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!

Wishful Thinking

Spent a lot of time over the last few days looking into open source cms solutions. Frankly it looks like Drupal, Zope or Joomla. Even more frankly it looks like as much as I have the desire to get familiar with at least one of these (probably Joomla as of the moment) I have absolutely no need for it with the Something Else site, and so it’s not worth taking up the hard-drive of this (awful) pc or the hosting server. Something to look into as and when I start on the next site. Ditto php for the above.

What has been very useful though, is jQuery, which is a free java-script framework that I only got around to downloading this evening, but is already clearly about to be very useful, If only for being quietly exciting. The possibilities are clearly endless, and you can quite see why it’s popular.

Google analytics started returning results earlier, which is the first time I’ve had it do so to a live site rather than a test beta, lots of incredibly brief visits from Germany. Which is nice. I expect entirely artificial though. Still, it’s nice to know that someone/thing other than me is looking.

Managed to solve the background-color problems with the a:hover, which were due to what, in retrospect were obvious mistakes in the cascading of the css. The current solution is still relatively ugly, and the ability to set different a:hover css properties to text or image links without using what are frankly needless divs would be nice. As would a way to use text pop-ups for image links, although I suspect that the problems with this are a lot more to do with the intrinsic ugliness of the current solution to the above problem than any specific fault. As of right now, it works. Just. I may use a per-tem java-script solution for a) functionality and b) adding jQuery in a useful setting.