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Cross-posted on Bong Buzz

It is a matter of great shame that in the recent few weeks there has been several attacks on doctors on duty in government hospitals all over the state. In most of these cases, the junior doctors had to bear the brunt of mob fury save for a few instances where the most senior and respected professors too were not unscathed.

I am apalled, to say the least, at the irresponsibility of the media! They are ever ready to cook up sensational stories of negligence and always blaming the doctors for whatever goes wrong in the government hospitals. Is it because doctors are easy targets? The tone of the media suggests that it is alright to beat up doctors, as if it is hardly an issue! As if they need to be reminded that it is never a solution and that law exists in the country. There’s no mention of the complete police inaction, hardly it goes in print that the perpetrators of crime are never brought to book (or even if the police does arrest someone, they never frame a strong case). Lack of police action after the crime has only encouraged this dangerous trend. The police inaction can often be attributed to political pressure from local leaders to protect their supporters.

Largely owing to this permissive attitude of the political system, police inaction and a media selling sensational stories, abusing doctors seems to have become a trend and it has assumed dangerous proportions! This is getting chronic! Outsiders are getting inside the hospital premises, abusing doctors with the filthiest of languages, assaulting them & damaging government property.

There has been so many incidents of mob fury in hospitals in the recent weeks that one can easily lose count. Last Saturday, the doctor on duty and an attendant were severely beaten up at SSKM after a motorcyclist with a critical head injury succumbed to death. Only yesterday another episode of mob fury unfolded at CNMC. Some relatives of a woman stormed into the labour room to inquire about the gender of the baby. As the doctor on duty was busy with other patients, he asked the relatives to wait who lost patience and manhandled the doctor! They also tried to ransack the labour room. Few weeks ago, in NBMC one of our beloved professors was beaten up by hooligans, supposedly the relatives of an expired newborn. One of the clinicians we always look up to, Sir was left with a haematoma under his right eye!

I am about to become an intern (junior doctor) in a few months and I can only wonder. Ruffians beating up doctors in hospital premises and yet no police action! Which century are we living in? What country is this? Unless there is this minimum security to ward off outsiders, how can doctors work in govt hospitals?

Please also listen to this podcast on Bong Buzz: Save our Doctors.

Cross-posted on Bong Buzz

I don’t know about the other states but as far as WB is concerned, the very practice of ransacking hospitals and assaulting doctors only reflects the how sad the state of affairs are in this state! Thanks to three decades of Commie rule that have championed mediocrity in all spheres of the society!

Only recently in North Bengal Medical College, a newborn with umbilical sepsis and consequent septicaemia was admitted in the hospital. The baby died and all hell broke loose. Hooligans came armed and at night they assaulted one of our very favourite professors who is a clinician par excellence, surely one of our idols, a great teacher and a dedicated doctor! While I empathise with the grieving relatives, there is no point in beating up doctors regardless of whoever is at fault. That is no solution and totally barbaric! Shall I say that the general masses are too primitive? Even more painful was to read the newspapers the following day! The media totally downplayed the assault story and brewed up a sensational story of negligence and we got to read what was only the half-truth.

Last year, there was another death of a baby despite best efforts and a mob of 200 people who entered our college campus in trucks carried out a mayhem in the Paediatrics department destroying whatever fell in their way. They also managed to ransack the ObGyn department which fell on the way. In Paediatrics they badly beat up housestaff doctors 2 of whom were ladies.

If there has been any negligence it is due to a total administrative failure! I mean why blame doctors if rats are eating up babies in the nursery! If the technicians at Pathology and Biochemistry refuse to take up test samples beyond a few hours of the day stipulated by their wish how can the doctors back up the diagnosis of so many patients in a govt hospital like ours!

When a doctor is assaulted and prevented from doing his duty, this automatically sends several other patients admitted under him at peril in govt hospitals which are understaffed anyway!

Life thousands of years ago must have been difficult. Guess what, today studies took a backseat as I played Civilization 4: Beyond The Sword. So for a greater part of the day I found myself struggling with the game.

My favourite genres happen to be RTS (Real-time strategy) and CMS (constrution and management simulation). Among CMS, the city-building subgenre more specifically. Make no mistake, I am no diehard gamer. The few games I have ever played on the computer are (the years indicate when I played them):

• Age of Empires II – 2002
• Max Payne – 2002
• Max Payne 2 – 2007, replayed in 2009
• Zeus: The Master of Olympus – 2003, replayed in 2009
• The Gladiators: Galactic Circus Games – 2003
• Tropico – 2003
• Rise of Nations – 2009
  
• Little bits of Road Rash, FIFA, etc 2003

As you can see, I ain’t much into action. Max Payne being the only exception. But then, it is a beautiful game with a compelling storyline! I am more into srategy games than anything. Two great city-building games I have played are Tropico and Zeus: The Master of Olympus.

