Nice to be nice

You’ll see on the right hand sidebar of my website, there are two lists of Popular Posts. They’re calculated based on a couple of measures such as the amount of people that read them and the number of comments that are made on them.

I like having them there as I think it helps draw people’s attention to some things I’ve written other than whatever happens to be new on the blog that day and because it’s a measure for me of what people like. Needless to say, I don’t do any of the calculations myself. It’s all worked out automatically by a handy tool called ‘WordPress Popular Posts‘.

I couldn’t get it to work properly for quite a while and posted several questions on a message board for help. The “plugin”, as these things are called, is written by a guy called Hector Cabrera. He wrote it for free and lets people use it for free. He also answered my questions on a message board. And when I still couldn’t work it out, he actually logged into my website, had a root around and fixed it for me.

I asked him what I could do to repay the favour and he replied:

“No problem, my friend. If I can help, why not do it? I could not ask you anything in return since you’re already using my plugin and that’s good enough for me!”

Wow.

I wish more people were like that.

As I read his email, I happened to be listening to a Pugwash song, the lyrics to which I couldn’t help but agree with. And so I am posting this blog entry with no other purpose than to say thank you to Hector (because it’s nice to be nice).