A Side Note

You may notice that I added a little box with a link to Dave Ramsey's site over there on the side. His articles are a wonderful introduction to those not familiar with The Teachings Of Dave :) and a reminder to those of us working on our Total Money Makeover to keep beating up on our debt.

It wasn't easy to make that little box work the way I wanted it to. If you're not a script geek, you should stop reading now. The following is not for the faint of heart.

The code they (the fine web guys at www.daveramsey.com) provide for just "adding to your own web site!" doesn't work on blogger, I guess because of the style sheets or the page processor/publisher or something. They (Dave's team) have a bit of src linked javascript you're just supposed to stick where ever you want their content and that, in turn, uses document.write to add the current content in the right place.

But like I said, it doesn't work with blogger at all. And I didn't like the text link that they add under their box anyway. So, I created a js feeder that rips their rss feed, re-packages it as variables (http://musak.mp3-best.com/dave.asp) , and then another onload function on this page uses that data to get the content and make the update. I tried to do it with XmlHttp but the cross-site scripting security makes that impossible to do without iframes and lots of tomfoolery.

While I was at it, I made the content random from all the available bits inside the feed, so you get one of the bits that's there, and not necessarily the most "current" bit.

Finally, I added a variable that I can update on the server to indicate what Baby Step we're on.

If you want to try this kind of thing on your site, drop me a line. I can change the 'babystep' var to an array with names (like 'Jeremy and Sarah') and step number (like 2), and then give you a custom js src for ya.

UPDATE: added the little [next] thing so you can scroll through all the items in the array from the current rss feed.