A resurgent Liberal

Another widget!

This one puts the party’s campaign buttons on a Wordpress site and gives you the option to change the number of buttons that are displayed.

If you already have widgets installed as part of your Wordpress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:

1. Download the ldbuttons.php.txt file and save it or upload it into your widget plug-ins directory under the name ‘ldbuttons.php’
2. Go into the �Plugins� area of your Wordpress installation and activate the ‘Lib Dem Buttons’ widget.
3. Go into the �Sidebar Widgets� section of the �Presentation� area of Wordpress, and drag your new ‘Lib Dem Buttons’ widget to the desired location.
4. Hit ‘Save Changes’

er� that�s it.

If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.

Iain Dale (born 1962) says that his earliest political memory is the power cuts and 3-day week in 1974.

I was born a bit later (1964) and certainly remember that: it seemed a great hoot - sitting in candlelight in the kitchen at home with my dad. But I have an earlier memory of being taught to use the new decimal coins (1971). Does anyone else remember that we used to refer to ‘new pence’ or ‘new p’ rather than just ‘pence’?

Adam Rickett has the fall of the Berlin Wall as his first memory (bless..). I was living in Austria at the time and, following a call from my old friend Martin Pierce who was flying out from England and had arranged some accomodation with a cousin, rearranged the flights that I was taking to a business meeting in Frankfurt and arrived in Berlin on November 17th (on Pan Am, since Lufthansa wasn’t allowed to fly to Berlin). The wall had opened on 9th November. The Brandenburg Gate was still closed. Somewhere I have a T-shirt in the style of a concert tour T-shirt entitled the “Break the Wall Tour 1989″ listing the dates that all the crossings opened with “Brandenburger Tor” still listed as “????”. I remember going to the British sector and seeing British soldiers handing out cups of tea to the arriving East Germans as they crossed the border and feeling proud at what I thought was a particularly fine introduction to British culture and the west. I remember going for a meal in a rather empty East Berlin and being told that nothing on the menu was available apart from two types of meat and one type of vegetable (and loads of excellent beer). But the main thing I remember is the ‘chink, chink, chink’ sound as everyone joined in bashing down the wall. The piece of Berlin Wall that I personally removed is one of my proudest possessions.

Using my two new bits of kit (a Sony ECM-MS907 Microphone and a Olympus WS-300M digital voice recorder), one old piece of software (Audacity) and one new piece of software (Switch Sound File Conversion Software), I managed to record a couple of podcast recordings for Ming, edit out various train announcements, ticket collectors and refreshment trolleys, convert them to MP3 (via the LAME MP3 encoder) and upload them to Ming’s site.

The original version of the podcast recorded on the train with all the interruptions is very funny: the automatic train announcements demonstrated remarkable comic timing!

Unfortunately it will have to remain unpublished.

However, if anyone has any ideas how to remove the mobile phone pulsing noise that interferes with the second podcast, I would be very grateful!

I’ve uploaded a podcast of Ming’s speech on nuclear energy this morning.

I’ve actually got the entire press conference recorded from beginning to end including journalist questions. Might it be worth starting up a Lib Dem radio podcast that included that kind of content and/or aggregated any Lib Dem podcasts or other audio files around the web?

Comments welcome.

According to the Guardian website, and Wikipedia, and the Lib Dem website, and his own website, and the Hillhead High website, Ming Campbell was educated at a state school - Hillhead High, Glasgow.

According to the Guardian double-page photo spread on June 16 (G2, page 11), he was educated privately in a different city, at George Watson’s College, Edinburgh. This is presumably because the person writing the article confused him with Menzies Campbell, the leading dental historian (1887-1974), not to any partisan political intent.

To their credit, the reader’s editor has written back to say they will be publishing a correction.

Another nifty piece of Javascript for you all…

This one generates the following party campaign buttons shown on the right hand side front page of this site (just below the Lib Dem blogs box):

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showButtons.php"></script>

And when new campaigns are launched nationally, the buttons should update automatically.

Now to widgetise it…