Category: On the Web

Mary Worth’s Howl

A couple of days ago I linked to a Tumblr site mashing up Peanuts strips and Smiths lyrics. Of course, I found it via Mefi originally. In that thread someone jokingly riffed that Mary Worth should be paired with Alan Ginsberg’s Howl.

Which cortex thoughtfully threw together here: http://www.joshmillard.com/2013/08/15/mary-worths-howl/. Which is yet another reason why Mefi is so awesome.

Another thing to do

Also, because I lack a comprehensive bookmark management system these days: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/print.

I don’t expect many of my right-leaning acquaintances will enjoy reading this so you have been forewarned.

The project? A wiki that documents the web of connections between movement conservatives and their dealings in the marketplace. There would also have to be some faceted navigation to that data dump lest one get bogged down in the fog.

The marketing angle presented in the link is something I’ve often mulled when listening to local AM talk radio during its interminable run of commercials. Things like how most answers to your economic woes are investment opportunities in numismatics presented as investment in their underlying metals. Other things like as you get later into the evening, the likelihood that the particular personality will be pimping their most recent book will increase geometrically. I used to think that Colbert doing the latter was distasteful until I recently realized it is another satirical bit.

I’d go on, but then I’d be getting preachy. And I’ll save that for the wiki project.

A fun little thing

The Romney campaign’s web site is coded with a bit of an open loop. It makes sense from a dynamically generated website perspective I guess. However, it’s also the sort of thing that lazy RESTful programming gets you. The idea being that you have a template that is populated by values from a data store based on parsing the URL that lands you there. The lazy was of doing things is to just assume that every value passed is valid. The smart way of doing this is to check to see if you have something useful for that value and to redirect to some kind of error if not.

For example, the good way of doing this is this very blog. Let’s say you want to see every blog entry published in 2012. You’d use the address http://blackfez.com/2012. Let’s say you’re on to the trick and want to see every blog entry published in 1948. You’d type http://blackfez.com/1948. Notice how the second link redirects to an error page? This is smart. And relatively simple. You just check your input before going off to render stuff.

Enough of the theory, why is this fun? Because with lazy RESTful programming you can do stuff like this:

Anyway. It’s fun. At least to me. It’s also a bit of lazy programming and leaves the Romney campaign open to some needling. And it seems like the last thing the guy needs is another exposure to ridicule.