I already know all the exciting things about Civilization series from the distant memories I have from reading Digit years back. That it is turn-based and strategy gaming at it’s best. My initial thoughts on the game aren’t promising though! I like the way most things are automated. I just give an order to construct a wall or barrack in a city and it gets done. What lets me down is the combat! I am totally clueless with this one-to-one combat. But it is supposed to be one of the greatest games out there! What I’m missing? A lot of Googling din’t come to any help either. Apparently some mod would let me enjoy one-to-many combat. But I am feeling kinda download-weary. So here I am struggling in 1500 B.C.

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.

Adsense section targeting should be adopted by any publisher serious about earning bucks from the Google Adsense advertisements program on their Thesis site. Targeting basically means telling Adsense which sections of your content should be considered for displaying contextual ads. For example, on a site like Niponwave where I display the OS of the users leaving comments here and a lot of people use Windows, if I were running Adsense, the word ‘Windows’ would have been picked up and many of my visitors would see advertisements related to the Microsoft OS. Get the drift? But if you want to show only relevant and contextual ads to your visitors then adsense section targeting is what you should be after. In fact, this is a recommended practice. Without further ado, let me type out the following few lines of code that will let you have Adsense Section Targeting enabled on your Thesis site in a few seconds.

// Adsense Section Targeting for posts
function start_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";
}
function end_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','start_adsense');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post','end_adsense');

Most people want to target only the posts – the post means the entire content of your post and just that, cutting out all the garbage info like Related Posts, Comments, Author Byline and so on – which is pretty cool. The above code fully achieves that.

However, if your site has an active community and there are always engaging conversations then you will for sure get comments that add more value to the posts, in which case it certainly makes sense to target the comments as well. Enter Adsense Section Targeting for Thesis Comments. Of course I am targeting purely the comment text and not the commenter’s name, the datestamp and other such unnecessary info.

// Adsense Section Targeting for comments
function start_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";
}
function end_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}
add_action('thesis_hook_after_comment_meta','start_adsense'); add_action('thesis_hook_after_comment','end_adsense');

Finally what about Thesis Teasers? If you are using Teasers on the homepage and archive pages then you will want to target the text contained in the teasers. So here is the code for Adsense Section Targeting for Thesis Teasers.

// Adsense Section Targeting for teasers
function start_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";
}
function end_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_teaser','start_adsense');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_teaser','end_adsense');

Summing it all up, here is the entire code for the ultimate Adsense Section Targeting in Thesis.

// Adsense Section Targeting
function start_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";
}
function end_adsense(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','start_adsense'); // Adsense targeting for posts
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post','end_adsense');
add_action('thesis_hook_before_teaser','start_adsense'); // Adsense targeting for teasers (optional)
add_action('thesis_hook_after_teaser','end_adsense');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_comment_meta','start_adsense'); // Adsense targeting for comments (optional)
add_action('thesis_hook_after_comment','end_adsense');

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

In this tutorial I will show you how you can create a cool member bar on your Thesis site that will:

1. Show a login link to visitors who are not logged in
2. Upon logging in, redirects users to the same page they were on
3. Show logout link to logged in users
4. Show links to dashboard, user profile and so on
5. Show gravatar of the logged in user

Coolness aside, it is a great way to present the more frequently used admin links right on the frontend so that the casual contributor doesn’t have to find his way out through a complicated dashboard interface! This is particularly useful for multi-author blogs.

I prefer to place the member links at the very top, in the Thesis header above the navigation menu, as seen on Bong Buzz. With the following code you can achieve that. You may also want to place it in the sidebar or footer for which you need to call the function in the appropriate hook – should be easy if you are acquainted with Thesis hooks – and modify the HTML and CSS accordingly. You can also add a welcome message to greet your users once they log in.

Although this guide is written keeping Thesis users in mind, it is applicable to any WordPress theme as well. A generalised code for any WordPress theme is given at the end of this post.

