Talk:Header text

localized versions

Currently to me the header text is in German (as I live in Germany):

Triff Randall Munroe in Berlin am 15. Oktober 2019!

Hier die deutsche Ausgabe vorbestellen!

(Meet Randall Munroe in Berlin on 15th of October 2019! Preorder the german version here) where "Hier" (here) is a link. 4 odd things I noticed about this:

• It mentions the German version, but not the German verison of what. The book isn't even mentioned.
• When I (re)load the page, for a moment I get the image about winning a stick-figure-sketch of myself.
• XKCD does not use means like other pages (e.g. 713: GeoIP to identify my language. As I am using a swedish VPN, I usually get advertisements in swedish (and redirections to swedish homepages, etc.). Maybe it is my browser settings which are set to German. Can someone identify the method used?
• The link leads to "https://www.xkcd.com/%22https://www.randomhouse.de/Buch/HOW-TO-Wie-man-s-hinkriegt/Randall-Munroe/Penguin/e547637.rhd?utm_source=autorenblog&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=how_to\%22" - a 404 page. (getting rid of the part before the 2nd https gets you to the page of the german publisher.

Someone got an idea on how to put this into the wiki properly? Are there other language versions as well? --Lupo (talk) 06:38, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Yeah there is, in the UK the text changes to "I'll be coming to the UK for the book tour." There is Javascript in the page which sends a request to https://c.xkcd.com/how-to/news which is simply redirected (for me to https://xkcd.com/ukNews ) presumably based on GeoIP, definitely not a browser locale setting. Not sure how you would get them all, maybe iterate country codes through the start of the URL? I tried deNews which worked. 162.158.34.172 17:57, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Black lives matter

As a note to whoever archieves this (I don't have the time to do it properly myself right now), today I noticed the first time, that the header text, which I think was empty recently changed to a cueball stating "black lives matter" and a link "how to help" to joincampaignzero.org. It might have been up for a few days. --Lupo (talk) 06:48, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

✓ Done; sorry I didn't notice your post here on the talk page before adding it. It seems like we should feature this article page more prominently somehow so people become aware of it. I'm not sure how that should be accomplished. JohnHawkinson (talk) 19:00, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

No need to be sorry. I could've done it myself, but there seems to be (as you mention in the post below) a quite formal structure to the page, and currently I don't find the time to spend as much time on this wiki as I used to, so instead I just thought I'd put together a note, in case it is noticed in the future, to then have a rough starting date.--Lupo (talk) 06:01, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Formatting this page as a visual gallery?

It seems like there would be a lot of value in having this page as a visual archive of all of the header illustrations, not merely reducing them to plain text. Is there a reason that approach was not chosen, and are there any thoughts about how best to format and manage it? JohnHawkinson (talk) 19:01, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

I guess it is because it is a much larger task to include all those images. But feel free to begin. I have created most of he text on this page, so I have already used a lot of time. There are links to the web archive where they can be seen. This was seen by me as a transcript of these, so it is possible to search for text bites. It will be a very long page to load if you include pictures directly here as well. But a link to the images placed in another page could be a possibility. --Kynde (talk) 07:53, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Recent BLM edits

I disagree with most of User:Kynde's edits from just now:

• Links to "Black Lives Matter" should remain to the url https://blacklivesmatter.com/ rather than hiding it behind an anchor, as Black Lives Matter, because "Black Lives Matter" is not a clear unambiguous entity, and where the point is to show the URL, we should do so.
• That necessarily implies https://joincampaignzero.org should get the same treatment.
• By removing the June 17 section and combining into the June 3 section, it makes no sense to now say "The link goes to" and list where it went on June 3–16 but went elsewhere from June 17–present.
• "Fill it in when it changes" just looks bad. It is a comment to editors, not readers, and the wiki is for readers. It should be deleted or restored to a comment.

I would make all of these changes, but they have the appearance of edit warring, so I wanted to raise them here first. Thank you. JohnHawkinson (talk) 18:02, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I just tried to use the same format I have used on all the other changes to header texts over the last couple of years. I have also inserted link like this before. I can see this matter is much more sensitive than any previously used in the header (or at least where any noticed this page.). If you feel strongly about this, then please feel free to change it back, or change my edits somehow. I would prefer this entry does not diverge from the format of all the others, but since this header means a lot to many people, I will not change it back if you think it should be formatted differently than the rest. If you really wish, undo my changes, I will not redo them then. But I think this is just the same header, with a new link and thus did not warrant a new entry. I have done similar with other headers where just a small thing changes (yes I know the link is the important part here, and thus not a small change, but it did not change the header text or image!) --Kynde (talk) 07:57, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Ideas about the Jan 31, 2022 countdown?

It seems like the countdown's code is on github: https://github.com/munvoseli/xkcd-countdown I can't seem to find any hints there what it's about, though. --162.158.159.29 13:01, 11 January 2022 (UTC) Nevermind, that's just the code of a progress tracker at https://munvoseli.github.io/xkcd-countdown/ . --172.70.90.173 13:19, 11 January 2022 (UTC)