Archive for the 'Site' Category
Site Tweaks
Those that only see this weblog through an RSS reader might not have noticed that I’ve made a few tweaks around here. The second column of links, imported from delicious, has been moved to the bottom of the page. Since there’s only the one core column now, I’ve merged the wordmark, which sat above the second column, with the header image and centered everything. I haven’t changed a single thing in the main body since I was happy with the readability, so that column retains its width and font size. It has more breathing room now.
In the footer, I’ve elaborated on my details and added an extra area of “recommended” links. It is, as they call it, a “blogroll.” I wanted to have something a little more permanent than my delicious bookmarks to point out some sites I’ve enjoyed recently. Those links will change, but not too frequently. All are highly, well, recommended but for entirely distinct and diverse reasons. It is an eclectic bunch.
Anyway, the main reason for these changes is that the single column allows for this:
Brighton sunsetImages float outside of the main column so the extra room allows for some extra large photos. I’m using the camera more often than I’m writing paragraphs, so I figured that I’d let the site reflect that.
Paris nights.Playing mp3s In Browser
or, “The V in FLV Means ‘Video’”
The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.
Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.
Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.
Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.
Happy New Year
2006’s been a good year, so here’s to an even better 2007. Happy New Year.
Bonus trivia: How is this weblog just like the block of cheese I bought two days ago?
WordPress part 2
There. I’ve gone live with a WordPress install. It’s been live for a couple of minutes and I’m already sick of WordPress. I don’t know why even bothered. This port of the site has left me screaming at the screen more often than XBox Live’s Street Figher 2’s arcade mode. With that, I say Fuck you WordPress. You certainly are easy to install, but doing anything with the themes is so obtuse and rediculous I might as well just code the whole damned thing in PHP myself.
Some things are probably still a bit off. The old feeds are now dead and need to be redirected. Comments probably don’t even work. I don’t know. I’m on vacation and I don’t want to deal with this now.
Wordpress
Wordpress is a pain in the ass to skin. More so than any of the other weblog tools that I’ve used. The seperation of content from design in the templates — the default ones — doesn’t feel up to snuff. I find myself mixing the Wordpress PHP variables with other various PHP statements and conditionals right in the middle of the HTML, which reminds me more of clumsily pieced together scripts than, you know, top-tier web applications.
All I want is for my html to remain exactly the same as it is now. Why is this so hard to do? (A rhetorical question since comments are dead until the transition is complete. I was tired of getting a hundred comments about ringtones and penis enlargers and poker. PROTIP: ban the entire .info top level domain to vastly improve your spam denialability!)
Amalgamated Feed
When online web services don’t play nice together, doves cry.
Right now they’re bawling their eyes out over the glitchiness between Bloglines and del.icio.us. I don’t know how it all began (and it began weeks ago) — perhaps an overly eager spider got itself throttled — but the end result is that most user feeds from del.icio.us don’t work very well anymore. Luckily, that’s what my inbox is for. However, in trying to fix and/or workaround the problem, I turned to yet another third party web app: feedburner.
In the process, I’ve ended up with a single, amalgamated feed that mixes this weblog, my del.icio.us feed, and even my flickr photos. It is here. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while; preferably rolling my own system but there’s no accounting for the combination of laziness and feedburner’s ease of use. I’ve railed about the decentralization of personal information and content on the web before, so this amalgamation is useful to me. Of course, the catch is that those various third party feeds are now being combined by yet another third party application, so it doesn’t solve the problem that my content is dependent on their services. For now, though, it’s a good stopgap. Useful too.
So if you’re so inclined, point the ole’ news reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/n0wak. If you do then you might see further evidence as to why Guitar Hero, despite its many frustrations, was my game of 2005. I still play it a lot and my pinkie still hurts a lot. It is possibly the game of decade.
Sixer
My hip four digit blogger id (it’s been a long time since I used their service) confirms that this is my sixth anniversary of doing this. I’m a grizzled veteran.
After all these years, the weblog became a natural extension of the self. There isn’t any thought to it, there’s no pressure or desire to impress or attract traffic and no stress about posting habits. It just is.
I’ve seen a lot of change in these six years. I’ve seen it go from “web logs” to “weblogs” to “blogs”, from a small niche geek group to mainstream “credibility”, from an innocent distraction to a spam magnet. There’s been a lot of self-indulgence in that time, a lot of it archived across various computers on the internet (unfortunately), but we learn.
I couldn’t care less if weblogs change the world. It doesn’t matter if they bring about the downfall of the “old media” (hah). What matters is that after all this time, I’ve greatly improved my writing (looking at my initial posts is cringe worthy) and my “style” (there was a lame no capitals period in there somewhere) and I’ve met some cool people because of it. That made it worthwhile and as I probably say every year, here’s to more weblog perpetuity.
And if others have enjoyed anything I have ever written or if anyone was pleased by something I have linked to or got something, anything, out of this nonsense, then thank you.
