Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Fair. Balanced. And a little wonky

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So you’ve all heard about Fox News’s incredibly stupid lawsuit against Al Franken because of the title of his new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right—which is now #1 on Amazon largely because of the publicity this lawsuit has created. Way to go Fox, extremely fair and balanced of you.

And Blah3 is fighting the good fight and keeping a list of all blogs that have gone “fair and balanced”; make Blah3’s day, join the party.

So I changed the code for Nobody Knows Anything’s subtitle from a collection of strange little taglines grouped solely according to my whim to a collection of taglines grouped solely because they contain the words “fair and balanced.”

And now my blog’s acting weird.

The right-hand column—which evidently already has problems in Mozilla and no, I haven’t fixed it yet—now doesn’t load when I open my page. The loading bar in Safari goes about halfway across…and then just hangs.

Any ideas why?

Here, by the way, is the randomization code I use for the subtitle, in case a)the answer’s there or b)you want something similar. I got the code off of the Movable Type’s board originally.

<script LANGUAGE = "JavaScript"> 
<!-- 

function makeArrayText(len) { 
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) this[i] = null; 
this.length = len; 
}

ran_text = new makeArrayText(5); 
// be sure to set makearray(n) = number of items to be 
included in the array, and start at zero! 
ran_text[0] = 'Fair and balanced, baby. Fair and balanced.';
ran_text[1] = 'You ain\'t seen fair and balanced
 \'til you\'ve read NKA.';
ran_text[2] = 'Fair and balanced since <i>at least</i> 1996.';
ran_text[3] = 'Fair <i>and</i> balanced twice a day, 
like clockwork.';
ran_text[4] = 'Except how fair and balanced my blog is.';

function rand(n) { 
seed = (0x015a4e35 * seed) % 0x7fffffff; 
return (seed >> 16) % n; 
}

var now = new Date() 
var seed = now.getTime() % 0xffffffff 

// --> 
</SCRIPT> 

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript"> 
<!-- 
document.write(ran_text[rand(ran_text.length)]) 
//--> 
</SCRIPT>

(I’ve slightly edited the text—inserting line breaks after “number of items to be”, “You ain\’t seen fair and balanced,” and “twice a day”—to make it fit on the page. Those breaks are not causing this problem!)

§

The funniest comment I read somewhere about this lawsuit: “If Fox News can sue Al Franken over use of the term ‘fair and balanced,’ does that mean the American people can sue Fox News over use of the term ‘News’?”

And I can’t remember who said it! If you know, drop me a line.

Comments

  1. I love that quote. Hope you find the source. Meanwhile, I’d been told that titles couldn’t be copyrighted, anyway. Books and films occasionally come out with the same title as an older book / film (usually by accident) – so I wonder what grounds they’re using.

  2. Loading your multiple blogrolls from blogrolling.com via JavaScript is what’s killing your page load times. You need to either switch to PHP- or OPML-based loading.

    Unfortunately, the first requires PHP-based pages and the second requires server-side scripting-based pages like PHP, JSP, or even (horrors!) ASP to parse the XML-based OPML into HTML.

    Since my site is already PHP-based I first used the PHP-based blogroll loading. But the formatting from blogrolling.com truly sucked so I wrote my own custom PHP code to parse the XML-based OPML and finesse the HTML.

    If you want to switch to PHP-based pages, I’ll gladly give you the code.

    Don’t worry about having “.html” Permalinks when switching to “.php” pages. There’s an easy way to solve that with server-side or even client-side redirects to the new “.php” pages. (And I’m sure I could talk Scott into doing all of this for you. 😉

    BTW, happy birthday.

  3. Well, I can see the left side nav again, so that’s something. I’m using Firebird, which is Mozilla based.

    Also, maybe FOX secretly owns Al Franken’s publishing company in some complicated money laundering tax break sort of way.

    Come to the dark side! Let Scott PHPify your site! (It’s very easy when you start to learn it. Exactly like Basic.)

  4. Well, I’ve removed the blogrolls…and the page still ain’t loading.

    Though I’m happy to move to PHP — particularly if Don’ll do it — I want to know what the deal is with my page! The problems didn’t show up until I changed the subtitle code and I can’t figure out what I did wrong.

  5. Okay, more data of weirdness!

    I took the randomization code out entirely and put in a single subtitle. I took the blogrolling links off the left.

    It’s STILL NOT LOADING.

    Help!

  6. Using the Activity window in Safari I figured out the problem. A single URL on your page is failing to load because the host can’t be found:

    http://wander-lust.com/wanderlust.cgi

    Apparently this is supposed generate content which appears below your site meter.

    Even if you fix this problem your site will still load slowly due to the blogrolls. But I can be bribed with food into helping you convert to PHP. 😉

  7. The righthand bar is still missing for me in Mozilla Firebird sometimes. It’s caused by the Sitemeter code, and can be rather difficult to pin down, since it depends on the content that follows it.

    I posted a possible fix in the comments the last time you mentioned this.