dive into mark

Our native North Carolinian neighbors laughed when we moved in with a supply of Philadelphian picks, shovels, scrapers, boots, and gloves. Who’s laughing now? (Answer: nobody.)

It’s not even like it’s a lot of snow. It’s like 10 or 11 inches. Buffalo just got 7 feet last week. Do they go around bitching about it? Well, yes, probably for 7 feet they do. But they still cleared it. Our street may never be plowed, and our driveway is one of only two on the block that anyone bothered to clear. (The other is owned by a couple who just moved down from New Jersey; this is their first winter in NC too, just like us, so they’re still in the NorthEast mindset too.) Everybody else is just holed up waiting for it to melt. Wimps.

I’m noticing more and more spam in my referer logs. People are apparently writing scripts that put their site in the “Referer” HTTP header and hitting weblogs like mine, hoping that someone (probably me, but maybe some other snoopy voyeur) clicks through and gives them traffic. But when you get there, there are no links back to my site; it’s all just a scam. Seems like a weird way to get your name out, but I guess staying ahead of user’s expectations and trying new and different things is part of the spam game.

And now someone is spamming me with obscene URLs that point nowhere. Don’t people have better things to do with their time? Come shovel my driveway; make yourself useful. I’ll even pay you for it. I guarantee you shoveling your neighborhood has a higher ROI than spamming random webloggers’ referer logs. Sheesh.

Update: I switched the layout back to be closer to the original, and moved the news down below the links along the right. The other site layout just looked too busy. Look for increasing levels of geekish tweakery in the coming days as I sit in my house, going insane from work-related stress, and unable to go anywhere due to my being surrounded by 12 inches of (unplowed) snow.

At least the power hasn’t gone out. My laptop only has about 90 minutes of battery life.

As you may have noticed, diveintomark has a new layout with a new feature: syndicated news. What you may not have noticed yet, unless you obsessively refresh your browser window every few seconds (seek help), is that the news source is random. Go ahead, refresh your browser window a few times. I’ll wait.

The actual news comes from RSS feeds, and are displayed with the viewRssBox macro, built into Manila (the content management system that runs this weblog). The randomization is a trick I learned here (link points to Google’s cache because the site seems to be down, or maybe it’s just all this damn snow that’s affecting my normally stellar (really!) Internet connection).

Here’s the code for the right-hand pane:

\{string.nthfield(includemessage(186,flProcessMacros:true), “~”, random(1, string.countfields(includemessage(186,flProcessMacros:true),”~”)))}

This just tells Manila to evaluate message 186 and pick out a random section of it. (186 is not special; it was just the next available message number that I created to hold the news sources.) Sections are delimited by the ~ (tilde) character, because it had to be something, and it had to be one character, and I don’t know enough about Frontier scripting to know if there’s a better way than this. Presumably this would break if the text of the one of the syndicated news sites contained a tilde, but that seems unlikely. Suggestions for a more elegant solution are welcome.

Message 186 lists all the possible RSS boxes, separated by tildes:

\{viewRssBox (”http://www.newsforge.com/newsforge.rss”, boxTitle: “NewsForge Headlines”, width:”100%”, timeZone: “EDT”, maxItems: 25, frameColor:”white”, titleBarColor:”white”)}
~
\{viewRssBox (”http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf”, boxTitle: “Wired Headlines”, width:”100%”, timeZone: “EDT”, maxItems: 25, frameColor:”white”, titleBarColor:”white”)}
~
\{viewRssBox (”http://maccentral.macworld.com/mnn.cgi”, boxTitle: “MacCentral Headlines”, width:”100%”, timeZone: “EDT”, maxItems: 25, frameColor:”white”, titleBarColor:”white”)}

Adding new news sources is as simple as editing message 186 and adding a new viewRssBox line with the required info, and it’s automatically put “in rotation”.

Links in the news feeds go directly to the story; I have neither the ability nor the desire to add a “click-through” redirection URL to track your news preferences. Some RSS feeds (like Moreover) use these click-through URLs, but I avoid those feeds. There’s usually better alternatives anyway that go directly to the source.

Lastly, make sure that Manila is not caching your home page, or the news feeds will only update when you make new posts. Go to Prefs / Editorial and set “Cache home page” to “No”.

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