Updated multiple times per day

Politicalgatewa — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 07:24:15 +0000

The feeds are always updated during the day and night...all hand picked news.

I just got picked up by a few syndicators like allheadlinenews, news4sites, worldnews.com, and a few smaller ones...

Let me tell you, when your news gets syndicated the hits come in waves and waves of people.

I write my own code to try to find unique visitors as best as possible without all the 'extra visits' most scripts show you...

Uniquely and without bots, as best as I could tell, I was approaching around 900 a day (24 hour period)...

This last tuesday (right after the google update unfortunately) is when I got picked up...

I went to 4500 unique visitors in the first 24 hours. A substantial amount of forum links (people using a news link to prove a point) popped up also...

It really is incredible....

When you first get some kind of tracking script you always check it and see cool things...like "a new site referral" and things like that.
I used to check every ten minutes just to see....

I stopped that and just check daily until this week....
I just sat there adn kept refreshing for hours as hundreds of site referrals came from all over...

Absolutely wild to watch it.....

fusioncroc — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 15:09:12 +0000

I like the site and have registered for a news feed but is it updated

P.s I Like The Temlate / Design

Politicalgatewa — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 22:48:28 +0000

All good things come to those who wait....

whooo hoo

A new member is using my news feeds,

http://www.kcwy13.com

you can see the news under national news, on the right hand side..

whoo hooo!!!!!

Bob

Politicalgatewa — Tue, 18 May 2004 18:28:08 +0000

The news feed was written by a programmer (I am building new ones)... I forgot about that invisible layer...lol... I put that in last year thinking search engines would ifnd my site, only to realize that inserted javascript is read differently...and it was useless... Thanks for reminding me about that...hee hee

None of the sites have any problems with them. Only a few use the photos, most use them as just news items/links

The iframe cannot be 750.... and even if it was it would still mean taking the whole middle section of somoeones site up I think...

The reason for 760-800 (with scroll bars 800) is the content of the candidates. It is not static and due to photo galleries and massive content additions (more is on the way) a white space of 480-500 (when pushed) is mandatory.. Adding the two navs on the sides, as small as I could make them, still fills it out..

Plus the information in the search engine part must be allowed to grow a bit (the select boxes) as longer names and offices are added...

The problem here is the candidates add all this into a database and I dynamically throw it all up...so due to the nature of 'problem' candidates and the info they want to add I have to give them room to pop the stuff up.

The iframe I just put up this morning to see how it would work...(and that is the branding I meant, someone else posted something about graphics and branding....)...Branding meaning, by adding a query to the url of the iframe, inforamtion about the site that is calling the pages will show up in the iframe content itself..

such as "In conjunction with mysite.com"
Special preset news feeds or other info per the members control panel can be shown on some non-content search pages... and the like.

The branding that they spoke of is nice, but the idea and concept behind the site is a non-corporate one. A 'one person' operation so to speak not beholden to special interests. I am having a logo done, but no luck getting it finished yet. I really am striving to make it personal and non corporate.

Also, since the 70 million voters in the US that are online are dominated by a majority of older persons (the ones who actually go to political sites) I had to opt for a very linear and 3-4 color system allowing for text increases as much as I could...that is the nightmare...

I will check out the WAP... My biggest problem is finding out how to, without a doubt, get the correct user agent string and 'know' it is a WAP appliance so they can be diverted to the proper pages.... That info is spotty at best as they keep coming out with more browsers but no one identifying standard.. (most will say WAP or some other term, but not every one....)

Bob\

Sue- thanks for the conversation and the ideas and the constructful criticism.. It is so rare to find anyone that will say anything other thatn "looks great' or 'looks fine' or 'I didn't go'.... seems most people really don't care at all....lol

This forum rocks

Suzanne — Tue, 18 May 2004 18:15:58 +0000

Politicalgatewa wrote: That link is not yahoos main page...look at their main apge and tell me about single column.... apples and oranges..

I purposefully used the main News page because it's an entry point. Yahoo has a much larger more diverse selection of offerings than you have. Even still, their main page is two columns. Then in the main large column, there are other columns.

http://www.zerocattle.com/examples/images/yahoo_2cols.jpg

Quote: I will take my clean low graphic index page over their horrendous 5,000 item page any day.... apples and oranges...

