Resources — It happens every now and then. The WordPress password reminder doesn't work for some reason, and you're stuck. Luckily, Larry cooked up a new resource page: How to retrieve a lost password.

Robert Verkaik writes in The Independent:

Britain must rethink plans for a database holding details of every email, mobile phone and internet visit, Europe’s human rights commissioner has said in an outspoken attack on the growth of surveillance societies. Thomas Hammarberg said that UK proposals for sweeping powers to collect and store data will increase the risk of the “violation of an individual’s privacy”.

Plans for the database of emails, phone calls and internet visits are to be published by the Home Office in January. These proposals have already been described by the Government’s own terrorism-law watchdog as “awful” and attacked by civil liberty groups for laying the basis of a Big Brother state.

This is a really clever one-man show that features some great "costumes" made from cardboard, to do some really clever things.  The transitions between costumes is really what makes it.  (Via BoingBoing)

Google News can be a coveted platform. But Google needs for the aggregation a special format - News Sitemap.

Basically you can create this format in two ways with WordPress. Both solutions will be presented here. I will talk about the second example more in detail, because I believe it shows very nicely how to use content from WordPress outside your blog.

1. The first way is to create a sitemap, similar to a feed in WordPress. This has several advantages for the administration in WordPress.
   How to create a feed, I have in the tutorial „WordPress Feed for Drafts“ shown. You can download this solution as a plugin and simple use Google News-Sitemap.
2. A second possibility is to create a PHP file in the root directory and to write the latest posts into the appropriate format.

Include WordPress

To get the data from WordPress, you have to have access to wp-config.php, therefore I include it and can get it from the global variables of WordPress, for example the $wpdb database .
This means you can retrieve now all data from the database, which are relevant to the XML format of the Google News Sitemap.

The format

Google provides the following XML structure. I build the structure in the file, and fill it only with the last 20 News.
Backgrounds and tips from Google are on their document site.

<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9?
xmlns:news=“http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9?>
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.domain.de/news/news1.html</loc>
		<news:news>
			<news:publication_date>2008-22-01T00:29:19+01:00</news:publication_date>
			<news:keywords>key1, key2, key3</news:keywords>
		</news:news>
	</url>
</urlset>

The file

Below you'll find a simple solution that you can surely expand. In the SQL query is the example of a defined category. This is simply the ID of the category compared (AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7). If all content should be drawn, then it's suffice to delete this line.

<?php
require('wp-config.php');
 
// XML header
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>' . "\n";
 
// urlset
echo '<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
				xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">' . "\n";
 
// Select posts; set limit 20
$rows = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_date_gmt
                            FROM $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->term_relationships, $wpdb->term_taxonomy
                            WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.id
                            AND post_status = 'publish'
                            AND post_type = 'post'
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
                            AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7
                            ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date_gmt DESC
                            LIMIT 0, 20");
 
// sitemap data
// set keywords !
 
foreach ($rows as $row) {
	echo "\t" . '<url>' . "\n";
 
 
	echo "\t\t" . '<loc>';
	echo get_permalink($row->ID);
	echo '</loc>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:news>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:publication_date>';
	$thedate = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 0, 10);
	$thetime = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 11, 20);
	echo $thedate . 'T' . $thetime . 'Z';
	echo '</news:publication_date>' . "\n";
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>online, news</news:keywords>' . "\n"; // change keywords
	echo "\t\t" . '</news:news>' . "\n";
	echo "\t" . '</url>' . "\n";
}
 
// End urlset
echo '</urlset>';
?>

In the above syntax, the unique keywords are statically assigned. If you assign tags to a blog post, then it is advisable to use it and create there. Following addition will help.

	$tags     = wp_get_post_tags( $row->ID, array('fields' => 'all') );
	$tagcount = count($tags);
	echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>';
	for ($i = 1; $i < $tagcount; $i++) {
		echo $taglist  = str_replace( "'", '', str_replace( '"', '', urldecode($tags[$i]->name) ) );
		if ( $i != $tagcount-1 )
		 echo ', ';
	}
	echo '</news:keywords>' . "\n";

Use this line instead

echo "\t\t" . '<news:keywords>online, news</news:keywords>' . "\n"; // change keywords

and it will assign tags automatically, seperated by a comma.

Inclusion in Google

Once you have the above syntax as a file in the root installation and successfully tested, then you only have to ask for inclusion in Google News. There is a form available. Then just wait for an answer from Google.
To see if you are indexed, you can simple search in Google News: site:domain.com.

