News Factoids?

[John Iliff]

I have a personal Web space I've been playing around with. 
It's mainly a place I use to run through JavaScript, CGI stuff, and 
lately PHP3. One of my "play" scripts is a random pop-up box generator 
that I hobbled together from several sources. It's JavaScript- 
so it won't work in older browsers, but it does retroact fairly well. 
With this script, I've been presenting little random news bytes 
(primarily from foreign newspapers and govt. sources.) It's trivia 
that tickles my fancy, all activated with a mouse click.

Today, I struck upon this idea. There are currently eight of these 
news stories, and I plan to provide a new one each week to replace 
the older ones (thus they'll cycle in eight week intervals.) If anyone
in the library world is interested I'll be glad to send you the updated 
stories each week as well as share the code. Consider this a bit of 
content to add to your Web sites, intranets, or extranets. I'll be 
glad to help anyone with configuration. It's very easy to implement.

My motivation? First, I think it'd be fun. Also, I am working for 
the private sector now, after ten years in "regular" library work, 
and I miss the contact with other libs. Also, I know if any librarians 
out there use this script, the work will be improved considerably by 
suggestions from my colleagues. No one judges Web resources better than 
librarians, imho.

To see how the Random News Factoids work go to: http://207.69.70.23  - 
you'll see the option to start the random news factoids. Because each 
box generated is done so randomly, some of the stories will repeat before 
unviewed ones have appeared. I like this, the randomness of the process. 
It's the math in the code that causes this to happen. Also, sometimes 
the boxes, like any page on the Internet, take a little while to load. 
It's the nature of the medium. 

Please contact me if you have questions, comments, absolute distaste 
for this idea, or want the code and the weekly news factoids.

Thanks,

John Iliff
on Coquina Key
4307 Tarpon Drive Southeast
St. Petersburg, FL 33705
727.822.0522
pp001654 at mindspring.com
http://www.mylibrarian.com 

and also ....


John Iliff
Internet Research Librarian
Global Employment Solutions, Inc.
jiliff at hrlibrary.com
http://www.hrlibrary.com
"The Bookmark for Human Resources"