And this is a squirrel in Stanley Park. You may be familiar with squirrels. I, however, am not familiar with squirrels; so they fill me with an unreasonable and insidious amount of glee and delight. I imagine that when they aren’t being cute, they do something bad to irritate everyone; but I’m not sure what that is just yet.

Jellyfish! I used to think I really liked aquariums, but it turns out that really I like looking at jellyfish. One day, I will have a tank of jellyfish of my own to look at. Except not for a very long time. Because jellyfish tanks are crazy expensive, jellyfish need special feeding, and I’m not going to be here forever and it seems like a pain of a thing to get rid of. Also: much easier to hug a cat than a jellyfish.

Nom. Nom nom nom. These cupcakes are awesome and delicious. There’s a cupcake store which is dangerously close to where I’m staying. They have all sorts of cupcakes. And also trays of all sorts of cute little tiny cupcakes.

More noms! This time, deliciousness from Ganache Patisserie. It was boxed up all pretty like, so it seemed like it was worthwhile to make a series of unboxing photos (:

In what can only be described as a total lack of planning; I have nothing resembling a spoon to eat such a delightful thing with. So I ended up barbarically eating it using a coffee stirrer. A coffee stirrer really is a lot better at stirring coffee.

The description of it from the website is…

milk chocolate caramel mousse with hazelnut croquant, raspberry gelée, 75% Tanzanie dark chocolate mousse, praline crunch, chocolate biscuit

I would describe it as being extremely delicious. I forsee returning at some point to try more things.


Have also been along to Roller Derby, and to see Fleet Foxes and Blitzen Trapper perform. There’s a lot of shows on; but also a lot which sold out ages a long time ago. Other shows manage to be on in the wrong city (Nina Nastasia plays in Vancouver two days after I leave; and Colin Meloy is playing tomorrow night in Toronto (and not even sold out. Oh the humanity))

[I collect photos of stamps I acquire when I go to things.]

So yes. That has been what has happened since the last huge update with photos. Pixies have hid the cable for my camera somewhere in my luggage (presumably), but now that I’ve bought a card reader, no doubt it will reappear.

p.s. Flying to Toronto on April 25th.

Would having to enable a handful of plugins be completely irritating? Would it be confusing?

(So you’d have the core-UTW plugin with, say, a simple formatting plugin and the geegaw tag-interface; or perhaps core-UTW with fine grained formatting and a textbox tag-interface (ooh! or one suited to Asian language); or maybe you’d enable some kind of import/export plugin to do that task as you need it, then disable it once complete; or all sorts of things)

So, uh, feedback would be nice (:

• The thing with tags being eaten by the wordpress 2.1 beta by comment-actions ought to be fixed.
• The thing where atom feeds were coming back invalid because of a mix of dc:subject and category tags.
• The thing where bbPress and UTW wouldn’t play nice because UTW had a is_tag function, and bbPress had one too. [If UTW sees that the is_tag function already exists, it isn't declared; and there's a is_utwtag function that bbPress users can use instead. Yeah.]

[Download Here | Forum Here]

• The bug in wordpress 2.1 which caused tags to vanish when a comment was made has been fixed Turns out that if you add a comment, it’s fine; but if you approve one, the tags will still vanish. Hrmpf.
• I’m pretty sure you won’t end up with double-tags in feeds, any more
• I’ve rejigged the way tags are added to feeds
• Tag intersections should be working properly again
• Tags can be added to pages (and will be included in tag cloud counts… displaying on tag pages, though…)
• No more XSS vulnerability with the ajax URL parameter
• There’s an invisible technorati tags format, now! (Handy for using with the automagically include tags on the Options > Tags page)
• Search includes tags [I worry about this bit! let me know if you see anything weird]

I’ve tried it using wordpress versions 2.0.4, 2.0.7 and a 2.1 beta; and it seems to work in all three (:

Attention WordPress 2.1 beta users!

http://082net.com/ says:

Here’s a temporary patch for resetting tags.
Modify ‘ultimate_save_tags()’ function on ‘ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php’ about line 502:
if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return $postID;
if (isset($_POST['not_spam'])) return $postID; // akismet fix
if (isset($_POST["comment"])) return $postID; // moderation.php fix

This seems to work.

