22
October
2003
12:50 PM
In the early eighties, I worked graveyard shift for a manufacturing company just north of Austin. In one room, on a table by itself, stood a lone terminal that was wired to the world. If you knew the codes, you could tap them in on its chiclet keyboard and Reuters headlines would scroll onto the screen, glowing green letters on a black background. I think it would also do stock quotes, and that might've been its real purpose, but I was a poor mouse and cared nothing for stocks.
I would slip into that room on break, or during a slow spell, and key in the Reuters code, and get a preview of what would be in the morning paper when I got off work. It's the only perk I can recall for that job, which was otherwise so crap that when I got my letter for grad school I was hard put to contain my glee as I told my boss she'd need to put an ad in the paper.
So when I saw on shatnerian earlier this month that John had worked a wheeze with the CBC to put up ever-changing headlines on his blog, I made a note to get to the source of this. (Without, of course, asking him, since that's no fun.)
Took most of this morning to tweak their CSS to suit my sideboard, but there 'tis: a no-ad newsfeed to warm the cockles of my heart.
OK that's pretty cool - haven't a clue how you did it though - I assume they have an RSS feed that you re picking up but no idea how you post it to there :-)
btw - how did you get on KICS servers? I've dealt with them a number of times over the years from when I was tech support for a large ISP in this area and we hosted their server for them as a favour and later after the ISP was sold helpin to keep them in the only building in the area with a fiber feed. Just curious how a coastie ended up on a local Kootenay community server :-)
If you click on the CBC link, it'll take you to a sign-up page for the headline thingie. Once they've made sure you're not an Evul Entity, you get a logon and password to a wizard that lets you pick what headlines you want, and (to a degree) what format you want to use.
For some reason, their javascript creates tables rather than divs, but on the plus side, you can copy the CSS code into a text doc and tweak it till it's just what you want.
Almost. I would be absolutely happy if I could get a link to a CBC logo with a transparent background. The white is annoying me. But that's handled by the JS, so I'm out of luck there. I think I could pull in the feed on a hidden page, swap with a local pic, then push the result into the main page, but I actually don't know any javascript and besides, it doesn't feel quite ethical.
I got a referral to KICS from a friend right here in town. I thought at first they might not want to host someone not in the area, since it's so clearly a non-profit, community boosting operation, but they didn't have a problem with me. And I have to say, they offer a really nice package on very reasonable terms. It's not everyone who will toss in a shell account, along with the rest of it.
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