July 3rd, 2008
I let the Album of the Week go awhile back because of time and I didn’t make it a resolution for the new year so I didn’t feel obligated to do it. I also felt guilty with my last design where only one post showed up that it would not get displayed long out there. With the new design, I figured I could play catch up with the album of the week. I am still unlikely to post every week, but I will try to do a few albums a month for you. In the meantime, I will suggest an album for each week since April 16th, the last Album of the Week
April 23: Know by Heart - The American Analog Set
I once told Mattbot that I would like to listen to some new music and he obliged with a bunch of artists I had never heard of. One of my favorites was the this album. Softly sung but strong lyrics infiltrate this entire album.
April 30: Hello Rockview - Less Than Jake
A flashback to my short punk/ska days, this album is still a great listen for a little angst with your horns.
May 7: Mary Star of the Sea - Zwan
While I did not love the album by the new Smashing Pumpkins last year, I did love the more obscure album by Zwan, Billy Corgan’s band between Pumpkins stints. It is meant to be listened to loudly, and I would encourage doing that.
May 14: Rodrigo y Gabriela - Rodrigo y Gabriela
A guitar instrumental album, this is simply amazing. I don’t need to say more, just check it out.
May 21: Dial “M” for Monkey - Bonobo
Nice relaxed electronic music that is interesting enough to keep you listening, but also works as great background music.
May 28: Narrow Stairs - Death Cab for Cutie
I decided to buy this even after I couldn’t find someone who recommended it. It is a little darker than other Death Cab albums but also a little more entertaining.
June 4: Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone since I loved the EP so much. This will likely be one of the contenders for album of the year.
June 11: Rook - Shearwater
If you like Okkervil River, you will love this album. Will Shelf, the vocalist for Okkervil River, lends his talents to Shearwater once again to make one of the most touching and powerful albums of the year.
June 18: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco
For most people, this will need no explanation. That being said, this album had to grow on me, but when it did, it has become one of my favorite albums ever.
June 25: Deltron 3030 - Deltron 3030
An obscure hip-hop album from the year 2000 was re-released with a few more remixes making it an even better value. This album is set in the 3030 and has sci-fi themes throughout. For a nerd, hip-hop doesn’t get much better.
July 2: Ghost Rock - Nomo
To commemorate Jazz Fest in Iowa City, I give you a kind of funky jazz sounding album from Nomo. If you arn’t sure, check out the track Rings as it will give you a good sense of what the rest of the album is like.
Posted in Music | Tags: aotw
0 Comments -
July 3rd, 2008
For the pick this week, I was inspired by my wife forgetting her iPod at home and not having a source of music for the day. I looked for a way to share iTunes music from the home computer across the Internet. After a brief search, I found Simplify Media, a client you install on your machine to share music libraries across the Internet. It also allows you to share your libraries with up to 30 other people. It isn’t perfect as it does not bring over ratings for songs, but it does bring playlists along so if you setup some clever playlists on your original machine, you should be all set. Simplify Media is free to use as well, making it all the nicer.
Posted in Music, Pick of the Week | Tags: Music, simplify media
0 Comments -
June 29th, 2008
For the Pick of the Week, I am choosing the one podcast I follow as soon as it comes out, Macbreak Weekly. Macbreak is where my Pick of the Week started since each host does one on the show. The show itself is entertaining because it not only covers the Mac news of the week, but often sidetracks into other discussions involving productivity, photos or random other technology. Due to the sense of humor of each host and their interactions, it feels like a bunch of tech savvy friends hanging out and talking about Mac stuff. I find it entertaining each week all for no cost.
Posted in Pick of the Week | Tags: macbreak
0 Comments -
June 27th, 2008
Once again, Marktopia has a new design with some changes to the way some stuff was done with the organization of the site as well. The first thing I want to do is give credit to PSHero.com for their Interstate Road Sign tutorial in Photoshop. The wonderful detail it gave set the theme for the new design and allowed me to add more texture to the site.
