On Sunday afternoon, Lisa and I attended her cousin Emma’s birthday party at Heckmondwike Bowling Club. It was going to be an afternoon of crown green bowling for all her family. We decided to go along as Team Blue by wearing the t-shirts we got from the Hope and Social Garden Party.

I took the bowls that my grandfather left me and it was only when I took them out of the case that I saw the connection. My grandfather was called Harold Schofield so his initials HS are on the bowls. I’d never realised before!

For the record, I was rubbish and Lisa made the semi-final only to be beaten by her Dad.

If you just want to cut to the chase, it’s here:

So what does it do?

TT Shortcodes makes the ttimg shortcode available to you. It consists of a simple pair of opening and closing blocks wrapped around an image URL.

For example:

[ttimg]http://caramboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/blackbirds.jpg[/ttimg]

Produces this:

Whereas adding the attributes crop="t", height="150" and width="500"

[ttimg crop="t" height="150" width="500"]http://caramboo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/blackbirds.jpg[/ttimg]

Produces this:

I’ve also added (as of v0.2) the webshot attribute. You need to install stuff on your server to get this to work so it’s disabled by default. Full details on how to get it working are found in the timthumb.php file.

If you do install the stuff, you can auto-generate cached thumbnails of websites. Like this thumbnail of the BBC site:

[ttimg webshot="1" height="200" width="200"]http://bbc.co.uk[/ttimg]

Pretty neat huh!

The attributes for the ttimg shortcode are the same as the ones used for Tom Thumb except I gave them real names, if you see what I mean.

So:

Tim Thumb

I’ve bundled the latest (secure) version of Tim Thumb with the plugin. I’ve also created a timbthumb-config.php file for customised Tim Thumb use. It’s fully documented in the file.

To install the plugin, all you have to do is unarchive the zip or tar.gz file in your wp-content/plugins directory then make sure your new tt_shortcodes directory has two sub-directories named cache and temp. If they’re missing for whatever reason, simply create them:

mkdir temp cache

You must also make them world writeable:

chmod 777 temp/ cache/

And that’s it, you should be good to go!

If you get something wrong, such as not making the two sub-directories (cache and temp) writeable, providing a broken link, or linking to a non-image file, you’ll see this little guy:

It’s then time to check your installation or post/page.

Examples

Have a look on this page for some funky examples.

Nice.

The plan this evening is to cycle from Leeds City Centre along the canal, past Kirkstall Abbey and on to The Abbey Inn. The ride will only take about 45 mins going up and 30 mins coming back. We plan on eating at The Abbey and having a couple of beers. The Abbey does two meals for a tenner on Friday evenings before 7.00pm.

If anyone would like to join us, feel free to meet us at one of the following places. With a bike, of course.

I will be meeting Lisa here at 5.15pm:

[mappress mapid="5"]

Then we set off along the canal towards Armley, where we’ll be here at 5.30pm:

[mappress mapid="6"]

Before reaching Kirkstall at 5.45pm:

[mappress mapid="7"]

Once we leave Kirkstall, it’s straight to The Abbey Inn here:

[mappress mapid="8"]

Come on, you know you want to :)

This video is a zoom into the majestic disk of stars and dust lanes in the NASA Hubble Space Telescope view of the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which lies 46 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear).

‘I would love to see tax reductions,” David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, “but when you’re borrowing 11% of your GDP, it’s not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn’t.” Oh no? Then how come he’s planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?

If you’ve heard nothing of it, you’re in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d’etat is taking place.

Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn’t in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century. The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can’t be named. Here’s how it works.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to “large and medium companies”: it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects “large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime”. The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.

But that’s not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate “of any major western economy”. By the time this government is done, we’ll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron said: “What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy.” He’s doing just the opposite.

These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business that doesn’t outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments.

So how did this happen? You don’t have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up “to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy” are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays.

I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I’ve just read Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I’m not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world’s tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London in effect dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won’t see a piastre of it.

