Creating a CSS Menu Bar with Listamatic

I'm working on a relaunch of Wargames.Com, the wargaming site that attorney Wade Duchene and I successfully defended from a UDRP arbitration challenge by MGM Studios two years ago. The site began as a wargame store, but sales and traffic weren't enough to justify the aggravation of running an online storefront, so I retreated from ecommerce after 18 months. (I was the entire customer service department. You'd be surprised at the number of people who order from one web site, then call a completely different site to complain when they're unhappy with the product.)

As someone who has played wargames and role-playing games since the '70s, I'd like Wargames.Com to become a site for wargame enthusiasts that's worthy of its killer domain. For the relaunch, I'm rolling out features over time, beginning with a wargame store locator and convention calendar. The site's database currently contains 960 stores and 34 conventions. After these features are done, I'll add community forums, product news and perhaps blogs.

Although I've been publishing on the web for more than a decade, I suck at web design. Yesterday it took me six hours to create a vertical menu bar for the site using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The Wargames.Com main menu is defined in HTML as a simple list:

<div id="navcontainer">
<ul id="navlist">
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/add-store">Add a Store</a></li>
<li><a href="/conventions">Conventions</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

CSS can transform a list like this into a row of graphical menu buttons. Instead of using cut-and-paste to swipe somebody else's design, I decided to learn all of the CSS that goes into the creation of a menu bar and develop it one step at a time.

Huge mistake.

You'd be surprised at all the different styles that have to be set to make a simple row of buttons light up when a mouse hovers over them. Changing one style like float, width or display can dramatically hose a bunch of other styles -- style sheets, like nuclear power plants, are susceptible to cascading failure.

With the help of A List Apart, I learned just enough CSS to understand that it was hopeless for me to go on and I'd never be able to create a row of three rat bastard blue buttons with goat-humping shiny blue hover effects.

I was ready to choose another profession when I discovered Listamatic, a site that contains several dozen example CSS lists with the HTML and CSS required to create them. You can preview lists, find the one that's closest to your desired effect and boom. I chose Russ Weakley's rollover horizontal list.

Css · Publishing · Gaming · 2009/02/20 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

The Fine Line Between Sucks and Rocks

The political blogger Andrew Sullivan has the obnoxious practice of running reader emails without naming the person. I can only assume his motivation is to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, yet still allow other people to shoulder some of his workload. I enjoy reading Sullivan, but he strikes me as a person who always has to be the prettiest brain in the room.

One of his wrongfully uncredited readers just submitted the perfect explanation for the popularity of the Pet Shop Boys:

I'm male, straight, and 38. I first heard the Pet Shop Boys in high school and dismissed it as yet more soulless, computerized Brit-Pop. Then one night in a club I heard their version of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name." I thought, "Listen to this crap. They take this well-made, passionate song and drain it of all feeling. Oh wait. That's brilliant. They're geniuses."

There ought to be a name for the principle the reader has identified here, which is the possibility for something to be so terrible that it circles around and achieves brilliance.

I experimented with the Pet Shop Boys in college (I was young; it was the '80s; I don't have to apologize for it). I nearly bought their 1986 debut album Please recently on iTunes to replace the cassette version I once owned, but the money went instead to the smooth jazz stylings of the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

Music · 2009/02/20 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Adobe Portable Document Format 1, Rush Limbaugh 0

On the Feb. 13 broadcast of his show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that them debbil Democrats were trying to hide the facts on the stimulus bill by publishing it as a PDF file:

... they have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it.

PDF files are searchable, as Media Matters demonstrated by searching for the word "false" in the PDF version of the bill.

Politics · 2009/02/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

How Bloggers Fared at the Newseum

While on a trip to Washington D.C. last weekend I made my first visit to the Newseum, the museum of journalism that moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008 after an extensive $450 million upgrade. The museum's $20 ticket is a lot when you can walk across the street to visit the Smithsonian for free, but as a J-school grad I spent around five hours engrossed in the six-story facility. Highlights include an emotional Pulitzer Prize photography exhibit, an exhibit on the Berlin Wall that features several sections of the wall alongside an actual East German sniper tower, and a 9/11 exhibit that includes the crumpled World Trade Center antenna. I didn't realize that it had survived the collapse.