[Download here | Forums here]

- Tag feeds are working properly again (: Hopefully.. Depending on the version of wordpress you’re using.. (:
- There are a couple of performance tweaks: There’s a lot less javascript being downloaded most of the time (but with one javascript include for each post if you’re using the magical ajaxy format.. it seems like a worthy compromise!); and if you have a post with no tags, it will be added to the magical cache the first time it’s hit (previously it wasn’t, so there was a tag lookup for each request to a non-tagged page)
- The default category is now being included, if you are using automagic conversion of categories to tags.
- I think that’s it (:

Download here

Apparently, I haven’t done a release of my plugin for a while. I just had a look at a diff between the new version, and the old version, and it’s terrifying trying to figure out what has changed (:

At the moment, I’ve only made a WordPress 2 version. If you need a WordPress 1.5 version, let me know and I’ll make the little changes that it needs.

- You can specify the text to display when there are no tags through the Options > Tags page
- The plugin isn’t requesting option values anywhere near as often (although this is less problematic in WordPress 2.0.1 than it was in WordPress 2.0)
- The plugin does a bunch o’ internal caching which has knocked the number of database queries way down
- I’ve made a couple of changes to streamline new installs (People hosted by Yahoo! had a database permission issue which prevented the automagic updating taking place; along with a couple of other stray issues that people used to ask about (: )
- There’s a lot more type checking/character stripping of user data (side effect of this, is that you can’t have apostrophes or quotes in your tags any more)
- I’ve included some examples for theme-type stuff you might want to do – adding the tags to the title in the header, creating a tag cloud page, a tag archive page (the one that lists the posts for a tag), and an interactive search page (it requires UTW 3. If you don’t have wordpress installed in the root folder, you’ll need to adjust the path to the ajax receiving page.. it’s near the top. You’ll see it)
- You can have embedded tags – if you are using Flock, Ecto, or any other not-wordpress way of adding posts, you can use [tags]comma, list of, tags[/tags] syntax to add tags to a post. [tag]single tag[/tag] can be used within your posts, and will magically turn into tag links when the post is displayed. (You can do this using the wordpress post adding screen too (: ) You do need to enable this on the Options > Tags page.
- There are all sorts of little stray bug fixes here, there and everywhere – Tidy tags works again; ampersands are no longer a problem in feeds; the tag box doesn’t have extra close div tags; and this plugin should no longer conflict with the Static Front Page plugin.

Download here | Support forum here

Beware:
- There are new options which might cause wonky behaviour (mostly just automatically included tags appearing) – go to the Options > Tags page and hit save to make ‘em vanish.

New Features:
- If there are database permission issues that prevent the auto-updater from running, you won’t see error messages all over the place (but if you do a force-reinstall they will display)
- Related posts are sorted by most tags in common, then most recent first (previously it was just most tags in common order)
- Tag urls are now url-encoded (duh.) – this allows using umlats and other such things (at least in the way I tried (; including ü in your tags works, using magical characters directly is a bit bung still)
- Lists of posts can now include the date of the post (uses the %postdate% formatting placeholder, and the default date format)
- UTW_Show functions have changed a little – the first parameter still takes the name of a predefined format; but if you pass in custom formatting information, it will be added to the predefined format.
- The Options > Tags page has a whole bunch of embedded help. Yay help.
- The automatically included links can now be placed either before or after the content. There’s also the option to add text before and after the tags (handy for Tag: labels, wrapping tags in spans or divs and wrapping html lists in <ul> tags)
- I’ve fixed an odd bug with feeds (it worked for me, but didn’t for a couple of people.. it’s just one of those bugs, I guess)
- [Wordpress 2 only] On the write post screen, the tag entry and tag suggestion boxes have been shuffled into the right-hand column and put into magical boxes for shuffling and hiding and whatnot.
- There’s a new template function, UTW_ShowRSSFeedIcon(). It displays an RSS icon on tag pages for the current tag set (if you’re viewing /tags/tag1 it’s a link to the tag1 feed. On /tags/tag1+tag2 it’s a link to the feed with posts tagged both tag1 and tag2).
- The UTW_AddTagToCurrentPost() has an extra parameter – it allows specifying the minimum user level that you need in order to add tags. It defaults to 3.

Things I haven’t forgotten:
- The ability to exclude tags from displaying in tag clouds and on posts
- The gadabe issue with … in tag links
- Cobbling together a non-includey version
- Displaying tag clouds for a subset of tags (For facetish purposes)

If there are things I have forgotten, let me know (: I get forgetful sometimes..

Support Forum | Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9, for WordPress 2.0 | Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9, for WordPress 1.5

It’s important to have tools cleaned and sanitised.

This is the milk, with the culture, rennet and mold. It has already started to coagulate together.

