Niponwave

I was on a no-movie-till-prof stance. Save for the Pirates which I revised only weeks ago. But I had to break the break cool, thanks to some must watch movies. It all started with Aisha at Cinemax on Aug 6, an Abhay Deol starrer. Then it was Byomkesh Bakshi at Inox last week. Then Inception at Cinemax. And today watched Peepli Live and Byomkesh Bakshi back to back at Cinemax. Actually today after watching Peepli I could watch either Byomkesh or Expendables. I went for a Byomkesh rewatch.

Having watched all of them, I have been asked by friends which one to watch! Well, as an ardent Sharadindu fan I wish you watched Byomkesh in a theater. It’s most definitely not a great movie, but we need to support the cause of good Bengali movies, so they may get better! So give this a thoughtl! Other movies you can watch later at the comfort of your computer!

If your brain is taxed and can’t take serious stuff, go for Aisha. A cool and funky romantic comedy. Not much brain stuff. Total entertainment. However, if you hate no-brainers please go for Peepli Lives for this is one delightful satire. A very serious and sensitive issue told in the most humorous way!

Oh well last two days were full of Civ 4. My post on BB prompted Chandradeep Mallik to come over to my place and have a dekko at Civilization 4! We found ourselves lost in chalking out the best survival strategies for our civilizations But the combat thing continues to irk me. Guess that applies to anyone who grew up on a staple of AOE, RON and such games which make warring so easy.

Late tonight I installed Windows 7 on the home desktop. It looks über cool! I never went for Vista which is totally like bloatware! Windows 7 utilizes resources efficiently instead of hogging it!

Anyway my fun time is up. Leaving tomorrow night for college.

Whole day spent sleeping and playing Civilization 4. Quite troubled by the game though Wrote all about it on BB (My Civilization IV Predicament). Tropico 3, the other game I installed din’t run as expected what with the low-end integrated Intel graphics. Although Civ 4 has been a letdown, Tropico 3 ain’t gonna be one I’m sure of that. I still have pleasant memories from Tropico, the first game in the series. Getting a graphics card is very much on the cards hence. One of the first things to buy after the MB.

I overslept in the afternoon. It was already 7 when I woke up. Watched Mohunbagan play the final match of a football reality show. I blogged it on BB (blog link). Finished reading the planned topic after that. Need to study a lot more tomorrow. Got return ticket. 5th night.

Study: Not much for the day. Will read GI system from Hutchison’s Clinical Methods.

Weather in Calcutta is heavenly. May hop out a bit in the evening.

Finished reading Alchemist. Had borrowed it from Nass more than a year ago. Ended up reading it finally! Also revised the Pirates. All three parts

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to display meta description and meta keyword tags on the author pages of your Thesis website. Not just Thesis users, this guide is just as good for any WordPress installation (as no Thesis hooks are being used).

Let me give here the code I am using on Bong Buzz, a group blog maintained by me and my friends, to show meta description and meta keywords tags on author pages. More specifically, with this code you can:

1. Show the first 160 characters of the author description (biographical info) as entered in the user profile as the meta description tag.
2.  Show the author nicename (display name) and blog name as the meta keywords.

function authormeta() {
if (is_author ()) {
global $wp_query;
$curauth = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
$desc = substr($curauth->description,0,160);
echo '<meta name="description" content="'. $desc .'" />';
echo '<meta name="keywords" content="'. get_bloginfo('name') .', '. $curauth->user_nicename .'" />';
}
}
add_action('wp_head', 'authormeta');

Code explanation

Assigning the author into the variable $curauth and then using it in certain tags to retrieve and display desired user information. Using the substr PHP function to return only the first 160 characters. 160 because that’s the maximum size of meta description tag allowed by Google; 165 for Yahoo and 200+ for MSN.

Bottomline

Thesis not letting you specify meta description tags for author pages has been a major disappointment with users running multi-author blogs. For any standard group blog written by a handful of talented writers who care about their online identity, having meta description tags for author pages is a must. A recent study put the percentage of adults who google their names at 57% and if your blog is slightly popular, a writer in your blog team will get his/her author page on the first page of Google results when searching with his/her name. Which is all very good. Now the bad part - the snippet of the result looks totally ugly with random words picked up from the page by Google. To get meaningful and decent snippets on search engines, you need well written meta description tags for author pages on your website, be it running Thesis or not.

Warning: Direct copy-pasting of code from this page can give you invalid characters.