One wall of the 9/11 exhibit displays dozens of newspaper front pages covering the attack. Headline writers had a hard time capturing the enormity of the event in the few words permitted by a ginormous font. The Boston Globe declared it a "New Day of Infamy," the Indianapolis Star called it a "Day of Death," and the San Francisco Examiner offered the lamest attempt of them all, the one-word exclamation "Bastards!"

I was curious to learn how the Newseum treated the touchy subjects of blogs and Matt Drudge, neither of which were likely to get much love from a place created by pro journalists to celebrate their own awesomeness. The picture atop this post was from a survey you could take. The next question was, "Do you read a news blog every day?" After I answered in the affirmative to both questions, I think I heard USA Today publisher Al Neuharth quietly weeping in an adjoining room.

The only bloggers I saw mentioned in the Newseum were Mayhill Fowler and Mary Katharine Ham on a wall about the 2008 presidential campaign:

A Blogger Scoops Big Media

Bloggers became a major force in campaign 2008. Mayhill Fowler, who blogs for the Huffington Post's "citizen-powered" Off the Bus web site, broke two stories during the campaign that sent reporters scrambling to catch up. Though critics panned her unconventional methods, her stories rocketed through the mainstream media. She captured Democratic nominee Barack Obama on tape saying that some "bitter" working-class voters "cling to guns or religion." She also taped Bill Clinton crudely insulting a reporter, sparking a backlash against Hillary Clinton's campaign. "Politicians need to learn that anyone can break news, and citizens who run into you ... can post it anywhere," said blogger Mary Katherine Ham.

The Newseum misspelled Ham's name and T.S. "Elliot" when quoting him in a film. There was no exhibit honoring the work of copy editors.

Blogs also were described in a recent-event timeline:

The Internet Explodes

Web logs, a new form of personal journalism, began to cover everything from computer programming to politics. Now known as "blogs," the constantly updated sites -- with links to other sites -- bypassed the traditional news media and gave individuals direct access to millions of Internet users. This cartoon (right) reflected the Web's growing popularity.

Let me be the first to express outrage at the glaring lack of credit for Dave Winer in that paragraph. The guy invented everything in those sentences except for popularity.

As for Matt Drudge, he got some love for stealing the Monica Lewinsky scoop that Newsweek spiked in January 1998, which "helped shift the balance between 'old media' and 'new media.'" I refuse to transcribe any more because Drudge's continued importance to the contemporary history of journalism crushes my spirit.

The Newseum has a TV studio where you can report a news story and watch the video. Because it has been too long since anyone asked me to be on television -- 1,398 days, 8 hours, 22 minutes and 18 seconds as of this post -- I paid $7 to shoot a story and take home the commemorative photo.

For Newseum Network News, I broke the exclusive that D.C. United was about to start a new soccer season. You're given around six seconds to vamp at the end before sending it back to network. My story, which you can see on the web, was way better than the one produced by the 10-year-old girl in the adjacent studio. Watch closely as I remain cool under pressure even though an errant ball nearly clobbers me.

This was the first time I ever used a Teleprompter, which completely removes the need to think about the words you are saying. I now know what I want for Christmas.

Journalism · Blogging · 2009/02/16 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Sharing Blog Posts on Your Facebook Profile

Over the past few months, I've gotten back into contact with more than a dozen old friends and coworkers through Facebook. After blogging for nine years, I prefer hanging out here on Workbench over social networking sites, but I'm beginning to feel like an anachronism. It's easier for people to keep up with their BFFs on sites like Facebook than to visit a bunch of personal blogs, even with the help of RSS and a feed reader. I recently began linking my posts on Facebook using Simplaris Blogcast, a Facebook application that posts the title and link of blog posts to your Facebook profile. You can manually post items from your blog, pull them automatically from an RSS feed or ping Simplaris with each new post.

For reasons unknown, Simplaris Blogcast stopped pulling items automatically from my feed a month ago. To get automatic posts working again, I've updated my weblog ping library for PHP so that it can ping Blogcast each time I post on Workbench.

