This is True
by Randy Cassingham

"It's nearly impossible to read these and not laugh out loud." --Philadelphia Daily News

If this is confusing to you, just use the javascript version on the main TAD page -- it works for nearly everyone. Sorry, but we cannot help you implement this free feature on your server.

Again with the default settings (plus centering), it looks like this (PHP):

This is True® by Randy Cassingham Stories from Our Archives ©1994-2008

Since We’re Neighbors Let’s Be Friends Employees of the Safeway supermarket chain claim that a new company policy is leading to customers harassing them. Store employees are being sent to classes to teach them to make eye contact, be friendly, and smile at customers, but 12 employees have filed a grievance, saying that customers think they’re flirting with them. They report that some customers are now propositioning them or following them out to the parking lot. (UPI) ...But it’s so easy to fend them off: just tell them employees don’t get discounts on groceries.

Subscribe Free Get This is True by e-mail once a week Visit True • True Story collections Get This Service for Your Site

This was done by simply adding the line:

<? readfile ("http://thisistrue.net/cgi-bin/tad.pl?ssi=1"); ?>

to this page, and changing its extension to .php (vs .html, which is this site's normal page extension). This server is Apache on Linux. If you "view source" for this page you will see that the actual story text is shown, not the "readfile" line -- the server replaced the line with the file it was calling. That's the power and utility of SSI.

The "ssi=1" flag tells the True-a-Day application on our server to present its output in HTML, rather than javascript document.write calls.

For pure SSI applications, the above invocation may or may not work -- the very common Apache web server's SSI function does not allow includes from remote servers unless you use PHP! It can easily be made to work, however, using a proxy on your server, which is great if you don't want to use PHP. Here's how:

• Create the file proxy.pl in your cgi-bin directory with these three lines, verbatim: use LWP::Simple; print "Content-type:text/html\n\n"; getprint ($ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
• Make sure proxy.pl ownership and other attributes, including "executable", are correct for your system

• Call the TAD function with this line from your web page: <!--#include VIRTUAL="/cgi-bin/proxy.pl?http://www.thisistrue.net/cgi-bin/tad.pl?ssi=1" -->

Naturally, we don't have the resources to support all possible configurations, so you're pretty much on your own implementing these advanced versions of TAD. However, if you suspect a problem with TAD itself, we'd appreciate hearing about it.

If you're interested in the technical background on how these advanced SSI topics work, see this article on the subject.

Customization Options

As with the javascript version, you don't need to use any of these, but they are available to customize TAD's look for your site. Note the syntax is slightly different from the javascript version.

Parameter	Use	Example
float=	sets horizontal position TAD appears	float=right (can also use left)
width=	the number of pixels you want the TAD box to be, or the percentage of your page width (default: 55%)	width=500px or width=55%
headerbgcolor=	background color of the top and bottom cells (default: light blue -- ADD8E6)	headerbgcolor=white or headerbgcolor=FFFFFF (Note: the FFFFFF is the standard hexcode without the #)
bodybgcolor=	background color of the middle cell (default: beige -- F5F5DC)	bodybgcolor=FFFFFF or bodybgcolor=white

How to add the parameters to the script call:
Include one or more, without spaces, after the tad.pl part. The first parameter is the "ssi=1" and must start with "?". Any additional parameters are separated with a simple "&". Example:

<!--#include VIRTUAL="/cgi-bin/proxy.pl?http://www.thisistrue.net/cgi-bin/tad.pl?ssi=1&float=right&width=275px" -->

A Note Regarding XHTML Validation

Our tad.pl program outputs a stylesheet reference. While this works properly, it is technically not valid XHTML because it happens in your page's <body>, and may cause your page to fail to validate. If validation is a concern for you:

• Add the following anywhere in your page's <head> section:
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://thisistrue.net/tad.css" type="text/css" />

• Add the following parameter to your tad.pl call:
  style= (i.e., "style=" followed by nothing)