After the culture and rennet have done their thing, the curds are ‘cut’ then allowed to rest; then placed in cheesecloth to drain. This gets rid of most of the whey. Next, the curds get squished for a couple of hours in this jury-rigged cheesepress.

These are the curds once they’ve been pressed, then broken into pieces to be salted before being placed in a mold (It turns out that a 500g yogurt container is pretty much exactly the right size for the amount of cheese produced by two litres of milk).

The next day, the cheese was unmolded. I opted to split this into two shorter rounds – it seems to be a bit easier to handle that way.

Installation
1. Download this file unzip, and place the php file in /wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php in your wordpress folder.
2. Go to the plugins page in the admin system. Click the “Activate” link for this plugin.
3. In your theme, include a call to one (or both!) of the template tags.

Template Tags
There are two functions available for including in templates.
<?php all_latest_istock_images(maximages [, imagesonly]) ?>
If maximages is left blank, then all of the images from the feed will be included.
If imagesonly is true, then the images will display without the descriptions. Each image is wrapped in <div class=”istockimage”> tags, to make it a little easier to use CSS to style the images. If you’re using this parameter, you’ll need to specify maximages.

<?php my_latest_istock_images(userid, maximages [, imagesonly]) ?>
The userid is the numerical user id of the feed to retrieve (In the Control Panel on the iStockphoto site, if you look at the URL given for your RSS feed; this is the number at the end. There is probably an easier way of finding the id, but I’m not sure what it is.)
If maximages is left blank, then all of the images from the feed will be included.
If imagesonly is true, then the images will display without the descriptions. Each image is wrapped in <div class=”istockimage”> tags, to make it a little easier to use CSS to style the images. If you’re using this parameter, you’ll need to specify maximages.

Examples
<?php all_latest_istock_images() ?> displays all of the images (currently 10) from the RSS feed of all recently approved images.

<?php all_latest_istock_images(3) ?> or <?php all_latest_istock_images(3, false) ?> displays the three most recently approved images with their descriptions; from the RSS feed of all recently approved images.

<?php all_latest_istock_images(10,true) ?> displays images only for the ten most recently approved images from the RSS feed of all recently approved images.

<?php my_latest_istock_images("183642") ?> displays all of the images (currently 10) from the RSS feed of my recently approved images (Remember to replace my ID with your ID to display your images instead)

<?php my_latest_istock_images("183642", 3) ?> or <?php my_latest_istock_images("183642", 3, false) ?>displays the three most recently approved images from the RSS feed of my recently approved images (Remember to replace my ID with your ID to display your images instead)

<?php my_latest_istock_images("183642", 10, true) ?> displays images for the ten most recently approved images from the RSS feed of my recently approved images (Remember to replace my ID with your ID to display your images instead)

The Output…
If the descriptions are included:

And for images only:

Lastly..
If you have any questions, leave a comment here and I’ll see how I can help (:
Oh yeah! My iStockphoto portfolio lives here: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&userID=183642. Go buy a million photos, so that one day I might make it to the threshold where I can cash out (;

Installation
1. Copy this file to /wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php in your wordpress folder.
2. Go to the plugins page in the admin system. Click the “Activate” link for this plugin.
3. In your theme, include a call to one (or both!) of the template tags.

Template Tags
There are two functions available for including in templates.
<?php all_latest_istock_images(maximages) ?>
If maximages is left blank, then all of the images from the feed will be included.

<?php my_latest_istock_images(userid, maximages) ?>
The userid is the numerical user id of the feed to retrieve (In the Control Panel on the iStockphoto site, if you look at the URL given for your RSS feed; this is the number at the end. There is probably an easier way of finding the id, but I’m not sure what it is.)
If maximages is left blank, then all of the images from the feed will be included.

Examples
<?php all_latest_istock_images() ?> displays all of the images (currently 10) from the RSS feed of all recently approved images.

<?php all_latest_istock_images(3) ?> displays the three most recently approved images from the RSS feed of all recently approved images.

<?php my_latest_istock_images("183642") ?> displays all of the images (currently 10) from the RSS feed of my recently approved images (Remember to replace my ID with your ID to display your images instead)

<?php my_latest_istock_images("183642", 3) ?> displays the three most recently approved images from the RSS feed of my recently approved images (Remember to replace my ID with your ID to display your images instead)

The Output…

Lastly..
If you have any questions, leave a comment here and I’ll see how I can help (:
Oh yeah! My iStockphoto portfolio lives here: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&userID=183642. Go buy a million photos, so that one day I might make it to the threshold where I can cash out (;