Secrets of the City

Matt-

What, you
don’t like how
Rex makes the lines
increase in length like this?
I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed.

-Aaron

Hey, he can’t even type luggage. Give him a break.

I wish I could read about the nudists, but I am at work. Sad face.

S4xton: this jedi skill requires years of training.

From the NWA grenade article:

She says the attendant told deputies she purchased the grenade at an Army surplus store as a present to bring home for her son.

What mother gives their son a hand grenade? “Thanks Mom!”

Matt- I’ll give you a hard time for awhile. I’ve almost gotten to the point where I’m emailing Rex on a weekly basis about typos.

Thrice weekly.

S4xton, did you miss “miscellaneous” in the header?

All that money for a private school education… still can’t spell. Thanks. I’ll take credit for “lugage”, but “miscellanous” was all rex cuz I copied his title from yesterday. (Both are now fixed, s4xton.) Please keep the corrections coming. I’m going to need all the help I can get until school’s over.

Well, s4xton, she is from Tennessee. My favorite part about that story is the headline: it reads like she had to go sit in her room and write “I will not bring grenades on a plane” 100 times.

I missed “miscellaneous.”

I also noticed that Matt’s links are not set to open into a new window like Rex’s are. Makes no difference to me as I open them into new tabs myself, but other people might notice.

spaceman- good point. =)

OK, now I’m registered, and just remember, Matt, target=”new”

Thanks for pointing out the same-window links. Also now fixed.

Wouldn’t that be “target=”_blank”?

They should both work, although I believe target=”new” will first look for an existing window labeled “new” and if it finds one, use that rather than opening a brand new window each time (as “_blank” does). Not much difference, I know.

If I’m wrong you can shoot me.

NO MORE LINKS OPENING IN NEW WINDOWS!!!

It’s so annoying!

And you know what…if you want links to open in new windows, you can do that on your own. Even Mac people.

I know, because I own a Mac and I open links in new windows all the time — but only on my terms.

Duly noted.

s4xton, so you’re the one responsible for mucking up my google reader RSS feed consumption of mnspeak. Every time mnspeak fixes one of the typos you point out, google views it as a new article and it goes back onto the unread list.

I suppose the real fix is to add unique identifiers to the articles entries in the RSS feed, so that RSS readers don’t look for differences in the description, but I’ll blame spelling pedants before pushing for a technical fix any day.

ry4an-

I can’t say I mind being held responsible for how MNspeak and Google interact via RSS. Sorry, I’m not going to fix that.

So Matt, how are you with ColdFusion?

-Aaron

I’m more of an ASP.NET guy myself. Just bought myself a dummies book, though.

I agree fully with Luke on the links not opening in their own windows. As I see it there are two reasons for a site to do that:

1) They genuinely think it’s what their reader want and that their users don’t know how to do it on their own (middle-click, option-click, etc.)

2) They want to keep readers from leaving so as to maximize ad views.

They’re both valid reasons, but I don’t think the first applies here, and I hope the second isn’t enough to justify the annoyance.

Reason for why I do it:

3) I just like it that way.

ry4an – I thought it was for a modified version of your second reason. Not just for ad views, but more to hold people to the site… as if MNspeak.com assumes you’ll always want to come back (to discuss) after reading the article/blog/photo/whatever was that MNspeak.com linked to. For people that don’t think MNspeak.com is the center of the universe, I can see how that could be annoying. I’m sure that many users think both ways. Again, I control-click and make a new tab, generally so it doesn’t bother me.

If I ran this site I’m not sure which way I’d do it: It’s a balance between respecting a probably large portion of your community that doesn’t like it and respecting the need to lead people back to the site after they’re done reading what you’ve linked to.

I’m glad I don’t have to decide.

-Aaron

I suspect that Aaron/s4xton is correct that most people (if they understood the question and cared enough to even bother answering) would prefer to have the new-window behavior left up to them (option-click, middle-click, etc.) vs. have no way to open-in-same-window without a copy/paste. I know that on the net at large the only sites one sees that pop up a new window for all links are those which know they’ve got novice users and those trying to keep eyeballs for hit counts for add revenue. I think google even has a preference wherein one can request that all the links on search results open in new windows (which might be the best solution but likely isn’t worth the effort), but they certainly don’t do it by default.

That said, it’s absolutely not a big deal. Someone who really cared could easily write a greasemonkey script to fix it themselves.

I certainly don’t care enough to, and recognize that this diversion has bored most people 5 messages ago.

ry4an-

Whew, that was fun.

You can call me Aaron by the way. I must say you’ve got great style to have a 4 in your name.

…anyway, about the grenade…

-Aaron

Thanks, s4xton. Difference is, I put the number there legally. Let’s just say that when dorky and rebellious intersect one ends up with extraneous digits in one’s name. It only gets harder and harder to justify with each passing year.

As for the grenade. I almost certainly bought one of those for $5 at an army surplus store when I was young. I give the lady full points for understanding what’s cool to young boy and wonder at her lack of understanding about how the world is now.

ry4an, I disagree on the “most sites” point. This is almost exclusively not true for media sites, from nytimes.com to cnn.com to pretty much whatever you name. However, you’re right that it’s true for most sites that are also applications. I suppose it is arguable if mnspeak is more application or more media.

Rex, I’d say it’s not about media vs. application but mostly about advertising vs. non-advertised, with search engines being the exception because they’re all about sending you somewhere else.

And I think “people need to stay here and look at our adds” is a perfectly valid reason to new new window pop-ups, despite the majority of users likely prefering having the option left up to them. If less ad revenue means less mnspeak, I’m all for whatever keeps people here to boost the #s.

No, I don’t think that’s true. In my experience with a lot of online media companies, the people who make these kinds of decisions are top online editors — people who went to J School. Their rationale is ethical, not financial. New windows are supposedly a signifier that you are exiting the journalistic credibility of the source site.

Regardless of whether those assumption are right or wrong (are people that dumb? what is credibility?), I don’t think it’s an advert impression issue, especially since using the “back” button would invoke another impression that target=_blank wouldn’t.

(For the record, MNspeak doesn’t currently count ad impressions, so the point doesn’t apply here.)

I’m sure you’re right that “this is a separate site” is part of it, but I don’t doubt that the top online editors are quite aware that keeping people on their site is good for their site and let that factor into their decision as well. Additionally, media sites consider most of their content to be in their site and the links are just gravy. Aggregator sites like mnspeak have a link in almost every story and usually the bulk of the content is there.

I’d say the best argument for using a new window on a site like mnspeak is so that after the person has read the article they’ve still got a browser window (or tab) open to the comment form so they can contribute. That might be reason enough to force the decision rather than leaving it up to readers.

I know 95% of the time I use the middle-click on the links on MN speak so I can easily comment if there’s something I want to say. The 5% of the time I try to actually leave mnspeak by clicking on a link and going to the target URL’s site, and it doesn’t work, I just swear at you mentally and forget about it. It couldn’t be less of a big deal.

Apropos of nothing, the STrib has a brilliant headline right now: Hamas victory snarls Mideast peace picture.

First, how does one snarl a picture? Second, what is this alleged “peace picture”?! Wouldn’t it be more accurate to write something like “Hamas victory makes Mideast only slightly more fucked”?

The author of the Rake article gave the ‘Norsemen’ the invention of the sauna. Grandma Rhauha is rolling over in her grave…

Who cares what window opens where. Let’s get back to the nudism. Good article.