if:else

This post has been removed becuase I'm an idiot and interpretation of basic math eludes me without the second cup of coffee. Normal service will resume shortly.

Oh dear. It seems that a new sort or arms race may break out shortly. The nice people at Arc90 Labs work hard to improve the user experience on the internet and one of their targets is the online-ad. One line ads are often badly implemented and more often than not end up annoying the very people they're supposedly trying to entice. Its also a sad reality that they also tend to drive the design of the page as you have to consider where to put that Big Ad or Banner Ad position when you're re-working layout... *sigh*

So back to Arc90 Labs... what did they do...? they created a simple and wonderful way to remove that clutter. Fantastic. I love it. Its called Readability.

But... I have a problem with this. Two problems in fact. The first is I wouldn't want anyone to change the layout of a page on my site without a little bit of discussion. I've worked hard to create a page they way it is, why can't you respect that. Of course thats kinda impractical so thats more a pet peeve. I'm a big fan of GM scripts that make minor tweaks here and there, like extra buttons in Gmail, or a new theme etc. However Arc90 Labs kicks off a radical, unrecognizable change to the page to achieve its aim.

The second problem is that right now this ad revenue, as much as you hate it, is what keeps many sites afloat. Most sites hate to be dependent upon ad revenue as their bread and butter (some aren't) but its a reality they face - and you do too by proxy. Ads are necessary at this moment in time to keep the content there.

All is well as long as the vast majority of users do the normal site navigation and the minority use these new toys. However I feel its a matter of time before tweaker and publisher get locked in a small arms race over enabling and disabling some site modifications just like this.

In this case, if a blogger or site owner wanted stop Arc90 Labs from working they could embed this code in their web pages (or in a referenced JS file thats on each page):

setInterval(function() { 

if (document.styleSheets) {

	var d = document.domain.split(/\./);

	var base = (d.length > 1) ? (d[d.length-2] + "." +  d[d.length-1]) : document.domain;

	for (var i=0; i<document.styleSheets.length; i++) {

		try { if (document.styleSheets[i].href.indexOf(base)==-1) { location.reload(true) } }catch(err){}

	}

}

}, 5000);

The script is simple and was done in a rush (hence the try{})... you can also view it here.

It checks every 5 seconds for any external stylesheets that are on the page that do not originate from the base domain. If a non-base domain stylesheet is found then it reloads the page so as to restore the original.

Its simple (but not fully tested) and I'm sure Arc can find away around it, at which point I (or someone else) will update this and the back and forth will go on and on and on... I'd rather not have to do that.

I created a quick Greasemonkey script on my lunch break so I could watch the markets collapse/rebound in (almost) real-time. It updates the business chart on the New York Times homepage every 10 seconds (anything less is uninformative and unnecessary).

You can download the script here, or here.

After 9 months in various stages of development (starting as a prototype within a Firefox plugin) TimesPeople was launched on Monday 22nd across the nytimes.com web site.

I've the distinct impression that I shouldn't go into the specifics on this project just yet. I will say that it was the most rewarding and challenging project I have been involved in. Watching the number of existing and new Times users beginning to use it in real-time took my breath away.

So far the feedback is mostly positive which is always nice.

As of writing the next push of tweaks and changes should address some minor issues that won't matter to 99% of people. Among them are corrections to existing microformats and fixes to ensure full W3C compliance (current at: 59 Errors, 4 warnings, soon to be: 0).

One thing I will say, based off my experience - I will be very very happy when IE6 is no longer a white-listed browser.

Back in 2006 I worked as part of the team for the Travel redesign project. It was intense and fun and I got to work with a lot of good people. It was also my first opportunity to use third party APIs in my commercial work - and since Google's map service was so new it was a lot of fun to work with.

I don't think I will ever be able to articulate how awkward it feels to be in a video... its the whole 'that doesn't sound like me' thing plus bad hair day in one.

Still, Google Maps was a big factor in my moving to a web app based direction. The actual page for this is here.

For many reasons I've found the need to scrape article pages of The New York Times - either to prototype something or gather sample data (though this should become obsolete once the API's become public).

Automated scraping of anything is easy but with the nytimes.com any automated is going to hit an interstitial advert at some point.

The easy way to avoid this is to append "no_interstitial" to the URL arguments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/business/30bags.html?no_interstitial

That was easy. One less thing to worry about.