NOTE 2009: Another old thing that is undoubtedly useless these days, thou it was fun at the time.

I was browsing over at the MovableType Forums and I came across this thread where a guy wanted to link his stylesheet to the output of the Terrorism Alert Plugin. The idea was that his site would have a different skin for each alert level, updated by the plugin on every rebuild.

He was helped to do this by the usual astonishingly bright and creative crew over there.

But, it got me to thinking, what if some poor soul was dependent upon MY stylesheets to know how terrorized to be??? I mean, I only post irregularly, and what if the terror alert went up to red in between postings, and my reader didn't realize he was supposed to be scared to death!

Or what if the alert level went down between rebuilds, and the poor reader didn't know he could relax about teror attacks and start being scared witless by SARS and the economy!

Nope. That would never do. So, the only answer was to cook up a PHP version of the terror alert script, so that my site will be up to date ... even if something happens to me. Remember, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you!"

That's a demo in the upper right corner of this entry, and there's another bit of terror business using this script in the left sidebar.

Okay, well, I realized that I had cooked up a slow, heavy-handed way to "scrape" the DHS site and extract the alert level, so we wouldn't want to invoke it with every hit, nor would we wish to overtax the government server (so to speak). So I threw in a little scratch file that would hold the current information, and allow you to set the time between updates - in the case below, it's four hours, but it's easy to change to a higher or lower frequency.

Just put a blank file named "alert.dat" in the same directory as the script, and chmod it to 777. That way, most of your hits are taking the info from that file and it's very fast. You only scrape the government once every four hours.

Other than that, the script below is very straightforward - the output statements here just echo the alert level and its definition, change the background color to the alert color, and display the graphic image, but you could just as easily make them stylesheet declarations, file pointers, or anything else. I've included the graphics and colors just so you can comment out what you don't want, and use the code for templates for what you do want.

There is a little demo here.

So, if you're into this sort of thing, just copy the PHP below, paste it inline as I did at the beginning of the entry, or in a separate window as above, or make an include, and in any case proceed to scare yourself silly