Web dictionary? Topic aggregator? Trackback spammer?

This is weird. It superficially seems to be a publish ping triggered peek-back system which tracks posts containing some or a few of the words it covers, and upon finding them, sends track-back pings to the post, one trackback for every covered word found. Does this read trackback spam to you, or is it a usefulm but perhaps misconfigured service? I'm leaning toward the former, but I'm not sure how fully automated or intended-permanent the setup is yet.

I received two trackbacks for yesterday's post, one for "javascript", one for "calendar", both words just present in page content, neither tagged. The site seems to be running a software called PukiWiki, and judging by the published site statistics the site has just started to get up to speed the past few days. I'd be leaning towards this being a potentially useful service, perhaps especially to the Japanese crowd it seems to target (pages seem to be written in Japanese encoded as EUC-JP but incorrectly marked-up as ISO-8859-1, so you may have to employ manual browser overrides to see the content properly) -- but if it's going to transmit trackback pings to autogenerated index pages, it's spam, useful or not.

I hold a firm belief about trackback notification being a tool reserved for notifying about human commentary. Breaking that is littering the blog world, and I believe this breaks that convention, quite severely.

Categories:

• trackback
• spam

Reflowing HTML around dynamically moving content

I have an amusing application in mind, for which I would like to solve a layouting problem I have never seen attempted on the web: extracting a <div> element from the document flow, moving it through the document and have the rest of the page content flow around the div as it moves around. I think this can actually be done already, given a bit of inginuity and work, given some additional constraints on the problem. With a bit of luck, researching this might prove productive.

Assuming we narrow scope to moving a fixed width div vertically through a same width column of text content, I believe I could chunk up the text into text nodes, initially one per word, and track down the start of every new line in the text body (at present window width). Then, by easing the div upward (or downward) through the page, one line (a few nodes) at a time, employing a position:static;, or for that matter position:relative; CSS attribute for it, it would let the surrounding text flow seamlessly around it, as it moves. (It should actually work just as well with a smaller div too, though the use case I have in mind will not require that.)

This would render a chunky, text terminal style, line scroller. Further polishing it, we could fine tune it to a smooth style pixel by pixel scroller, by calculating the distance between lines and interpolating a suitable top padding for the element, to place it at just the right height every step of the way through the document.

Of course we wouldn't have to slide pixel by pixel through the entire stretch; most likely it will often look better to do a smooth sine curve slide over just a couple of frames, perhaps half a second or so, to cover a distance of a few hundred pixels in a dozen or so steps. And we could ease down the opacity of the nearest line or lines of text closest to the moving div too for still more effect.

This whole concept feels a lot like developing demo efects on the Commodore 64 or Amiga used to, back in the eighties or nineties. ;-)

Categories:

• DHTML
• reflowing
• effects

Template upgrades

In pathing up my blog template to not crash down so badly when Del.icio.us is offline, I also found the bug that made my backlinks disappear; somehow I had dropped a bit of initialization code that made my overly complex Blogger backlink injection work in the first place. I ought to rewrite that from scratch using document.write like Jasper does; it would take out the need for my more bloated approach. Either way, backlinks here now work again, in Firefox. Not in IE nor Opera, though, further suggesting I'd be better off with Jasper's more robust approach.

While at it, I added a feature to tell my own back links apart from back links from other people, though. Maybe I ought to separate them into sections too, I'm not sure yet. I also ought to write an article on how to do such things, eventually, but in the meantime I warmly recommend Jasper's article above. It is easily extended by those of you familiar with programming in general, or ecmascript/javascript in particular.

Good to see my ClustrMaps hack working neatly in the latest versions of IE, Firefox and Opera alike; I had not tested that myself until today. I think I will set myself up with a more formal test bed of browsers (also including Firefox 1.0.7 and 1.0.6, either of which was reported not to get it quite right) if (or should I perhaps say when) I start doing freelance / consultancy work on web related development. Until then, quality control will remain loosely at today's level of laxity, user feedback driven.

My post navigation calendar approach of using the Blogger tags and daily archival to enumerate all post dates, and my Del.icio.us tags for providing them with titles on mouseover seems to be worth keeping and pursuing, as it degrades nicely when the latter is not available. Had I done as I initially planned on, and relied solely on Del.icio.us for it (less and cleaner code), that navigation option would have been effectively severed now.

I'll probably end up writing next post in my article series on setting up Blogger blogs with calendar navigation using this two tier approach, too, the latter feature being an optional add-on to those who take the time and trouble to tag all their posts at Del.icio.us, for that feature, for the possible topic navigation system that opens up for or just for driving relevant traffic to your blog.

Categories:

• Blogger
• BackLinks
• Del.icio.us
• CrossBrowser
• navigation