MediaSavvy

I’m spending time every day deleting spam from MediaSavvy. The worst part is having to rebuild the entire site every time I delete a single spam. Perhaps I need to switch to a dynamic CMS like Expression Engine, so that I don’t have to do this.

Meanwhile, my email spam filter managed to move a couple of important messages into my spam folder. I don’t blame SpamSieve, which I love. I blame the spammers for making this whole process necessary.

Finally, I get a dozen spam faxes for every fax I want. This has been going on ever since I used my fax to send a message to efax.com. You can’t tell me they didn’t sell my number to the spammers.

Detecting spam has become an entire industry.

Technology is insufficient and the law is insufficient. You need both to solve this mess. What really galls me is that the direct marketing industry has fought every step to help solve the problem and given us a law that is completely inadequate to the task. Apparently, they can’t tell the difference between what they do and what the spammers are doing. If they can’t, how are we supposed to?

[This note was rewritten. The original post was eaten by a Safari bug exacerbated by the way Movable Type posts messages.]

Steve Outing asks why so many Web sites put their (fixed-width) content flush-left in the browser window, and not in the center.

I’m not a designer, but I know why I do it. When you have centered pages and go from one site to another, the location of the top left of the page in the browser window is going to move every time you go from one site to another.

I find news.com’s centered presentation very disorienting when I move there from pretty much any other site.

Eliminating fixed-width layouts is also better because they give designers the illusion of more control of presentation than they really have. Fixed width for navigation and advertising columns is more justifiable, but content should be set free and more control over presentation should be ceded to the user.

Tim Porter asks if there is a name for news stories whose newsworthiness depends on what’s happening in the media, and not the event itself.

It is a news media story about alleged lies made to the news media by a man whose notoriety depends solely on the news media. Accompanying the story, is a picture of the news media (in the person of Diane Sawyer) interviewing Peterson. Calling rhetoricians: Is there a word for this type of circular coverage? I call it informational incest.

How about “meta-journalism”?

I never thought I’d program a Web page.

I’ve done a little programming, but on the Web I have been happy to either create static pages or to use a content management system. My Web programming has been limited to using includes to modularize my pages and tossing CMS macros onto my pages.

But since I’ve started building Coastsider [password required for the next week or so], I’ve started using PHP. I started using it against my will, just to get some of the “templates” that came with my classified software to look like the rest of the site. Then, I started using it to create forms for my users.

Yesterday, I created a page that interfaced to the Terraserver’s satellite photo database, including panning and zooming. It’s empowering to be able to build software into your web pages. It’s barrier-shattering to be able to mix code with HTML to do simple tasks and to interface to your content management system. The architecture of PHP encourages experimentation.

No more than a small number of individual Web site publishers will ever do much coding. On the other hand, I now think that increasingly powerful content management systems will encourage programming, rather than make it unnecessary.