In the quietness of the holiday season, the Secretary of State for Culture, Andy Burnham has come forth with plans to age-certify the web like is currently done with films and DVDs. Coming in wake of the IWF’s horribly misguided attempt to block Wikipedia, this is another hamfisted approach to regulating the Internet as if it were old media that solves very little.

So what will it look like? It certainly won’t look like a BBFC for the web: First there’s questions of scale: the total number of sites (not counting subdomains) alone is around 156 million, while the Google index is in the billions of individual pages and there may be up to a trillion unique URLs on the web. Compared to the 639 films and 11,439 videos and DVDs that the BBFC classified in 2008, that’s more than just a few orders of magnitude. No human-oriented solution would be able to get the job done - it’ll face a hard enough job coping with the 120,000 blogs created every day. So any such system will be automated.

Secondly of course, there’s the international dimension. How is a site in Russia or Tuvalu going to be compelled to undergo certification by a UK body? Answer: none at all. So the idea of a website being clearly labelled “PG” or “18″ like a DVD is can go right out of the window - expect it all to be done on the ISP level as it comes into the UK, filtered as you access the site.

Oddly enough, automated filtering like this has existed for years, in corporate firewalls and software specifically targeted at parents such as CyberPatrol and NetNanny. You pay for a licence and it monitors what comes in and out, a bit like a virus scanner, for specific keywords or pictures that might look like nudity. These are hideously imperfect and have their faults by being too over-zealous - how do you prevent filtering out of information about sex education, or other health issues such as breast cancer, for example? But an imperfect solution is better than none for some parents, so why not fork out on the software if you’re worried about your kids, and leave the rest of us be?

Censorship of legal but possibly offensive material in this way is a private, not a public, good - most of us are adults and want our access unfettered. But rather than just tell parents to buy a copy of censorware and install, Burnham wants ISPs to spend millions at the network level to implement it. This is a fairly idiotic waste of money, but then the more you look at what Burnham says, it’s clear he hasn’t got a full grasp of facts on the issue:

Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach.”

This is utter bollocks. If you’re talking about the ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, it was created by the United States Department of Defense. Burnham is probably thinking of John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, with its famous quote:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

But this was written in 1996, long after the Internet had taken hold; Barlow was not a creator of the Internet, far from it, instead while the TCP/IP protocol was being proposed and the early Internet assembled, he was writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Back to Burnham:

I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

Libel online is an emerging issue? The first Internet libel case, Godfrey v. Demon Internet was over eleven years ago (and a dangerous precedent it set too). It has since been clear with cases such as the Alisher Usmanov blog silencing that like all libel cases, the plaintiff has an unfair advantage. Far from being lawless, it’s all too easy for the rich and powerful to silence anything online that is in the UK’s jurisdiction.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

Categorical as he likes to be, Burnham burbles over what exact content should not be available, or to whom - is he still talking about child protection here or is he going further? Far from being clear about it he’s muddying the water, starting off by talking about child protection but now touching on the wider issues of freedom of speech and what content can be seen by anyone.

“It worries me - like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.”

Well then don’t do it. Supervise your own bloody kids. Or cough up for some supervisory software. Or learn about what’s out there and talk to them about it first.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he said. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

Actually most sites children use online (such as Bebo, Habbo or MySpace) have quite clear and helpful parental advice sections which if he took the time to read, could be quite edifying.

“This isn’t about turning the clock back. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”

You could start with yourself, minister. This bit tickles me the most:

He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

Given how web-savvy the Obama administration is, I expect their response to be mostly along the lines of “WTF?”.

So, in conclusion, the minister for fun doesn’t really have much of a clue - all he knows is there is a problem of some sort and he must be seen to be doing something about it. And the truth is there are already plenty of cheap software solutions, which flawed as they may be, offer a quick fix to the problem. But rather than tell people to fork out themselves, it will eventually cost all Internet users both money and convenience.

A better solution is to not let kids go online alone without educating yourself about what sites are good and what child protection policies they have, talking to your kids about it and showing them how to use the web safely. But in this government’s bizarre world, telling parents how to bring up their kids would be seen as nannying and intrusive, while quietly classifying & censoring everything they download is nothing more than a matter of course.

Extra: John has some extra good points over at Sore Eyes while Tom Watson MP is clever enough to open up discussion to everyone on his blog, with a promise he’ll feed them back to Burnham. Now there’s Government 2.0 for you.

And a bit more: Alex has an excellent rant - although I don’t quite agree with him it’s purely a class-based thing, the English-language bit is an excellent point I hadn’t picked up on. Terence meanwhile argues it’s merely the fear of the new and unknown. Finally - Richard Clayton has a rather excellent summary of the problems with age ratings and content filtering.