Reading Treasure Islands, I have realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn’t have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, shielding them from their obligations to society, insulating them from democratic challenge.

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor’s show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don’t declare war on society, you don’t lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot’s website

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This fixes it:

for php 5.3 change the lines

function ace_where(&$where,$filter="")
function ace_join(&$join,$filter="")

to

function ace_where($where,$filter="")
function ace_join($join,$filter="")

in

advanced-category-excluder.php

Original Article

sed has supported apostrophe substitution for many years. Use the \xHH
notation to indicate any hex character. Since the apostrophe is 0×27,
you can do this:

sed ‘s/\x27/\\&/g’ infile >outfile

HTW

Original Posting

If you’ve stumbled across this article in a search, go to the first entry, read that, and then come back here.

Template Editing

In the first article I showed how to set up post reporting using Contact Form 7 and Simple Content Reveal. The method used was to enter shortcode from the two plugins into the WordPress editor. It’s easy enough, but if you were to use post reporting on every article it’d either become tedious or you’d often forget to enter the shortcodes. Also, if each article on a page of articles had the shortcode entries, they’d all have the same reveal ID.

Such as here:

1

[reveal heading="<h4>%image%Report a change in this entry</h4>" id="id2"]

The id="id2" would be replicated on the page several times and the result would be that each click of the reveal text would only open the first instance of id="id2". So what’s required is dynamic id allocation and the way to do that is to edit your templates. Don’t worry though, it’s painless.

Over at my testing site I’m running the default WordPress theme. The WordPress loop is contained in a file called loop.php but I’ve copied that file to a new file called loop-index.php. WordPress will use this file rather than the original and it’s probably safer to work on a copy. If you don’t use TwentyTen, you’ll have to look for the file that contains your loop.

The Code

Here’s the code I’ve entered into the template. The first and last lines are from the template itself, the middle three are my additions. You’ll notice that I’m using do_shortcode() on the middle line, the one that contains the Contact Form details. This is because you can’t enter Contact Form 7 as PHP into your templates so it has to be wrapped in a do_shortcode()

You’ll also notice that in order to aid styling, I’ve wrapped the first [reveal] in a span and given it a class name.

< ?php simple_content_reveal("%image% Report change in information",get_the_ID ()); ?>
< ?php echo do_shortcode('[contact-form-7]'); ?>
< ?php simple_content_reveal(); ?>

The tricky part of the new method is using get_the_ID() to define the id of the [reveal]. What happens is that it picks up the ID of the WordPress post and uses that as the id of the [reveal]. That way each id will be unique and there will be no conflicts with other iterances of [reveal] on the same page.

There’s nothing stopping you adding other [reveal]s on a page or post by using shortcodes in the WordPress editor, you just have to make sure you give each one a new ID.

Widgets

I’ve managed to put all the content reveal/contact stuff into a sidebar widget. I’ve achieved that by using the Widget Logic plugin. This clever little plugin allows you to define where your widget appears, and where it doesn’t. For this purpose, I only want the widget appearing on single pages. If it appeared alongside multiple posts, there’d be no way of telling which entry was being reported. If that makes sense.

I’ve used shortcodes again here buts to use them in widgets, you have to place this entry in your function.php. It lives in your theme folder with all the other files. It’s a simple addition on a new line:

 add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode', 11);

Once you’ve edited functions.php and installed Widget Logic, create a Text Widget in your widgetized area, such as your sidebar. Mine looks like this:

At the bottom of the widget, you’ll see the Widget Logic entry. is_single() will make the widget appear only on single pages.

In order to create a Contact Form 7 in the sidebar I used a new form so that I could define column widths etc. Here’s what the sidebar version looks like, You’ll see that it uses features from the Dynamic Text Extension plugin that we installed in the last article.

In Summary

What I’ve tried to achieve in this and the previous post is a method to implement post reporting in WordPress posts. It strikes me that it could all be bundled into one plugin (Such as the comment reporting plugin) but after a small amount of time, the effect achieved is quite satisfactory.

If you have any questions or want any help. Leave a comment below.