The next thing you will notice is that the Categories are back. When Wordpress introduced the tagging feature, I jumped all over it and abandoned the categories. It allowed me to do the tag cloud I had on the previous design and made me feel all Web 2.0. When working on this new design though, I realized without categories, I had lost some focus for what I blog about. I decided to look at my content a little harder and found everything could fit into 5 neat buckets, Music, Personal, Pick of the Week, Reviews and Web Technology. I went through the lengthy task of adding a category to each post so now if you only want to follow one type of post on my site, you can use the RSS feed for that category.
This is also a nice lesson for other bloggers, use categories and tags together on your site. Combining few categories with many different tags gives you a well rounded organization for your site and can also help you better define what you want your site to be. I would love to hear opinions of the site, so feel free to comment below.
Posted in Personal | Tags: design, marktopia
4 Comments -
June 21st, 2008
Lots of people ask me what I use for a web editor, expecting the answer to be Dreamweaver almost everytime. When I tell them I use Textmate, I get an odd look almost everytime. Textmate is a text editor on steroids. First off, it looks about as good as a text editor can look and if you don’t like the default look, you can tweak it however you like. Next, you can open either a file by itself or a folder using the sidebar. If you open a folder, you can quickly get to different files easily in a tabbed interface. This all makes it easy to get to the files you want to edit.
Luckily, Textmate isn’t just pretty, it is also really useful. It comes with bundles that allow you to perform shortcut macros for whichever language you are programming in. In my case, lots of times that is plain HTML and/or CSS. Textmate can tell by the file what type it is and automatically defaults to the shortcuts for that type. Textmate is one of those programs that seems expensive for what it does, but when you see someone who has mastered the shortcuts, it is like watching a magician put out code. If you have moved past the Design View of Dreamweaver and find the code view lacking, I would recommend checking this out. Also, if you are programming in Rails or PHP, I would HIGHLY recommend giving it a spin. You might find that you can not live with out it.
Posted in Pick of the Week | Tags: textmate
2 Comments -
June 15th, 2008
Operator is a plug-in for Firefox that enables highlighting microformats on a web site. Microformats are content types on a web site that have been formated a specific way to highlight the type of content they are. For example, if you wanted to put contact information on a site you can use specific html tags and classes to create the contact information and then when visitors with Operator come to your site, it will highlight your info and enable them to interact with it in different ways. The idea is a little difficult to explain, but if you get the extension and go the Microformats calendar example page, you should see some sample events show up.
The idea of microformats to display content types on a site is a relatively new one, however the idea makes sense. While Operator might not be the best way to get this data in the future, it is the best way I have found now, so check it out.
Posted in Pick of the Week | Tags: operator
0 Comments -
June 10th, 2008
Late a few days due to panic over flooding and parents visiting, this will be short and sweet. Google Earth is really cool, and if you are a Disney World fan, it got cooler last week as Disney announced they have rendered the theme parks and most resorts in Google Earth to incredible detail. You can navigate the parks, find out about attractions and just take in the sights of Disney World. More info can be found on Disney’s site, but after trying it out for a few minutes, it is really cool.
Posted in Pick of the Week | Tags: disney
0 Comments -
June 2nd, 2008
I recently read Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke and found much of it compelling. There were a number of ideas in the book that made me think about the way I design and how I could improve upon my designs. Two things in general stuck out and after a couple of weeks, I have come to really like one of the ideas and dislike the other. I will tackle the one I don’t like first.
Always Using Semantic Code
Semantic code is great. For those of you not in the web business, it means not making up your own stuff for HTML that exists, i.e., don’t make a class called “heading”, using one of the HTML heading tags. The book encourages the use of semantic code throughout your site. If you have a grouping of pictures on a page, instead of putting them in a general container, but them in a list with each picture being a list item. Then identify the list and each item on the list and use those IDs to style it in CSS. With this method, the world of absolute positioning can open up to you and you can do some really inventive and cool designs, outside of the normal box model.