You're right, it is apples and oranges to compare Yahoo's main page to your main page. Again, that's why I chose the News Page instead. If you don't like YahooNews, look at http://news.google.com/ instead. The point is that these large sites that people GO TO to read their news, they don't jam as much as possible into their sites. They leave some room.

Quote: 800 should be a standard...over 50% of my visitors still use displays of 800, and mine is 760 if you look at the information inside of content, not enclosed table size...lol

Exactly! There shouldn't be scroll at browsers set to 800 pixels wide, but there is with your iframe because IT is set to 800 pixels wide which doesn't allow for the space of the scroll bar, the browser chrome, and any bars the user has set up for him/herself.

Quote: The idea is to get people who are used to such sites as the drudgereport.com and sayfiereview.com to pop up and use my site for news linkage too.... Since most of the feed links go outside my site as does theirs, I am trying to stay inside of the one page industry standard for such linking news sites....best I could do...

I don't know what to say to that. Other than you need to a) state the source of the news links and b) restructure your "one page" so it doesn't look like the classifieds.

Suzanne — Tue, 18 May 2004 18:06:25 +0000

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/wap/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/csstalking/

And so:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/designingforcontext/
http://www.webstandards.org/learn/resources/css/

Eric Meyer knows more about CSS than the original authors, I think. Any book by him will be an education. You can learn more -- http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/writing.html

Suzanne — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:51:48 +0000

I know you have two services -- the iframe for the elections and the general political newfeeds, right? I combined my opinion about them in one paragraph, I can see how that was confusing.

iframe

http://www.politicalgateway.com/elections/iframe/cand.html?id=38&xid=38&xrid=34&xs=57&xc=34295&xy=2004

There is no reason why that has to be 800 wide. You could make it fit 750 wide easily. Where does that content come from? Is it a static page on your site for that candidate? Or does it come from a database? If it comes from a database it doesn't need to be set up in the same way, and you could allow different access that sets colours, only parts of the information, et cetera. Most definitely you could allow the user (candidate?) to style it as they please.

newsfeeds

The front page of your site is too crowded and too wide. Period. I looked at a number of the sites that use your feed and they are also too crowded. They have different options -- some have the image and the link, some have the link and the description, some have all three. None of the sites that I looked at (I looked at 13, a selection) were well designed or appeared to have any sort of traffic at all. It's good that you have options, but you are serving them bad code that they cannot control.

document.writeln('<div id="pgcom345"  <<
style="position:absolute;  <<
width:46px; height:2px; z-index:1; visibility: hidden;">  <<
<a href="http://www.politicalgateway.com/index.html">  <<
<font size="-7">News From Political Gateway</font></a>  <<
</div>');document.writeln("</p>

That's the first couple of lines. Non-standard, and will cause validation errors. Added line breaks marked with "<<".

Politicalgatewa — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:37:00 +0000

Tony Randall died today....

He was such a good actor, it was a pleasure watching him as I grew up..

:lovesick:

Politicalgatewa — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:33:38 +0000

Suzanne wrote: The good news, Bob, is that if you code to standards, and use CSS, you don't need WAP. One less acronym on your plate. Unfortunately you left off graphic and information design on your list of things to learn...

If you have the knowledge of the different wireless systems that can turn regular html pages into WAP pages specifically designed for small size and Kb browsers I would pay handsomely for the book...big time...

To use my database on a wireless phone without all the graphics and overhead with simple CSS standards would save me months of hard work with PHP/WAP languages...turn me on to that book!! I am all for it (I hate this wap integration with PHP, freaking nightmare,....and very non-"show me" in the instructions... (like reading the W3C docs lol)

Politicalgatewa — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:26:25 +0000

Suzanne wrote:

Take a look at a site like, say, YahooNews. Instead of going for multi-column, they have gone for one thin, one larger. Look at your newspaper (print) -- most often the style is the same. As you go DEEPER into the paper, you will find multi-column pieces, and when you get to the classifieds it's column heaven.

That link is not yahoos main page...look at their main apge and tell me about single column.... apples and oranges..

I will take my clean low graphic index page over their horrendous 5,000 item page any day.... apples and oranges...

800 should be a standard...over 50% of my visitors still use displays of 800, and mine is 760 if you look at the information inside of content, not enclosed table size...lol

The idea is to get people who are used to such sites as the drudgereport.com and sayfiereview.com to pop up and use my site for news linkage too.... Since most of the feed links go outside my site as does theirs, I am trying to stay inside of the one page industry standard for such linking news sites....best I could do...