This blog is now read by more machines than humans: RSS robots, spam-laying insectopoids, echoes of blog-gathering .edu projects. This essentially is the state of affairs that all human activities w
Cleaning Up the Nation
Austin Bay:
If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at
Rank Materialism
Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing some
Fallujah Fonda
Uh-oh. From the Telegraph comes this exciting news:
Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.
Acros
John Pilger: Partner in Terrorism
In an outrageous piece of terrorist propaganda appearing on the cover of today's New Statesman, John Pilger puts the blame for the 7/7 London attacks not on the terrorists, but rather on Tony Blair:
New Item Extra Coolness
I added a new feature to the blogstead. It's the Hot List- yet another aggregation of what's being widely linked to in the 'sphere. You'll find it in the sidebar, conveniently labelled "Hot List".
I don't like it. It looks wrong. Needs more work.
The rank number links to the frequently cited url, and the blurbs under it link back to the citing blog using the text that they originally used to link to the cited url. Confused?
Right now there isn't a way to get the cited url's title, so what you'll find there is kind of a mystery, the contents only obliquely hinted at by the vague link text below. Or the link text could be thoroughly descriptive and give everything away. It's a crap shoot.
I may arrange to grab the cited url's title and stick it in there. There is the problem of JavaScript-generated titles, as opposed to straight-up html titles, which would complicate things slightly. But whatever.
Update: I changed the layout of the feature a bit. Went from a digit for the rank to the number spelled out- makes it easier to see that it's a link. And I changed the referring text from a line by line list to a paragraph of text separated by dots. Looks better I think.
Short URL: http://spartac.us/298
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Thanks, Vik. It's done with AMP, which is the underlying technology of this site. That's a jargonny way of saying Apache (server), MySQL (database), and PHP (web server programming language).
The server periodically scans selected blogs and stores their links in a database. Once an hour the database is polled for the most frequently cited new links added in the last two days and a text file is created with the links and citing blogs listed. This text file is then included in the blog. The idea is straightforward enough, but the details are little complicated, as with any programming.
© 2002-2006
Brian O'Connell.

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