David Emery Online

6

On Tuesday it was the 6 month anniversary of this blog. So far I’ve written 16,355 words, which is not bad going, I think. I’ve also had 39 comments posted so far, which isn’t really a huge amount, but I’m not doing this for the fame – thanks to all that commented!

I’m pretty chuffed that I’m still going with this blog; the amount of blogs you come across via google that have been abandoned is very high and when I set out I really hoped mine wouldn’t be one of them. I seem to have settled into posting about once a week, which seems about right – While I started out doing the “post on everything you read about” thing, I’ve since decided that there’s no point repeating what everyone else is saying unless I’ve got something to add to the topic. For example, when Apple released the new iPods I think I read about them on pretty much every blog I read, without any of them saying much more then “oh, Apple released new iPods that play videos. I like them/don’t like them/am ambivalent”.

I’ve really enjoyed being able to write in...

Warning: Wide Load

Recently A List Apart, one of the top css/web site design sites, went through a major redesign. First off, the site does indeed look brilliant, with a sophisticated look that fits in well with the vast amount of content contained within.

However, they made a design choice that I think is so fundamentally wrong that I felt I needed to weigh in on as the issue is so important (even though it’s been discussed at length elsewhere):

The site is designed to fit on a screen 1024 pixels wide.

Now, why is this a problem, I hear you ask?

Currently, most people design their sites for screen sizes of 800 pixels wide (which equates to 771px after you take into account for scrollbars and other window furniture) and this was because 800px x 600px used to be the most popular screen resolution.

These days, less and less people are using screens of 800×600 with most people using 1024×768 or greater, so I’m sure the guys behind the A List Apart redesign looked at their stats (you can tell what size screen people who browse your site use) and decided that the amount of people using 800×600...

Oi, Nostradamus!

So much for having some free time to blog, then…

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Warner Music recently announced (it was a few weeks back and I’ve lost the link) that they are forming an exclusively digital label, with artists putting out music in batches of three (singles, then) spaced out over the year – as opposed to an album of circa 12 songs once every year or two.

Well done Warner Music!

It won’t work though.

Yet. This is the way that the music industry is going to go, but it’s just too soon – there just isn’t a big enough online market yet to support a band (or, more accurately, a record label).

I think that it’ll happen like this:

Step 1: The music industry (i.e. the big five) will continue on the greedy, i-need-more-money-to-keep-sueing-my-customers path they are walking at the moment and stop demanding that iTunes raise their track and album prices and actually make them do it.

Step 2: Apple do it (otherwise they’ve got no content, which makes it hard to sell iPods), but also starts to let individuals sell their own track on the iTMS.

Step 3: By this point, downloading will be a significant portion...

On Safari

Click for full size

There’s a new version of the indispensable free Safari add on, SafariStand out which has completely blown me away by adding OmniWeb-style thumbnail tabs to Safari. Thumbnail tabs was one of things I really missed from OmniWeb when I switched to Safari (OmniWeb is simply too slow on my 867Mhz Powerbook), so it’s really nice to have them back.

However, to get the full effect of the screen shot above, you have to do a bit of hackery. The main weapon in the GUI fetishists toolkit is the Apple supplied Interface Builder, and I’m not going to detail how to use it, just the steps I went through to get the look above.

To start, obviously Safari is normally metal, which is the first thing to go, replaced by the swish-ness of Unified Toolbar. Normally, however, Safari doesn’t really work to well when Unified, as I don’t use the bookmark toolbar and hence the tabs and the toolbar bleed into each in a fairly ugly fashion. Now we’ve got the thumbnail tabs, though, we can get rid of the normal tabs (which stick around even...

Music Week

Over the past week or so I’ve been to a whole load of gigs – the benefits of working for a record label, I suppose – which is why I haven’t been blogging much. Generally I blog in the evening, which doesn’t really work if you are out at a gig, but I don’t have too much lined up this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to write a bit more (I’ve got a whole load of stuff I’d like to write about, but I don’t think I’m going to have time…).

Here is a quick really pretty long roundup of all the stuff I’ve seen:

Saturday 20th August, The Garage London: Kill Casino & Asylum Nation

To start of my mini-gig-marathon I went with an easy gig – The Garage is about 30 seconds walk from my flat, so it wasn’t exactly a strenuous night out. Anyway, I digress – Kill Casino were easily the best band on the bill, with their particular blend of punk and alternative rock working really well, especially when coupled with their female vocalist, Karen Luan – it’s always good to see something a bit different from the...

