Vanity Foul
Dedicated to the wanderings of an egotistical mind.


20040728
Wednesday July 28, 2004

The Great American Illiteracy Scare

I see this sort of doom at least every other year: Americans are reading less!

While I am no internationaly recognized research body, I have trouble reconciling this fear with the wave of "mass reading" that occurs with each new Harry Potter book release. I'd say every 10 years of so a new book arrives which captures childrens' imaginations and hooks them on reading.

Or maybe I'm just deluding myself.
( Jul 28 2004, 10:30:15 AM ) Personal Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/the_great_american_illiteracy_scare

Hell is for economists via Boing Boing

Bizarro, dubious factoid of the day via Reuters:

Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

<sarcasm>Well, that would explain Mexico then, eh?</sarcasm>
( Jul 28 2004, 08:21:00 AM ) Technology Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/hell_is_for_spammers



20040727
Tuesday July 27, 2004

Improved Search

Earlier tonight I committed a long-desired Search improvement: Paging. The results are broken into pages of 10 entries. Try this search.

At the top you‘ll notice a new select list labelled “Restrict by Category“. This allows the user to select a category to narrow the results. Also, after each entry is a link “restrict search to just this blog“ which will narrow the search to that entry‘s user and display in that user‘s template.

If you scroll to the bottom you‘ll see “1 | 2“ which are links to the pages of results. This is the href for “2”:
http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/search?q=help&username=&n=10&o=10.
The ‘q‘ is the query, ‘username‘ is obvious and optional. ‘n‘ is the number of results to display on each page, and ‘o‘ is the offset (the current page is displaying items 0–9). If ‘o‘ is greater than the # of results it gets reset to 0, so no thinking you can dink around and break it!

So you can play around with this href a bit and get different paging.

I haven‘t added the necessary velocity code to individual pages yet, so currently this is limited to the sitewide search only.

( Jul 27 2004, 09:19:35 PM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/improved_search_p

favicon and a simplified display

I love it when users post about how they've customized Roller.
( Jul 27 2004, 08:28:44 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/favicon_and_a_simplified_display

For further reading on today's posts:



20040723
Friday July 23, 2004

Re: Google circa 1960

Some ideas just really catch your imagination. What this put into my head was "Wouldn't it be cool to create a CSS theme that looked like this?". I don't know enough about CSS, but it seems it'd be possible to use a font like that and to get text boxes to display as an line rather than a box. Consider this a LazyWeb request.
( Jul 23 2004, 08:37:15 AM ) Entertainment Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_google_circa_1960



20040720
Tuesday July 20, 2004

Referer Spam Master List

Arjun Ram has contributed to my "link spammers" list. See them all!

( Jul 20 2004, 05:15:38 PM ) Technology Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/referer_spam_master_list



20040719
Monday July 19, 2004

Here we go again.
( Jul 19 2004, 12:46:47 PM ) News Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/here_we_go

ACLU Pizza Scary. Via Ben Hyde.
( Jul 19 2004, 11:19:50 AM ) News Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/aclu_pizza

For further reading on today's posts:




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