NEWS… 
Monday, 12 September 2011
Yet Another Teaser (Talk Talk)
While I had hoped that there would be some lead time, at least enough to allow me to finish what I wanted to write before anyone else posted something, it turns out the folks over at The Quietus have trumped me: today their “twenty years on” item on Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock (1991) appeared.
I’ll still be posting my own reflections on the album at some point later this week (likely to coincide with the US rather than the UK release date), so I won’t be reading their feature just yet, and I’ll refrain from saying why it’s important for me to write about the album here. Keep your browser at the ready. And, if you’re curious, those things I said were on the back burner over a year ago? They’re still there—along with the list of my 2010 favorites. Soon it will all start to appear. Really.
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Monday, 23 August 2010
Scheme Change
With so many things occupying my attention on any given day, I sometimes have difficulty remembering seemingly little things that I want to do. One of them—simplifying the links for individual posts in the Musings, News and Faves categories—has long been on the list of tweaks to make. But, really, I should say, was on that list, since I redid the URL scheme here a few days ago. So, where once a page might have had a link that was server-readable (e.g., “dynpost.php?post_id=[something]”) but not exactly easy-to-remember, now all such links are simpler and shorter (e.g., “post/[something]/”).
I’ve made changes throughout the site to reflect the changed scheme/nomenclature, so all internal links and navigation controls work as they did in the past. In the event that you’ve linked to one or more pages from one of your sites or mentioned one somewhere else, the old links will still work, but you might want to replace them with their shinier, sleeker successors. While altering the links, I also made some subtler, under-the-hood modifications that affect the way that search engines index the site’s material, but they need not detain us. All you need to know is that pages load faster, and your browser has to do less work. Sweet, no?
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Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Navigational Aids
In a few procrastinatory moments this afternoon, I added a little more functionality to the pages on the site that have archives—News, Musings and Faves. In the past, someone jumping to an archive page would be confronted with a long list sorted in reverse chronological order. In the Faves archive, which right now has only six entries, such a list was fairly easy to get through. The Musings and News archives, which now have fifty-five and forty-one items, respectively, were a little more challenging.
To make browsing more seamless, therefore, I made some minor tweaks to the code and the layout. Right below the title of each archive page, there is now a horizontal set of links which, when clicked, will allow you to jump to a specific year. The content is still sorted as before, with more recent items at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. I had been toying with the idea of splitting each of the archives into several pages, but I think this solution is the better one for now, minimizing as it does the number of clicks one might need to get to a particular post or set of posts. At the very least, digging back into the archives might be easier for first-time readers or casual browsers. Enjoy…
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Saturday, 1 May 2010
JPlayer to the Rescue
A few months back, the computer technology news followers among you might have noticed stories about Apple Computer’s purchasing the online music streaming service Lala. Each reporter or media outlet that bothered to comment speculated on what Apple's intentions might be, particularly as rumors swirled about the imminent release of the iPad. For now, those intentions remain unclear, but one thing is certain: as of May 31, Lala will be no more.
Why should this matter to you, dear reader? It has something to with a change you might notice in some of the more recent posts in the Musings section.
You see, last summer I started using Lala to make it easier for readers of that section to hear the songs I discussed when there were no other high-quality options already available online. I originally saw the service as a useful alternative to imeem, whose selection seemed limited and uneven. The latter was occasionally handy, as it contained some tracks (like a wonderful version of "Goddamn Lonely Love" by the Drive-By Truckers, recorded live at the Cannery Ballroom in Nashville) that weren't available elsewhere. Last August, however, MySpace purchased imeem, and by December imeem was effectively shuttered. It was around that time that I started looking for alternatives to both services. I had seen good notices for jPlayer, but, upon investigation, realized I didn't then have the time to create a custom interface (its default would have looked terrible on this site). So I left the matter for another time.
This week's Lala announcement got me to reconsider, and in fairly short order yesterday I did the coding and image creation/editing work. It was much easier than I thought it would be—though there was a lot of tricky CSS math to do. The payoff is that, for the time being, I have a much more reliable solution for embedding audio, and you have better options for hearing it and interacting with it—even if you're using an iPhone. So, check out one of the Musings (say, the one about Felt), and give the new player a try. I think you might like it…
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Monday, 26 April 2010
Commenting Restored … Again
Sometimes I have to take some time out from my everyday life to ask some non-everyday questions … like why folks who learn, from a certain elsewhere, of updates to the Musings page comment in that other place rather than here. I think of my small cadre of readers as highly intelligent people, ones who wouldn’t read something here, then waste time going back there when there’s a convenient link handy at the bottom of a page. Something else had to be happening, I figured. So, in the midst of some other under-the-hood updates, I did some investigating and learned that the commenting code was broken. It was so broken, in fact, that anyone wanting to comment would be confronted with some bewildering error messages and incompletely rendered pages.
The commenting system is fixed now.
If those of you who read those Musings choose not to comment in the future, I’ll have to figure out whether there are other reasons—beyond your perhaps obvious lack of time. More to come…
