New Banner Image Explanation
November 6th, 2008Cryptogon’s global readership has been growing much faster than U.S. readership. In fact, there are now more non-U.S. readers than U.S. readers. As such, it was a bit silly of me to make a banner image that assumes knowledge of an American pop-culture icon. More than a few readers from outside the U.S. were baffled by the new image.
The Wikipedia page for Kool-Aid, especially the part about “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” should clear up any questions related to the banner.
Posted in Announcements | Top Of Page
In the upcoming Josh Brolin/Matt Damon movie about Harvey Milk, I read they’re downplaying the connection to Jonestown, but supposedly Dan White was partly angry about Jim Jones when he shot the mayor of San Francisco in the early 80s. The story is fascinating for all its cascading reactions. http://tinyurl.com/6fcdky
Thanks for changing it…as appropriate as old Roddy’s brain-washing image was, it was still really difficult to look at every day. And it probably made Cryptogon.com fairly NSFW (I certainly worked to make sure my family didn’t see it…).
BTW, I don’t get ANY banner pic at this time, just a white title-bar. I know it’s not my browser because it’s the same at both work and home.
@lagavulin
Hmm. What OS/browser are you running? I happen to have been on three different computers in different locations and it’s working as expected on Windows Firefox and Internet Exploder.
The image shows up fine in FireFox, I get the blank white title bar in Google Chrome though! Weird!
wow, that’s wierd.
the banner was blank when i entered the site, but after logging in, it showed up…
we didn’t have koolaid in nz in the 1970s, so the ad-inspired imagery is lost on me, but your verbal reference to koolaid is well understood. even if i really dislike that particular metaphor. nasty. ha.
Oh man… I know what this is… The problem has something to do with the caching software I recently started running. Logged in people don’t hit the cache. Which means…
I don’t know. Why wouldn’t the images pull from the cached files…
Ok, back to the drawing board. I hate computers sometimes.
Server side hotlink protection was preventing the cached files from pulling the images—only for people who weren’t logged in. Tochigi’s comment was the tipoff. When you’re logged in, you’re not hitting the cache, so it looks normal. Since I was logged in, it looked ok to me. Woops. Anyway, it should be working now for everyone, logged in or not.
Kevin – about the non-U.S. readership growing fast and representing the majority of users – I’d be curious to see a rough ‘poll’ of your readership, by nationality – not by which country they’re living in (I’m sure that amongst your readers there are plenty of expats such as myself, who don’t live in their country of origin).
How would you do this, you ask?
Well there is one way I think might work. If you have one of those sites (such as statcounter for instance) that ‘analyze’ the traffic to your site, there should be a way for the statistics site to see the language variable in the browsers of your site visitors. So take me for instance – although you’ll see that my IP is based in Italy, if you look at the environment variable you should see that I’m using Firefox in en-US (English-U.S.), which is a better guess at my nationality than which country my IP address belongs to. The theory being, people will have browsers in their native language rather than the local language. So a British reader living in Thailand for instance, might have the en-UK variable, though visiting cryptogon.com with a Thailand IP address.
It’s just a thought.. if you’re curious yourself and do it, let us know the results!
Banner comes up just fine now, even when not logged-in. How nice and cheery!
Thanks for the explanation š Is Kool Aid a bit like Ribena then?
@williamspd:
I just Googled Ribena. They’re similar only very vaguely. Ribena is a concentrate (I’m assuming that means like orange-juice concetnrate) containing real fruit juice. Kool-Aid is nearly completely artificially flavored powder one mixes with water and sugar (I use liquid saccharin instead of sugar). I guess a little bit of natural flavor is used in Kool-Aid power, but not much. It’s a shame the Jonestown mass-suicide gave Kool-Aid such a dark association. Before that, it was associated mainly with childhood and innocent fun (even though the brand is owned by a nasty big corporation).
“…see that Iām using Firefox in en-US (English-U.S.), which is a better guess at my nationality than which country my IP address belongs to. The theory being, people will have browsers in their native language rather than the local language. So a British reader living in Thailand for instance, might have the en-UK variable, though visiting cryptogon.com with a Thailand IP address.”
Dare to disagree š
Most people who are proficient with computers will use english as the operating system language default, since english is the de facto computer language. I cant stand native language apps – the words are weird and no nerd uses them in daily speak š
“Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3)”