http://www.perilsofleisure.com

how does the left content part work?

i know it uses a style-sheet, and it looks like its all pre/loaded...  i'm a beginner in .css so speak clearly and in english please  :)

thanks in advance.

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking.  How the styles work?  How to make blog content in the sidebar?

It looks to me like they probably have two blogs - a main one, and then a Daily Peril one that shows on the sidebar.  This can be done with php or ssi.

If you specify what you are trying to do, one of us can help.

Kristine

Ahhhh, there's a lot more going on than that - the author is using Javascript (I think?) layers to show a different included blog depending on the text you click right above the sidebar.

I'm jealous!!!! It's an awesome thing to behold.

Geez, did we break it? Now I can't get the site at all in my browser.

Oh, I didn't look that deep into it.  Very cool.  It does look like javascript is controlling it when I look at the source.  

But I see the page still, Girlie, so maybe just YOU broke it?!  Just kidding!


Kristine

Well, it actually looks like it's been slashdotted.

Allow me to display my ignorance and ask: What the heck does that mean??

That is a really cool Script working there.  Anyone wanna reverse engineer it??

Slashdotting is actually a term related to the site www.slashdot.org.
The site lists news, etc and when A site is mentioned on slashdot, everyone who reads it tries to access the site mentioned.  This of course overloads the sites (not slashdots) server and the site crashes.  It creates a situation similar to a Denial of Service Attack except its legitimate traffic causing the problem.

The term is being used more and more generically for a site getting overloaded and crashing because it was mentioned on TV or the internet for some reason.

Another synonymn is "The Screensaver Effect" in relation to the TV show on TechTV.

Okay, I thought it was something like that - but of course, my first thought was to check Slashdot.org and see if they had mentioned the site for some reason!

So while I got the gist of it, I didn't realize it had become a generic term for site overload due to a link being posted *anywhere*. Heh.

Thanks!  :D

girlie is right on what i'm trying to ask how to do...

any luck w/ the "reverse engineering"?

The Perils of Leisure is actually run by my friend Paula -- I asked to her explain how she built the page and she said she'll try to post something today.

woohoo... that would be nice.

Oh, thanks Mena - that would be great!

Kristine

Hi Everyone,

Mena asked me to respond to this thread and give you all info on how I assembled the five-blog sidebar on my weblog.

Basically, the page consists of five blogs. The main blog, on the right-hand side was assembled in the basic way one assembles a blog - by putting the appropriate MT tags into the area one wishes the content to appear within.

The sidebar consists of five DHTML layers set in Javascript to show or hide, depending upon the button click behavior on the buttons up top. Four of the layers contain blogs.

I set each blog up as I would any basic blog - following the instructions for creating a directory, entering appropriate info, etc. - and then used SSIs (Server Side Includes) to pull the content into each layer.

The blogs created for the sidebar SSIs need no elaborate template because they appear within a larger designed template. Therefore, the templates for those blogs consist of ONLY the tags that one would normally use to display content. In other words, the tags you would place to control where your posts appear on your blog is the only piece of code you need to input into the template area of those sidebar blogs (or any blogs being pulled into another page using SSIs).

After you input the appropriate MT tags into the template areas of the sidebar blogs, you need to include the SSI string within each DHTML layer on the main blog's template (the template for the page that the blogs appear within).

And, that's it.

I hope this helps. I'm not a tech person and sometimes have difficulty explaining this stuff, so if I seemed unclear, please let me know and I'll do my best to clarify.

And, thanks to everyone for the kind words. :-)

Paula

this is kind of late, but someone asked what "slashdotted" means.  There is a website, http://www.slashdot.org that is one of the most widely-read websites out there.  It's run entirely by geeks, and it is one of original weblogs ever to be published (it's been around for over 5 years).

There's a nasty tendency of any site linked to in a slashdot post to have its bandwidth exceeded - so, if you don't click on the link in the first ten minutes or so of its posting, the site won't load because of hosting overload.  THAT is called slashdotting.  If something is slashdotted, it has been shut down by too many people trying to view it.