jotsheet

Have you been following March Madness this weekend? If you haven’t, you’ve been missing out. And maybe you think UW-Milwaukee, a 12-seed that’s beaten Alabama and Boston College to reach the Sweet 16, is a beautiful Cinderella story. Well, it is, except for the rat at the helm of UWM: Bruce Pearl. He’s going to learn a hard lesson next outing: the Illini Nation has a loooong memory.

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Referrer (or referer) spam has become a serious problem in the blogosphere. We need an intelligent way to eliminate this growing nuisance. I’ve thought about and researched this for the past few days, and below I offer a proposal for a technological solution to this problem. It requires programming, and I am not a programmer, so I welcome suggestions, corrections, and improvements to this proposal.

I hope that this blog entry can serve as something of a starting point for information about referrer spam as well as a sandbox for exchanging ideas about methods of curbing or eliminating it.

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In part 1 of this three-part “Hyperlinking best practices” blogging miniseries, I talked about the most effective way to visually present hyperlinks. Now, in part two, I’ll describe how to visually convey to users whether a link is external to a website (that is, it is not located on the same domain) or internal (part of the same site).

Background: Why does it matter whether a link is “external” or “internal?”

If you’re on a website and you’re reading stuff on it, you probably want to be there. You might want to know that by clicking a link, you’d leave that site and visit another website, where the quality of the content would be unknown. Perhaps you’d be more willing to follow a internal link, thinking, “I like this site!” and less willing to follow an external link, thinking, “That’s probably a porn site with popups!” This is the premise behind distinguishing external, offsite links from internal links. Supplying users with this contextual information helps them make decisions about whether it’s worthwhile to click a link. One way to convey this information visually is with CSS3′s attribute selectors.

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I’ve struggled for a long time with how to best visually represent links on a Web page. (Yes, I know; I’m saddled with the weighty matters of the world.) Anyway, I’ve been turning it over in my mind for a while, and I finally put thought to action yesterday and implemented some hyperlinking best practices here on underscorebleach.net.

I figured I’d save you the trouble of contemplating the intracacies of hyperlinking usability and instead do a big write-up. So here’s a three-part series, with the next two parts soon-to-come.

1. Visual presentation of hyperlinks (this entry)
2. Distinguishing internal links from external, offsite links
3. “Branding” links to particular areas of your site (to be added later.. maybe)

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Many moons ago, when I was but a lad of 14, I was mesmerized as a classmate told me of new technology hitting the World Wide Web: frames. To say the least I was impressed. This frames stuff was hot. (Incidentally, that classmate was the son of Larry Smarr, former director of NCSA.)

But we users of Netscape 2.0 were young and naïve. Now we know better; frames suck(ed), for a variety of reasons. But frames were still useful, particularly in the way they presented content. The navigation was clear; the header was clear; the content was clear. As the user moved from page to page, much of the content remained static, imparting a feeling of security. Today, with the almost total depature of frames, the security blanket of frames has been lost.

Recovering the “security blanket”—with CSS

Today, I drew up a quick CSS layout for a coworker. It forced me to get back to the basics with CSS layouts, and I remembered a time a few years ago when I tried with limited success to use the position:fixed CSS property in a previous design. But as I composed this simple layout—header, nav, content area, and footer—I thought back to the position:fixed experiment. Maybe there was something useful there, after all. And maybe, a few years later and with a few more Web standards, well, standard, I could make it work.

So I mocked it up, real-simple like, and here ’tis:

Quasi-frames with CSS
(View source for HTML and CSS)

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A few months ago, I wrote up a little tutorial on stopping hotlinking (or hot-linking, also known as bandwidth theft) called Selective hotlinking prevention through .htaccess”>”Selective hotlinking prevention through .htaccess.” The idea was simple: prevent random users from stealing bandwidth while allowing defined directories to be hotlinked, e.g. for posting images on a message board. The technique described in the previous entry is still valid, but I’d like to describe an improved and more efficient approach to hotlinking prevention.

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If you’re a dorkwad like me, you might’ve looked at the jotsheet URLs and seen that there’s no extension there: no .html, no .php, no .shtml. Here, I can prove it: http://underscorebleach.net/content/jotsheet/2003/11/eu_budget

How do I do that? Good question. But first, you ask, why do I do that?

1. It makes the URLs future-proof: if my server-side approach (currently SSI) changes to PHP, there’s no need to change the file extension on all the files. Also, the same URL can be bookmarked, and you don’t have to mess with redirecting old URLs in a big honkin’ .htaccess (if you’d even bother with that).
2. Since Google
3. It looks cool. Nerd power. Uhh yeah

So, since it might be of some use to another small-time nerd out there, I figure I’ll share my approach to extensionless blog entries in Movable Type. It takes a little bit of doing, but by the time you’re done, you’ll be the coolest blogger on the block.

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