top Premiership star sectioned
London, near England - 28 February 2008
Arsenal Football Club were left reeling following another hammer blow to their chances of winning the Premiership. Last night, the French international defender and club captain, William Gallas was sectioned under the mental health act. A spokesman commented: 'This is an unusual step but the action was necessary for the safety of the individual and those around him.'
Investigations reveleaed that William Gallas' mental fragility was long standing and deep rooted. Our intrepid reporter tracked down his parents in Asnières-sur-Seine:
'Mais oui, Willy would often scream and thrash around on the floor if his elder sister played with his favourite blue train engine.'
'But that's not unusual behaviour for a toddler.'
'Certainment mais Willy was 23 years old at the time.'
Gerard Houlier of Olympic Marseille also remembers Gallas' fiery temperament: 'He once head butted the head coach for berating him for a single, misplaced pass in training.'
Jose Mourinho also endured a volatile relationship with Gallas: 'He disliked playing at left-back. We often had to make him sit in the 'naughty corner' until he relented. Gallas never really forgave me for giving away his beloved number 13 shirt to Michael Ballack. This was a punishment for turning up late for pre-season training. The last straw came when he threatened to score an own goal or concede a penalty in a crucial game against Manchester City. The guy is mentally unstable and we feared no-one on their right minds would buy him.'
Fortunately for Chelsea, fellow Frenchman Arsene Wenger miraculously 'had not seen' any of these previous incidents and paid £5 million plus Ashley Cole to secure Gallas' services.
Initially, things went reasonably well for Gallas who thrived on the Arsenal captaincy and quickly established himself as a favourite with Arsenal fans at The Emirates.
Sadly, the wheels started to come off for William Gallas in February 2008. Back at Old Trafford, the scene of the 'death of the immortal 49'ers', Gallas endured a torrid afternoon in a 4-0 FA cup defeat and was tormented for 90 minutes by Wayne Rooney.
Gallas lost control after Nani taunted Arsenal by indulging in a quick demonstration of ball juggling skills. This showboating was brought to a premature end by a swift and full blooded tackle from Flamini and later, by a viscous reprisal, from Gallas himself.
A week later, Gallas was tipped over the edge by a combination of unfortunate events at St Andrews. Following Eduardo's horrific injury, missing a chance to seal a crucial win 3-1 over Birmingham, then being denied a penalty, Gallas finally lost control and his sanity by another controversial refereeing decision when a injury time penalty allowed Birmingham to secure a 2-2 draw and deny Arsenal two vital points.
Gallas, the club captain, left his position and sat down distraught in the opposition half. Psychologists think this may be a cry for help and a regression to the 'naughty corner' punishment. When James McFadden converted the penalty, Gallas launched an unprovoked attack on an advertising hoarding, obstinately remained on the pitch and had to be lured back to the dressing room by Wenger, Pat Rice and two men in white coats.
Gallas' late night arrival at the mental institution triggered the departure of another high profile football star with well publicised problems. Paul Gascoigne, 40 of Gateshead, immediately discharged himself after a brief chat with Gallas: 'God I thought I had problems. I realise I am battling the demons in my head and trying to overcome long standing addictions to drugs, alcohol and false breasts but compared to Willy, I just feel like a fraud even being in here. Let me out now but please, just don't tell him I've nicked his blue Thomas the Tank engine.'
WordPress 2.5 dashboard
The forthcoming release of WordPress 2.5 was one reason I was hesitant to move to Habari.
However, having seen a demo of the revised dashboard in WordPress 2.5, all I can say is I am glad I made the move and didn't wait.
While I am merely an end user (not a UI designer), Michael Heilemann articulates many of my views on the deficiences and usability of the Wordpress dashboard in this detailed analysis.
Michael also dissects the design of the WordPress 'Write Page' screen. The 'Write Page' is probably the most important one for the blog author as that's where he spends most of his time. I agree with Michael - the page is cluttered with unnecessary distractions
Compare the WordPress page with the 'blank canvas' presented by the article editor in Habari.
post mortem on the WordPress to Habari migration
'Those who forget the past are condemned to relive it.'
The migration of this blog from WordPress to Habari is mostly complete.
I had a few unexpected problems with a significant number of comments and a handful of posts that contained mismatched HTML tags and didn't display the corresponding page at all. So I had to painstakingly review every single post with comments and correct the HTML by hand.
Inevitably, I forgot the lesson of my previous migration and didn't give any regular readers advance warning of the impending chaos or any notice of the change in RSS feeds. That's not because I don't care, but rather that I treat this blog as a chance to experiment with the technology.
Worse, I didn't sever the link to Feedburner during the housekeeping so peppered existing readers with duplicate, outdated articles.
So, whether you are a (non-Feedburner) subscriber who is wondering why I have suddenly stopped blogging or an existing reader wondering I am peppering your RSS feed with antiquated articles from yesteryear, I apologise.
If I was embarking on the migration again, I would probably spend a little more time checking the migrated content prior to trimumphantly making the switch. However, when you have more then 750 posts and 1100 comments, that's easier said than done.
A useful tip to speed up the import process is to purge all comment spam in WordPress prior to the import. Similarly, disabling the Habari Pingback plugin also speeds up the import considerably.
Habari does not automatically ping Google of new content but Feedburner has equivalent functionality.
Apart from fixing up a few posts containing locally hosted images, the tedious administration tasks should now be complete so I can start to enjoy the various features of Habari.
One example is the media silo with Flickr integration. On WordPress, I often struggled with the seemingly simple task of inserting a photo into a blog post. Initially, I thought I was just stupid but now I know why - the interface was broken.
Owen Winkler created a screencast demonstrating the features of the Habari media silo with easy management of locally stored images as well as seamless integration into media services (Flickr, Viddler).
now on Habari
I simply couldn't resist the temptation any longer so this blog is now running on Habari because:
- The Habari Administration screens look like they have been designed rather than evolved.
- The WordPress import utility works brilliantly.
- Michael C. Harris created a TinyMCE plugin for Habari - literally minutes after my initial enquiry.
- Most of the required functionality (Google Analytics, Feedburner, Akismet, Sitemap) is available as plugins for Habari.
- Michael Harris also helped me configure rewrite rules so my existing WordPress permalink structure is retained.
- A gentleman called Harry from London developed this attractive Habari theme.