I wanted to do a fairly simple website for this web assignment. Since I’d suggested Craigslist in class I wanted to do something different, and the simplest website I could think of that wasn’t Craigslist that had a lot of content and would be easily editable was the Drudge Report. For those who are unfamiliar with Drudge (All two of you!) it primarily works as a news aggregator: it provides links to news stories, with only rare articles actually original to the site. It works, however, by drawing people’s attention to particular issues and articles, and by summarizing the content in a title, which is not always the same as the article’s title. So despite the simple format and the lack of original content, there’s actually quite a bit of somewhat-subtle manipulation of the content and freedom to create. Conceptually, I decided to focus on a zombie apocalypse combined with a certain strain of flu. I’m not sure why we have zombies on the brain this semester, but I figured I might as well join in.

First, I had to fix the really annoying tendency of Drudge to refresh at random intervals while I was working. (I guess that’s…an awesome feature when you’re at work and you’re too lazy to hit the refresh button, but it makes working really hard) With the help of Aaron and Jim Groom, I managed to find and destroy all the javascript that was causing it to do that. Of course, since I don’t know what I’m doing, I also deleted important parts of the scripts that affected how ads were displayed. So now instead of one ad at certain places on the screen, I had a half dozen, making it functionally unreadable. So I went back in, found the code for the ads, and terminated it with extreme prejudice. Eventually, the problem stopped. (This is why I should never be a computer programmer, president, or parent: my philosophy for resolving problems often consists of “Burn it all to the ground. It’s the only way to be sure.”) I left just one ad inside the code so that I could make my own to insert, which I did.

At that point, I could finally start the beautiful process of artistic creation. Also known as scribbling random ideas down in a notebook, forgetting about this project entirely, and then sitting down the day before and unleashing it most of it over a good cup of tea. (This is elaborate, iterative process that has taken me several years of college to perfect.) More seriously, I started by coming up with my own headlines and looking for pictures, but that started to take a really long time. As I soon realized, most of the headlines didn’t have pictures associated with them anyway, and I could work a lot faster if I used the original headline as a basis for my own. I also decided that it would be dumb to have live links to unrelated or slightly related articles when where the headlines linked to is actually a huge part of the “story” that I’m writing; there’s probably as much text hidden here as not, so please hover over the headlines and see where they link to, I worked hard on those. Most have some sort of joke or not-so-subtle criticism of some aspect of society. On a more meta level, I suppose I was satirizing not only society, but how news is aggregated and presented even after it’s written.

Enough explanation, though! Here’s the web story.

Before I wrap this up, however, I need to issue a disclaimer: I don’t own the Drudge Report, I have received no permission from anyone involved with any of the mentioned websites, organizations, or news sites, etc. The long list of news sources as well as the banner and the site layout have been largely left alone and are not my work. I also used several pictures that were not original to Drudge. As far as I can tell, they are all Creative Commons or in the public domain, so I did not receive permission to use any of them. They are listed below: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=180523001282&aid=244255#!/photo.php?fbid=180523721282&set=a.449648106282.244255.180523001282&theater

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Marine_One_Whitehouse.jpg

http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3400039523

http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/050222-F-0000W-018.jpg

http:// www.flickr.com/photos/luciuskwok/4063196874/ (I added a space before the www on this one so wordpress doesn’t automatically convert it to an image)

Enjoy!