Ramblings of a Technology Addict

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

It's the Last Midnight.

One hour.
In an hour we set aside our peaceful ways as a nation and gird our loins for battle. We let slip the dogs of war against a brutal despot. Our soldiers, men and women, people with families, friends and coworkers, will lay their lives on the line to protect our interests as a nation. There will be those caught in the crossfire, those who lives are destroyed. I weep for them. Their lives are no different than mine. But I pray more for their children. Children who will grow up in a free Iraq. Children who will have the power to elect their own government, set their own laws.
I wish this was not necessary. I wish we could snap our fingers and Saddam would decide to retire to the South Pacific and leave us all to stand our military down. But life is not that simple. No, that is too much to ask, for we are but humans.
For now, we can just hope and pray that it is quick.
7:28:21 PM  comment []

Just a quick reminder on my license.

This site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Which means content from my site can be shared so long as it is attributed, so long as no one is charged to read it, and content based on it must be distributed under this same license.
The reason I say that is that I got a few links from NewsIsFree which is scraping my content aginst my license. I have submitted a request to have my content properly attributed and I will let you know what I find.
3:41:37 PM  comment []

Some More Thoughts.

So, I spent yesterday thinking a lot about how I want this new tool to handle, what I want it to do, how I want it to generate the content. I think there are two modes of operation.
Mode One: Light and Simple
This mode is the very plain and simple version. It grabs the headlines, scrapes the full text from the website page and displays in simple black text on a white background. Slide number is in bottom right in form of "Tom Bridge's Slide 1 of 25" and in the bottom left corner is the Net News Wire logo. No frills, just the article.
Mode Two: Intensive
This is the more fullservice mode. Instead of grabbing just the text, it takes a bit of the look and feel of the site with it. So, if you were reading my site, it would take the top headers here, so the toolbar and the title bar, then display the text much as it would appear on the website. The same tags, icon and slide number will appear. There will also be a color coded circle in the upper left to give it a genre, as according to which link grouping it was in. Red for Tech, Blue for Blogs, Green for Sports, etc...
The real trick I think is going to be handling articles that run more than one page. Do you make it more than one slide? Or do you truncate it and make you go read the article? Do you give the executive summary first paragraph and eliminate it all together? I think there has to be a balance somewhere. Thoughts? Have you got an idea for this? Respond below.
10:11:14 AM  comment []