Here, have a free idea

An idea, free to anyone who would like to take it:

There are currently quite a few companies that you can go to if you would like a blog, Type Pad Blogger being some of the most popular (I use Textpattern on this site, as it’s free and very customisable).

Now, a lot of people end up wanting to put adverts on there blog, either because they’re hosting their blog on their own server and hence have to pay the hosting changes (which can end up being pretty large on a popular site), or simply because they spend a lot of time on their blog and wouldn’t mind being compensated for it. Oh yeah, and people are greedy. That too.

At the moment, if you want to put adverts on your site the common way of doing it is to go to google and use there adwords technology, which lets you put adverts on your site if it’s popular enough (which a lot of blogs aren’t – this one currently included). Now, even if your site is popular enough, it’s still pretty technically complicated to put adverts into your site – you have to edit your sites templates and insert...

Assorted

As you may or may not have gathered, I am currently a bit busy*. Of course, the first thing to give is this blog and to be honest I imagine it’s going to be a few weeks before it calms down a bit, so it’ll probably stay a bit sparse on here until then.

The main reason behind the busyness is that I have finally got a full time job :-) I’m working doing web stuff (html/css + content publishing, site updating etc) for a major record label (although I’m not going to say where, blog smart and all that…), which is pretty darn cool really, me being both a web geek and a music buff!

Also, I’ve discovered one of the benefits for working for a record label: Free booze gig tickets! This week I got to go to a lovely picnic in Regents Park, London where Devendra Banhart played a few songs in the sunshine:

Of course, finally getting a job has coupled in nicely with getting more and more freelance work (it never rains etc…), which seems to be really getting going now:

• Further to my work on themes for Sandvox...

IE Woe

Now hopefully these promises about IE 7’s css support are true – it’ll certainly make my life easier in about 4-5 years time when we can finally start targeting it. However, a lot of people are complaining/moaning/being smug about the topic of “browser hacks”, and how they will all break hideously on IE 7.

A browser hack, for those fortunate enough who don’t know, is a way of giving a browser a different bit of css (which controls the presentational aspect of modern web pages – like how large a piece of text is, or what position an element has on the page) normally by exploiting a either a specific bug unique to a particular browser or a browser proprietary feature.

With IE 6’s current appalling css support (which is completely different to IE 5.5’s appalling css support which, again, is different from IE 5.0’s appalling css support…) most of the time browser hacks are used to make IE behave in some way, by giving it different css to Firefox, Safari et al.

So, when IE 7 finally comes out (next year, sometime. Maybe.) all the...

Cloudy Vista

A quick note before I start: I haven’t used Vista beta 1 yet, so all this info is gleaned from various sources off the net.

If you haven’t bothered finding out about what’s new in Windows Vista, I’d recommend having a flick through Paul Thurrott’s review of beta 1 (note, this guy is a notorious windows lover; there’s no way he won’t gush over whatever the final product Microsoft releases is, so this is going to be the most positive spin on a beta you’ll likely see. However, it does go though the new features pretty well.) and also having a watch of the interview with Chris Jones, Vp of the Vista build team (on Channel 9 via Scoble ).

I am actually really surprised at how bad Vista is at this stage – Microsoft is a pretty large company (ahem, this maybe a slight understatement), and I thought they would manage to do something interesting; at least one new feature that makes me go “ohh, I want that!”.

But sadly – for Microsoft – Vista doesn’t have any innovative features.

It’s been a running joke for years that Microsoft just copies...

Music music

Yes, it’s finally time for the inevitable music post.

Everyone in the world has a different opinion on music (and most of them are wrong), and equally everyone with a blog seems to think that it would be a great idea to broadcast there particular music obsession to the world. Sadly, nobody actually cares what you think about music – if people read your blog it’s because of what you normally write about (blogs, normally…), not due to your ever growing country and western collection (yee-ha!). Hence, I have tried to keep my particular musical obsessions off this blog, but I’ve now decided that it might just be a better idea to let it all out in one go, possibly on a yearly basis, just so that when I sit down to write it doesn’t always pop into my head as being the thing I should write about.

So…

I’m currently listening to a heady mix of the new Subways album (which has some really nice simple punk rock on it, but maybe a little bit too much filler), the Art Brut album (much, much better then I was expecting – really very good,...