I found this video recently, and I thought that Mary Lou Ford’s voice is absolutely stunning. She does extreme justice to this version of Elliot Smith’s song “I figured you out.” It’s haunting, yet comforting at the same time.
The video isn’t a video, per se, just an image of a girl on a motorcycle, but it works. (And, might I add, I want to meet that girl, or a girl like her, on the motorcycle.
Something tells me that I’m glad I didn’t start listening to Radiohead until Amnesiac came out. I probably never would have liked them if my initial exposure to them was one of their early videos rather than the video for the “Pyramid Song” late one night.
In fact, I still to this day prefer Amnesiac, arguably their most difficult album, because of the sparse arrangements compared to their “wall of sound” earlier years. Don’t get me wrong, there are great songs on Pablo Honey and The Bends, but the filler in-between is what kills me. It’s obvious that they were trying too hard to force a “sound” onto their songs, rather than just letting them play out.
Later Radiohead goes the opposite way, sometimes detrimentally, but most often in a way that works wonders on their songs. Standard song structure is irrelevant if your songs are awesome 
http://www.youtube.com/v/WuOfZDu0EBE
http://www.youtube.com/v/XX3IYwuGApA
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably not the most imaginative when it comes to naming conventions for elements of your web pages. At some point in time, it pays to pay attention to those details, as it will spare you a lot of grief in the long run.
For example, I recently created an application form called “short_form” because it was an intermediary form with only 4 inputs that fed into a large 40+ input form. I named the rollover submit button, imaginatively, “application_submit_rollover”. These things, in and of themselves, are not a problem. It’s when you start duplicating things that you will start running into issues.
Now take short_form and duplicate it. It is on a separate, but related web page that uses its own CSS and its own image directory. Me, being lazy, decides that instead of renaming everything, I would simply restyle the same elements and replace the images with different images, but retain all of the same naming conventions.
Man, I felt productive on that day.
Then came the decision to pull that separate page into the original site. Uh oh. Now we have a problem.
Now I have two different forms with completely different styles and images, but the same #ids. Not only that, but to my chagrin, I discovered that another designer had created yet a THIRD application using similar naming conventions. But of course, instead of “application_submit_rollover.PNG” he named his image “application_submit_rollover.GIF”, further complicating the issue.
Long story short, we had to spend more time fixing our naming issues than it would have taken us to create the forms from scratch with appropriately, and UNIQUELY, named elements.
So take it as a lesson learned: Shortcuts taken to increase productivity can in the end come back to haunt you. Take the time to do things correctly, and you can better spend your time worrying about the issues that really matter.
Did you know you can publish to WordPress via Google Docs? Yeah, I know, crazy right?
But it’s the truth. This post right here is proof 
To do it, you just have to hit the “Share” button, then select the “Publish as web page” option. You’ll see that there is an additional button that pops up: “Post to blog”.
It’s as simple as entering your blog’s site and login information, and Voila! Instant bloggage.
I love Google. I really do. There’s a tear streaming down my cheek as I look at this 
This video is awesome. They project highly stylized and customized video and project them onto actual buildings, creating some amazing effects. I especially like the one where the 20 foot tall “person” is looking out of a “window” on the side of the building. Very, very, cool.
Recently, a page that I really wanted to look at was down. As in, no longer existed and the domain was bought by a spammer. Where did I turn to? Archive.org, naturally. Thankfully, the site was listed so that I could check it out. Even greater, I could still download the .zip file that I needed.
What struck me though, is that there were no styles on the page. Normally you get a complete snapshot of a web page, CSS and all. Looking at the source code, it was immediately apparent why no styles were loaded:
<style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/css/global.css";</style> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20070826215132js_/http://www.website.com/js/prototype.js"></script>
Notice how archive.org automatically prepends their own URL to the front of the archived site’s javascript? I doesn’t do that for the @import‘ed CSS because it doesn’t look like a link.
I’m curious how this works for relative links within the page, whether or not it resolves them to the full domain when archived. I know that Wget can resolve them, and a lot of web scraping programs are built around that, so…
If ever there were something that needed simplifying, it’s the Google Maps API. To quote Mike Williams:
Using the Google Map API is not easy if you don’t have much Javascript experience.
If you find the Google documentation too difficult to understand, it’s not because it’s badly written it’s just that the subject is not easy.
Well, that stinks.
Thankfully, there are a few tutorials out there that make life with Google Maps a little easier to handle. I’ll just cover two of them here, because quite frankly, I still need to learn a lot more to understand the other things out there that are available. (Like KML from Google Earth, for instance.)
The guys at NETTUTS.com have created two different tutorials about using Google Maps, and they are both very easy to understand and implement.
The first was How to Create a Mashup by Combining 3 Different APIs
This tutorial came in handy because I was searching for a good way to integrate a Google Map into a client’s website without pulling my hair out. I’m glad I subscribe to their RSS feeds, because it was a lifesaver.
They show you how to use the Phoogle Maps v2.03 PHP class to automatically create a map using a simple array that lists the values that you need to map. Since I already had these values mapped to variables, it was a piece of cake to implement.
Their second tutorial, This is How You Use the Google Maps API – screencast, was created to make more sense of the Google API, using the standard Google API methods. It’s more intense, from a programming standpoint, because you need to have more things created manually, but you can have a lot more flexibility, i.e., complexity, if you so choose.
I’m working from this one currently, because I have a project that requires more extensive overlays than are available through the Phoogle PHP class. Territory Central will be my place to create and store information for/about different areas or territories used by people doing regional sales or other territory-based activities. It’s not fancy at all, but it’s a start
As soon as I get it completed, I’ll post a tutorial on how I got it to work.
Cheers!
The Onion is hilarious. This little bit of farce is so funny because it is so dead on. I love it. YouTube even responded by actually creating the tab that they illustrate in the video, but only when you’re viewing that video.
I’d talk trash about a ton of the videos on Youtube, but since I’ve only ever made 1 video, I see no point
Subtle, but sweet.
I named 46 HTML 4.0 elements.
A, ABBR, ACRONYM, B, BIG, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, CITE, CODE, DD, DIV, DL, DT, EM, FIELDSET, FORM, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, HTML, I, IFRAME, IMG, INPUT, LI, LINK, META, OBJECT, OL, P, PRE, Q, S, SMALL, SPAN, STRONG, STYLE, TABLE, TD, TEXTAREA, TR, U, UL
I forgot 45 HTML 4.0 elements.
Not bad, considering that the remaining few, short of a few form elements, are rarely ever used. The ones I slap my head over are marked in bold:
ADDRESS, APPLET, AREA, BASE, BASEFONT, BDO, BR, BUTTON, CAPTION, CENTER, COL, COLGROUP, DEL, DFN, DIR, FONT, FRAME, FRAMESET, HEAD, HR, INS, ISINDEX, KBD, LABEL, LEGEND, MAP, MENU, NOFRAMES, NOSCRIPT, OPTGROUP, OPTION, PARAM, SAMP, SCRIPT, SELECT, STRIKE, SUB, SUP, TBODY, TFOOT, TH, THEAD, TITLE, TT, VAR
The rest are rarely, if ever, used in 90% web design. In fact, some of them I have no idea what they do. Perhaps this will give me an opportunity to discover what I’ve been missing