Slow Nudges to the Midriff of Style

A busy week in terms of developing. The site went through a complete redesign which lightened the whole thing and began to make it look halfway decently designed. Only half, but still, an improvement.

Having looked around for a solution to creating rounded corners, I eventually settled on this method largely because it gives me the ability to not bother creating any background graphics. There seem to be three million rounded corners methods out there, none of them that I’ve found to be particularly satisfying.

What has been particularly useful is Walter Zorn’s jQuery based tooltip which has very well annotated script, is very easy to customize and lightweight. Which has been very useful for displaying album titles above thumbnails of covers on Something Else

Meanwhile we went live with streaming audio using Sean O’s jMP3 which is a very nice slim flash music player. As ever, function beat down style for the minute, and the thing works, but I’m embedding the player again and again, which I don’t think is actually needed.

The other big discovery was Bluefish - a web focused text editor with a whole bunch of very useful features for writing code. It’s very quick, very nice, very clean, and has all of the features I was wanting from the Ubuntu standard text editor: a directory tree in the same program for switching files, working keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, decent find & replace functionality.

What’s more, it also contains a built in syntax library for CSS2, HTML, Python and PHP, which is just a brilliant feature to have displayed in a side panel next to your file.

Next up, sorting out the jMP3 code, tweaking the graphics, and perhaps actually releasing a record!