installation knows the correct local time ( that’s in Settings | General in WP 2.9.1), and install the plugin at that time of day. The publication day will be the day it’s actually posted.

Time Release will let you appear more organized and consistent – but (current version, at least) doesn’t let you specify more than one post per day. Still, if you’re busy, this can keep your blog rolling more smoothly. While I’d like more control, I think I’d like – even more – to set the “put in queue” box checked as default, so every post after the first one each day gets queued. I do tend to post in clusters – so that would even things out. However, it’s easy to drag-and-drop the checkbox to the upper-right-hand portion of the screen, so it’s harder to miss or forget.

Time Release – downloadable at the WordPress Plugin Repository.

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A few things that made it worth mentioning in a post, before I’d used it at length. Debrief Notebook has a rare “about” page. Short, and the main paragraph, explaining the software intended uses, is exceptionally well-written, clear, and amazingly concise. I have a friued, a broadcast journalist of some note, for whom I’m developing a website, but which is not ready to premiere. Stay tuned. My friend can take the most complicated political reporting and compress it, intelligently into a very few words, like Hemingway’s famous six-word novel:

“Baby Shoes, For Sale. Never Used.”

Debrief Notebook‘s “About Page” has this:

The concept behind Idealign software is to make it easy to capture thoughts and ideas, with fast recall in different contexts. Once captured, recall is often only a click or two away. These contexts are based on real life experiences and situations. The Debrief note software is small, fast, responsive, and well behaved. Debrief Note Book “About Page.”

Which is followed by an exceptionally short, exceptionally funny graf. Go there to read it – - it for yourself. No spoilers here.

My reasoning was, if they were clever enough to do this – and detail-oriented enough to put this much care in their “About” page – they were smart enough to create a usable piece of software. Not  – especially in the area of – what do we call it? PIM? Personal knowledge o content management (CMS) system?

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Remarkablogger has a post and thread about the respective virtues of the Thesis Theme and the new Headway Theme. If you’re considering using either theme system, read Meet Headway: The Next Evolution in WordPress Themes, and make sure to read the discussion in the comments.

Also:  John Haydon switched from Thesis to Headway, and that’s a post worth reading.

One aspect of Thesis is, to my mind, beyond debate. Brilliant designers use it do brilliant work, and swear by it. An excellent example: Lisa Firke (HitThoseKeys and the Wild Keys blog, Lisa’s portfolio here). If that doesn’t persuade you, here’s the Thesis Gallery Showcase.

There’s no question that Thesis is a powerful tool in the hands of skilled designers. One question on the table is – what are the better choices of WordPress systems/tools given user skills and learning abilities?

I’d like to make several points and disclosures:

• I’m a paid-up, true-believer Thesis user; but certain of its capabilities depend on coding skills that I don’t have; that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been able to do more with Thesis than with other themes, paid and not – but my limitations become limitations on the use of the theme; I’ve also paid for Ian Stewart’s work and Justin Tadlock’s. I’ve started (and manage) more than a dozen sites on the WordPress platform, and all of them are works in progress – I haven’t gotten any of them exactly where I want them  – in part because I have very limited (read = zero) graphic design/photography skills.
• I think this might be a more interesting conversation if it were a comparison between Thesis, Headway, and the work of two other developers:

Ian Stewart’s Thematic system: the Thematic base (or “parent”) is free, and the various “child” themes – built by a growing number of designers, range from free to perhaps $30 – making the cost of experimentation lower. (Gallery of “child” themes here; Stewart’s outstanding WordPress blog, WPAZO, is not to be missed.

What we’re talking about here are WordPress systems – which is why it doesn’t make sense to compare them to, for instance, the work of Brian Gardner, whose brilliant themes are more or less out-of-the-box – there are many variations – but the range of customizability is limited.

In Part II – more about Ian Stewart’s Thematic system – and the work of Justin Tadlock – the Hybrid WordPress Theme Framework..

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We’re big fans of  the Thesis Theme – (which is in evidence at my primary site, Popular Logistics) and of Pixelita Design as well, a Texas-based design firm that’s done some brilliant work. They’re sufficiently prolific that, in addition to their primary site, they’ve got these blogs:

• Pixelita Design Blog
• Themes by Pixelita

In addition to design, they also offer hosting, and build some high-function – as well as beautiful – sites. Their identity work, in particular, is outstanding.

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