March 31, 2005. In February I made some changes to Tense Radio, a Flash-based MP3 player for Tense Forms (a label and publisher I co-founded). The new player had a variety of subtle changes. Previously it used a default buffering time of 15 seconds, adding to that as necessary. That’s about all Flash provides for on its own. The result is that users with fast connections had to wait longer than they should… Read more »
March 29, 2005. RSS is a very cool technology that’s quickly gaining in popularity. It’s like having your own newspaper, with only the news you care about. And instead of having to wait for the next day, it’s updated continually. While it’s quite popular already, it’s a long way from mainstream use. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that it’s rarely presented well. Many web sites have an “RSS”, “XML”,… Read more »
March 23, 2005. The site was a bit of a mess today, unbeknownst to me. I was making some changes to the database for a new version of Tense Log, and one of those changes had some rather adverse effects here. While I’m on the subject, here’s a preview of a Tense Log v2.0 template (altered slightly to get the best bits in). Tense Log v2.0 has a completely redesigned template system that’s far more… Read more »
March 3, 2005. Bookmarklets (sometimes called Favelets) are just snippets of JavaScript that are stored in a bookmark. Click the bookmark and it runs a script, which can do a number of useful things. Below are a few that I use on a regular basis. In most browsers you can install these by simply dragging the link below to your bookmarks bar. Validate HTML Validates the HTML or XHTML for the page you’re… Read more »
February 9, 2005. Far too often I see a site do something that just doesn’t make sense. Here are just a few of these blunders. Playing music automatically… and then playing a video without pausing it. It’s amazing how often I see this with Flash movie web sites. You go to the site and music starts playing. You click a button to play the trailer. A new window opens. The trailer starts playing… and the… Read more »