All of this is well and good if you are the one maintaining the site. This starts to fall apart though when you have end users updating their site and have no knowledge or care of semantic code. Tools like Contribute, Dreamweaver, etc, allow users to make new paragraphs, insert images, and make new lists. This is all good and required, however it might not be what the designer intended. With the power of absolute positioning comes the responsibility of making semantic HTML, and once something unintended is introduced, things can go haywire pretty darn quick with a design. Because of this, a balance has to be struck between perfectly semantic code and something the end user can update easily. If you are doing your own site, then I recommend going crazy with semantics, otherwise, just be reasonable.
Don’t Design For the Bare Minimum
When I started as a web designer with CSS, it was always my goal to make the site look the same in all browsers. This sometimes meant some hacks to get some of the “not quite” supported features of CSS to work on all browsers at the time. As time has progressed, different browsers still have differing levels of support for CSS. Combining that with the evolution of CSS and you could make a huge chart of CSS selectors and the browsers they work in, and in fact some people have! By designing for the lowest common denominator, a designer was restricted from the CSS available AND still had to deal with the nuances of each browser.
Clarke proposes different versions of a site for different browsers. If a browser is supporting cool and new technologies, then why shouldn’t we take advantage of them. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take other browsers into account, you still have to make your site look nice in Internet Explorer, but there is nothing to say that you can’t make your site look nicer in Firefox or Safari. Yes this takes some extra planning, but as a designer you can play with new technology and encourage other people to use browsers so they can see the stuff that is possible with web standards. On a side note to this, if you want to see what is possible with CSS3, check out an examples page in the latest update for Safari.
Overall, the book was fantastic. It made me think about the way I am doing design and while I didn’t take everything from it, it was still worth checking out. I know the next design for my blog will incorporate some of the new web standards and will also use a lot of semantic code, I just don’t think I can do the same with the HTML on a customer’s design.
Posted in Personal, Web Technology | Tags: css, design
1 Comment -
May 31st, 2008
thesixtyone was a site that I had seen recommended a number of times, but each time I went to it, I didn’t understand it. Finally after asking a friend who is a member what the deal was, I got it, and I got hooked. The short description is that it is a site that makes a game out of finding new music. With your account, you get points to bump songs. As your bumped songs become more popular, you get more points to bump other songs. You also get extra points for logging in each day and accomplishing goals like listening to 100 different songs.
Being a Web 2.0 site, of course there is the social aspect where you can keep track of how your friends are doing. It also has a wonderful interface which allows you to listen to a track and still browse around other parts of the site. The one drawback for some people is that it is primarily independent artists so you won’t find any top 40 music out there. That being said, I have already found quite a few new artists that are good. You can find my profile at http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/mizidymizark if you sign up and want to make a quick friend.
Pick of the Week is my way of highlighting cool/new services and software on the web or the Mac. A few Windows applications might sneak in from time to time, but it will be rare. You can find an archive of services and software at http://www.marktopia.net/tag/potw/.
Posted in Music, Pick of the Week | Tags: thesixtyone
0 Comments -
May 27th, 2008
As I mentioned in my 500th post, I am working on a new design. Before going too far though, I wanted to get some thoughts from the people that read the site. Right now I have a single post at a time on the site with links to the last 5 further down. Do people prefer having more posts on the front of the site, is one good or do you read the site through RSS so it doesn’t matter? What about colors? I have a fondness for more natural blues, browns, greens, etc but would a cleaner (read: less color) design work better? Also, because the single post is at the top of the page, do the things like tags and other content get lost or forgotten for you? I am looking for constructive critism so feel free to post any and all suggestions. I realize this is my site, but I also want it to work for you, the reader.
Posted in Personal | Tags: marktopia
3 Comments -
