OrderedList.com : Clearing Floats: The Float (Nearly) Everything Method – An interesting alternative to my current practice of using a special horizontal rule with clear: both; as its sole rule. I may well try this out on my next site as I like the idea of dropping the need for extra markup to clear floats.
Archives for October 2004
To be pleased with one's limits…
“To be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Build a $100 GNU/Linux machine
Build a $100 GNU/Linux machine “out of new, readily available parts that already have Free Software drivers.” – Boing Boing
The Story of Eleanor Rigby
We recently picked up the Ray Charles album Anthology, on Amazon. It is an amazing album, which is no surprise. But, I must say I was truly struck by the depth of emotion expressed in his version of Eleanor Rigby. While I have always been fond of the song, Mr. Charles infused it with a soul that has never been there, bringing the song back down to a more human level. It isn’t just a song, it is a story, expressing true aloneness, and loneliness, something that we, as humans truly fear at our very core.
Web Site Marketing Call
I just received an interesting phone call:
Me: Hello, this is Alex
Caller: Hello, I would like to speak with the person who is in charge of Marketing for SarahJoy.com
Me: That’s a personal site
Caller: Oh….well, uh do you have any sites that you need to market?
Me: No, ‘fraid not.
Caller: Okay then, thanks
Now, I wonder if they will call about marketing for any of the other domains I have registered…
Now Playing – WinAmp 5 Plug-in
One area that I am constantly trying to improve on this site is the Recent Playlist functionality. For a while now I have utilized the Do Something plugin by Oddsock to ping a script on my site whenever Winamp changes songs. But it has had one major flaw: it only reads information from the ID3V1 Tag instead of the information contained in the ID3v2 tag. While that might sound like a bunch of gibberish, it boils down to a couple of major differences. The updated tag (ID3v2) has more fields for information, and more importantly, doesn’t have the character limits assigned to the old tag.
Using the limited confines of ID3v1 causes a lot of albums to not appear as their names would be cut off. For example, the Duke Ellington disk “The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts January 1943 (Disc 2)” would be cut to “The Duke Ellington Carnegie Ha”. Not very helpful for people reading it, is it? It is even worse as Amazon (which provides the album covers) wouldn’t understand it either, and thus would not return the proper (or any) album cover.
Now that I have rambled on, explaining the nuances of the issue, I will introduce the solution to the problem: Now Playing, a great Winamp 5 plugin that pulls the information from the ID3v2 and sends it to the PHP script on my site exactly as I want it to.
Now, all I need to do isi eliminate the disc number (typically “(Disc 2)”) from the query sent to Amazon, and we should see vast improvements in the Recent Playlist area!
Update: I have packaged and released my code as SilverSpider Play List.