In honour of
Tom's migration from Blosxom to Wordpress (thus joining the rest of us here in the twenty-first century), and in recognition of how I owe him a present and all, I've decided to alleviate his pain.
You see, because Tom's a nutcase, he had
all the dates displayed on his previous Blosxom weblog in the Latin form, using a
Perl program to convert dates to Roman that he developed. Clever and elegant. Pointless, natch, but he seemed to enjoy it. However, the move to Wordpress has broken that, because Wordpress isn't written in Perl, it's written in PHP. So Perl plugins don't work for it.
So, I have taken it upon myself to convert his Perl Roman date converter to a Wordpress PHP plugin. Download the
Wordpress Roman Dates plugin here. Install by dropping into your
wp-content/plugins folder and naming it
romandates.php.
Nota bene primus (since we're doing Latin stuff): this isn't very idiomatic PHP; it's a direct conversion from the (not very idiomatic either) Perl original
Nota bene secundus: this would have been impossible for anyone who wasn't me, because Tom
didn't actually publish the source of his Perl program. But I'm his sysadmin, heh heh heh.
Thank you and installed with pride! Excellentissimum est! And it saves me a lot of time I was contemplating putting into this. As to the point of its glorious pointlessness, I need only point out the point that Cicero made on this point: "Supervacuus est pulcher". Probably. It might have been Cato. Anyway, thank you for describing any of my code as "clever and elegant". At least it's better than the good old days of "LET rabbit=1" and "FOR n=1 to dog STEP cat".
Two things though:
1. I did publish the original source. It is available locally on Aurochs.org, but is probably best accessed through the Unofficial Blosxom User Group version 2 plugin registry under date-roman-v0i1.
2. The original template I had on Aurlog displayed the date in sane Gregorian format when you hovered the mouse over it, using the title attribute of a span tag or something elegant like that. I'm not sure it would be wise to add that to the plugin, thinking about it, but when I merciless hack the template to pieces at some point, I'll try to include that.