Deflated Cardinals fall to Butler

The atmosphere inside Worthern Arena Wednesday night prior to tip-off was filled with eagerness and intensity. A large crowd of 6,996 packed the house to see Ball State take on the #20 ranked Butler Bulldogs. Ball State students were loud and rowdy with the hopes that the Cardinals could pull off a huge upset.

Once the game actually started, those hopes came crashing down.

Butler guard Shelvin Mack broke the game open early by hitting 4-4 three pointers in the first 6 minutes, giving Butler a comfortable lead of 16-4. From that point on, the Bulldogs cruised to a 58-39 victory, outplaying Ball State on both sides of the court.

“Butler came out and hit us early,” Ball State coach Billy Taylor said. “I think our team got down, got deflated and didn’t do a good job rebounding from that run.”

Ball State never managed to find a offensive answer to Butler's strong zone defense, shooting a poor 31.7% on the night. At halftime, Ball State had only managed to score a pedestrian 11 points.

Both Mack and forward Gordon Hayward had game highs of 15 points for the Bulldogs, while Malik Perry led Ball State with 11.

The win ends a 2 game losing streak for Butler with losses to Clemson and Minnesota and re-establishes the confidence they had entering the season.

"I think that [loss to Clemson] woke us up. We were just trying to get back to the basics," Mack said. "We came out a little more determined today. We had something to prove."

For Ball State, the loss extends their losing streak to 3 games. Taylor said that Ball State must work harder in order to end it.

“Our defense has still got to improve,” he said. “Our understanding of personnel from the opponents and scouting reports and executing on the floor has to improve. We have a lot to work on.”

Quick Hits

• Freshman walk-on John Green earned his first significant action of the season, playing for 21 minutes. He proved to be a solid addition to the rotation, hitting a three-pointer in the second quarter and playing adequate defense on the Butler backcourt.

• Hayward is being projected as an NBA first-round draft pick by a few websites, such as Flagrant Fouls and nbadraft.net. Hayward, along with Mack, led Butler on the night with 15 points. He first made a name for himself in high school, scoring a last-second shot in the state championship game to grab the victory.

• Butler coach Brad Stevens said after the game that he was impressed by the turnout at Worthern Arena. “It was a good night, with that crowd and that student section, to get off to a 16-4 run."

How to write link text

Good link text should not be overly general. It should indicate the nature of the link and where readers will go when they click on the link. Word your text so that the target matches the readers' expectations within the context of the sentence.

In addition, hypertext links shouldn't talk about the mechanics of clicking. Here are a couple of examples of how not to link within a sentence:

• Click here to download the editor/browser Amaya.
• To download Amaya, go to the Amaya Web site and get the necessary software.

Both of these sentences divulge too much of the mechanics of getting the software. Instead, place you links in text like this:

• The editor/browser Amaya lets users create hypertext documents.

When possible, put the words conveying the most useful information at the front of the link text. Those are the words that users will see first when scanning Web pages for a link.

Writing headlines: Web versus print

Good Web headlines are very different to good print headlines. But why?

They are often seen out of context

Web headlines might appear on a story, on the site's front page, or on another site entirely (through syndication, perhaps, as shown below). That means they have to make sense in their own right, without being dependent on any image or accompanying copy.

Headline feed from Syndicated news

This isn't the case with print headlines. A classic headline was in The Sun, a British newspaper. It celebrated the torpedoing of an Argentine ship during the Falklands War:

This is a great print headline -- but only makes sense when seen in context, with the accompanying introduction and images. So it would make a lousy Web headline.

They are seen by a wider variety of people

Stories on a Web site are often read by people outside the area - many of whom come to them through search engines.

This means that some terms may be suitable for print headlines but best avoided for Web headlines. The editor of the Web publication should give guidance on the degree to which stories and headlines should be targeted at the core audience, and the degree to which they should be accessible to all possible readers.

They don't have the same space constraints

In a newspaper, the layout of a particular page may leave room for only a four, three or even two-word headline. On a Web site, conversely, every headline will often have a 50-character limit -- and that's only to stop headlines busting on to a second deck.

But all this doesn't necessarily make Web headlines easier to write than print headlines; the greater space constraints of print can be a spur to creativity.

They are written for search engines too

Web headlines aren't just written for people; they are tten for search engines too. This means they should include keywords that likely will be used to search for the story. Preferably these keywords will be near the beginning. In addition, place words that specify the geographical location of story should be included.