Let’s start defining a function and name it ‘memberbar’.


function memberbar() {
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) { ?>
<ul class="login">
<?php global $user_email;
echo get_avatar($user_email, 13);?>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/profile.php" title="User Profile"><?php  global $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo();
echo($current_user->user_firstname . " " . $current_user->user_lastname . "");
?></a></li>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/post-new.php" title="Write New Post">Write</a></li>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/" title="Dashboard">Dashboard</a></li>
<li class="noborder"><a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url( get_permalink() ); ?>" title="Logout">Logout</a></li>
</ul>
<?php
} else {
?>
<ul class="login"><li class="noborder"><a href="<?php echo wp_login_url( get_permalink() ); ?>" title="Login">Login</a></li></ul>
<?php }
}

Now you call the funtion ‘login’ we just created anywhere you wish the member bar to appear. Pretty neat, right? 🙂

function top_nav_menu() {?>
<div id="top_nav_menu">
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo ('url'); ?>" title="Home">Home</a></li>
</ul>
<?php memberbar(); ?>
</div>
<?php
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'top_nav_menu');

I am quoting the relevant portions from my CSS which will give you a member login bar similar to the one on bongbuzz.net. You should modify it as per your need, especially the measurements.


#top_nav_menu {
height:27px;
}
#top_nav_menu ul {
list-style-image:none;
list-style-type:none;
margin:0;
padding-top:7px;
padding-left:5px;
float:left;
}
#top_nav_menu li {
border-right: 1px solid #aaa;
display: inline;
text-decoration:none;
}
#top_nav_menu ul.login {
padding-left:0;
float:right;
padding-right:5px;
}
#top_nav_menu li.noborder
{
border-right: 0px;
}
#top_nav_menu li a {
padding:0 10px;
}
#top_nav_menu li a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}


Code for WordPress themes in general:

<div id="top_nav_menu">
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo ('url'); ?>" title="Home">Home</a></li>
</ul>
<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) { ?>
<ul class="login">
<?php global $user_email;
echo get_avatar($user_email, 13);?>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/profile.php" title="User Profile"><?php  global $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo();
echo($current_user->user_firstname . " " . $current_user->user_lastname . "");
?></a></li>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/post-new.php" title="Write New Post">Write</a></li>
<li><a href="/wp-admin/" title="Dashboard">Dashboard</a></li>
<li class="noborder"><a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url( get_permalink() ); ?>" title="Logout">Logout</a></li>
</ul>
<?php
} else {
?>
<ul class="login"><li class="noborder"><a href="<?php echo wp_login_url( get_permalink() ); ?>" title="Login">Login</a></li></ul>
<?php } ?>
</div>

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

Hope you find this useful. 🙂

Add B.R. Ambedkar’s birthday to the Bengali New Year, throw in a Saturday and a Sunday and wow! you get a good enough excuse for a short break! 😀 As it turns out I made perfect use of this recipe for holiday and got back home in this scorching Kolkata heat. In all that heat and humidity, I stayed more at home and less outside, ate all the good foods mom made and took lots of sleep, trying my best to correct my sleep-wakefulness cycle.

I spent a lot of energy to revamp the look of Bong Buzz. The new look is 70% complete. (Please check it out at http://www.bongbuzz.net) I need to make a logo for the site in the coming days. There is also a lot of new posts there.

During this holiday, I got a new phone. It’s a Sony Ericsson, no-frills 3g phone with focus on fast browsing. The model is T715 and I got it from Anandamela for 9.25k.

The gaming competition to be held at SIT was called off! Well we went there and waited for a good many hours and the games were slowly starting but then came the announcement that it’s cancelled! Crapola! Anyways, we made good use of the time eating in the canteens. They have a small but nice campus. The architecture of the main building was quite spectacular – spread in a circle with a central atrium with a lot of light coming through the translucent dome at the top. All Techno colleges have a similar architecture, I’m told. And we played carrom too! Their carrom board was sparkling new, our dilapidated hostel board a far cry from that! They have a fine basketball court with a neat gallery alongside for the audience. The computer lab room which was converted into the gaming room boasted of some 60 HP terminals with 19 inch displays. Most students except the final year people and some 3rd years wore uniforms. Vitamin G is in vogue and they were smoking it in open daylight in the nooks and corners of the campus. We came to know the reason why the event was cancelled. Apparently it had to do something with disputed semester results. The guys who were conducting the event were really polite though. They were really apologetic and returned entry fees to 2 of us who already paid up and played. One of them called us in the evening to inform that it is going to be held tomorrow again. But I don’t think I’ll be going. Can’t waste precious final year time!

Well there is a gaming competition at SIT (Siliguri Institute of Technology) on 5th! I have participated in Rise of nations. In case you don’t know, well this one is pretty similar to Age of Empires. Only there you fought with elephants and horses but in RON you got nukes! I don’t have much practice really. Last I played this game was in July! Let me see if I can do much in a day!