ok do you at least like my hairstyle in that video? i was trying to do something a bit out of the ordinary there.

OK - looked briefly at the polio information -- it's actually compelling data and I will do further research as a result.

You seem to (at times) disparage vaccines in the same context as polio -- there is no indication that vaccines caused polio by this data, but rather that polio was caused by DDT, and the, therefore, the vaccine was of no benefit.

Not sure what that necessarily has to do with vaccines in general...but clearly there is an indication that Polio comes from DDT - which is not beyond belief.

ddt causes infant paralysis. only 1% of kids with infant paralysis were tested for polio. and i would not trust that lab work either, they were doing everything they could to come up with a positive result because there "clearly was polio" and if a lab kept getting negative results they would not be trusted by doctors anymore. but even with all that only a half of those tested for polio showed the virus.

anyway i dont think ddt causes polio, i think ddt causes infant paralysis and then doctors who didnt know any better and didnt test for polio just diagnosed it incorrectly.

Well, the page clearly tries to make a direct link between polio and the use of DDT by the public. again, I haven't read everything word for word, but I'm not sure how you can not take that away from the data as presented, particularly the re-release of DDT in the 80's and then the sudden rise "post-polio" cases in the US...i.e. when we have DDT, we have polio, when we have no DDT, no polio. Polio did exist before the discovery and use of DDT....

How odd that you put up information and then disagree with it...???

you are not understanding. do you know what polio is? doctors were diagnosing polio if they saw an infant that was paralyzed. or even fdr who ended up in a wheelchair after swimming in a heavily polluted lake. so those "cases" of polio on the graph are not saying that the people actually had polio they are saying those are the cases that doctors saw a paralyzed infant and blamed it on polio (in almost all cases without doing any testing for the virus). and the conclusion to draw is that these were misdiagnoses.

I profess to have no expertise in polio at all. I admit that I only glanced at the data in general and read a few conclusion on the page - I admitted this before.

I did see that the web page *does* try to draw a correlation between outbreak of polio and the research and use of DDT. That's what I saw...then I closed the web page and moved on, because I'm not interested enough to do much more beyond that.

But yes...I get it...the people didn't have polio, they had DDT poisoning and subsequent central nervous system damage, which was misdiagnosed as Polio.

I get it...DDT is the culprit. It's not surprising that the use of poison causes poisoning.

And from this point on, I don't really care much further.

I thought the best website in the universe was mine....

disappointed. i thought we would talk about this for hours keeping my website thread bumped at the top in the desperate hope of getting more visitors. well toxic chemicals do massively weaken your immune system, so people poisoned with these pesticides probably were more likely to have polio or the flu or anything else in their systems. you could probably dianose them with a lot of stuff. but yeah, i think the misdiagnosis due to nervous system damage is probably more significant.

blankflag, unless you're looking to become a web coding guru, I would strongly recommend implementing a content management system (CMS).

Nah, the best website in the universe is David Mitchell's SoapBox. Still, this may be worth a sniff at some point this weekend

i assume by implementing a cms you mean i should leverage an existing cms. i think in computer science implementing a cms means writing the code for a cms. but sure, a cms is nice. but to be honest i dont like them. they are really complex and i dont understand where everything is or how everything works. plus i cant force people to type comments in a specific way with a cms, but if i write my own comment box then i can force people to type comments how i want them...

but anyway what do you think is missing that is in a cms? maybe organizing the photos by subject or date or something? or structuring the site in some topical way?

the other thing is a cms will probably require people to register to comment, with an email address or something. i somehow doubt anyone would care enough to register on my site so that would just make me more depressed. the way it is now anyone can spam my comment page without registering.

anyway... but do you suggest any cms in particular? maybe i could look at it and see if i can learn something from it. or even maybe use it, depending on if i change my mind on the issue.

I use drupal myself. If you want something simpler, I would recommend wordpress. If you can know enough to fiddle with style sheets and the like, you know more than enough to fiddle with a CMS. And you can do everything with a CMS that you an do without it if you're willing to get into the guts of it.

I would say the main thing your site is lacking is structure. I don't even know what it's for or about just from glancing at it - most people will move on if they can't determine in a few seconds if your site is interesting to them.

As for the comments, you can implement different settings for comments. The way I have it on the one site that people actually look at, registered users can comment and unregistered users can also comment, but require moderator approval (doing otherwise will result in lots of spam).

my comment box right now requires you to type each character individually, paste is disabled, so spamming might be a bit harder unless the user is an actual hacker.

ok i will look into maybe tagging images with keywords or adding date stamps or creating website sections/subsections... if you think structure is the biggest issue. the ideal would be a dynamic structure where the users determine the structure... but maybe that is unrealistic.

Nearly all spammers are bots. Preventing humans from pasting text into the comment box is probably not going to stop them.

but the comment box isnt even a text entry element. i think most bots type into a text area or something. the raw html doesnt even have a form. when you click the link to send your comment, javascript reads what characters you have typed and make a form on the spot. but if a hacker wants he can just read the javascript file, find what the data is being sent and to what page, and then send the spam directly. i dont know how it works but there must be some program where you can give it a webpage and what to put as post data and it does the work for you. but presumably that takes slightly more work. obviously its not immune from spam.

apparently i accidentally made a minor change and uploaded to the site hours and hours ago that broke the comment box and i didnt realize it until now. which sucks. anyone who couldnt comment then should try now.

second point - apparently this site is full of crap by locking my bloomberg thread without allowing me to respond when it is very important information. i guess the site owners/moderators dont like free content and increased traffic. another reason, i guess, why i need to make my own site.