Saturday in St Savin – now available to Apple users

Saturday was a typically not very busy day here in the Vienne. In this post I am happy to offer you some photographs of not much happening, which, in an engineering breakthrough, can now be seen by Apple iThing users.….

Last Saturday, after a spot of shopping, and an execrable lunch at the corner bar (sadly the French no longer do crudites the way they should be done), I wandered around the square, which was completely occupied with the St Savin Grand Prix de Boules.  This top-flight sporting occasion was an opportunity for les Amateurs des Boules to wear matching and wholly unflattering tracksuits, and show off their opaque but undoubted skills in this almost wordless sport. Heading back afterwards, I stopped the car off at a junction with an old railway line now used as a randonee track.  It took me to the Gartempe, a bridge I had never seen before, and gorgeous, tranquil little river spot, guarded by an empty wooden fisherman’s hut of the kind that stud the rivers in these parts. The photographs are shown below.

As usual (if you have Flash), the photos are best seen in full screen (press FS in the bottom right hand corner), and in slide show ( press SL).  Titles can be seen by pressing the ‘i’ in the top right corner, and to get back here, press ESC.  If you don’t have Flash, i.e if you are using an Apple iPad/Pod/Phone, or a Nexus 7 tablet, or any Android tablet running 4.1 Jellybean, you can now see them as well.  Just click any of the thumbnails and a full screen slide-show should start.  This will now work for all my previous posts that used Flash, so it you couldn’t see the photographs before, try going back and giving them the once-over!  At the end of the post I cover how I fixed this problem by the way – should you be interested……….

In the last post (this morning!) I mentioned my frustration in getting my photographs visible in systems that did not support Flash. After an executive lunchtime nap I returned to the fray, and found the answer. The plug-in I use, Grand Flash Gallery (or “Flagallery”, IMHO by far the best for showing photographs in-line in the page, and also full-screen), offers a non-Flash backup for Apple users and others, but this has never worked for me.

Like most non-Flash solutions for showing images in WordPress (the platform for this site) Flagallery uses  jQuery, a fast and powerful JavaScript Library.  It seemed likely that a jQuery problem was causing the non-Flash function to fail, but there is a lot of complexity in the themes and plug-ins used in this site (I use over 30 plug-ins for example), and I had no idea where to start looking.  However, a bit of research in the excellent support forum of the theme I use (Weaver II pro – a top-notch bit of code in my view) revealed that many potential problems could be found by examining the source code of my home page using the developer function of Firefox. Doing this I found that one plug-in, “Easy Speak Widget Contact Form” was loading an outdated version of jQuery, and this was conflicting with the Slide-show code.  I removed it and voila!

So now there is no contact form, but nobody used it anyway.  I am free to explore more advanced, Flash-free ways of showing my photographs, and if you use Apple or other non-Flash gear, you can see my photos too.   Jolly good show all round!