Blogcast uses the same ping protocol as Weblogs.Com. Before you can use the Weblog-Pinger library in a PHP script, you must add Blogcast to your Facebook account and retrieve your ping info, which includes a ping URL that includes a special ID unique to your account. In the example URL http://blogcast.simplaris.com/ping/0dd8dfad5c842b600091ba/, the ID is 0dd8dfad5c842b600091ba. You'll need this ID when sending a ping, as in this example code:

require_once('weblog_pinger.php');
$pinger = new Weblog_Pinger();
$pinger->ping_simplaris_blogcast($post_title, $post_link, "0dd8dfad5c842b600091ba");

Once Blogcast has successfully received a ping, the application setting Update Mode will have the Ping Automatic selection chosen.

The code's available under the open source GPL license. If it worked, this post will show up on my Facebook profile.

Programming · Php · Facebook · 2009/02/15 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Meet Charlie the Angry Leather Salesman

On late-night television in Utica, N.Y., leather store salesman Charlie Celi went off the script in November to share his opinion on the state's politicians. Celi, who handles marketing for Forever Leather at the Sangertown Square shopping center in New Hartford, N.Y., flew into a Howard Beale-style rant against former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and departing Sen. Hillary Clinton.

"If Spitzer wasn't out there poppin' chicks like bon bons, maybe we'd be a little better," Celi says in an ad that has made its way to YouTube. "The people in upstate New York always gettin' the short end of the freakin' stick," he continued, directing his next comments directly to the politicians: "You all suck. ... Hillary Clinton, thanks for nothin'."

In an earlier ad, Celi shares his opinion on dog urine and cigarette butts in the streets of Herkimer, N.Y.

"There's a nice smell of dog urine all down Main Street," he observes. "I'd like to see something done and I'm not alone. ... I'm not turning my back on Herkimer. I love Herkimer."

In another spot he addresses price-gouging gas companies, specifically calling out Nice N Easy convenience stores.

"These gas people. They've been hosin' us, hosin' us, for a year when we were down," Celi says. "The scumbag Nice N Easy people -- I say scumbag, that's a harsh word -- ratballs is a better one! ... Did you have a good time, because someday you're going to pay for what you did. Pisses me off."

Celi has been holding court on local television since 1989, his son Patrick told me in a phone interview Tuesday. Forever Leather's a family-owned business, and the company began buying blocks of late-night time for half-hour infomercials in the '90s. "We never plan them out," Patrick Celi said. "We used to do them once a month." The rant against politicians inspired a call from the mayor of Rome, N.Y., and some suggestions from the public that Charlie Celi run for office. He's a political independent who isn't interested in doing that, his son said.

"It has been said to me that I'm quick with the tongue," Charlie Celi acknowledges in one ad. "There's people out there pretty mad at me right now for things I said. I didn't mean it. I just get mad."

Politics · Tv · 2009/02/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Visiting this Web Site May Harm American Thinker

For 30 minutes Saturday morning, Google displayed the warning "this site may harm your computer" with all search results, including its own home page. Normally, the warning only appears on sites that Google suspects to be infected with malicious programs such as viruses. A data error flagged every site on the web as potentially harmful, as thousands of people noted on Twitter.

The situation became so desperate that people began using Yahoo Search.

Even though the problem lasted just a half-hour, that was enough time for the conservative blog American Thinker to uncover a vast left-wing conspiracy. In a story headlined "Google Blocks Conservative Web Sites," Rick Moran writes:

The blocks appear to be temporary -- more a nuisance than a threat. But this morning, websites for the Republican National Committee, Real Clear Politics, and Pajamas Media were all blocked with the caption:

Warning -- visiting this web site may harm your computer! ...

The potential for this gigantic corporation to game the free flow of information to suit its own ideological ends is frightening. Everyone -- liberals and conservatives -- should be concerned when ideological attacks like this take place.

Since the problem affected billions of pages in Google's search database, it appears that the writers at American Thinker don't get out much beyond right-wing sites. Color me shocked.

Politics · Google · 2009/01/31 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

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