David Emery OnlineDizzee Rascal Driving U.K. 'Bonkers'
Dizzee Rascal is set to score a big-selling No. 1 single in the U.K. on Sunday (May 24) with “Bonkers” (Dirtee Stank), his collaboration with DJ and producer Armand Van Helden.
…and it’s self released on his own label. Who says indie record labels are a dying breed? There’s still plenty of money to be made selling recording music, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (just don’t count on selling as much as Dizzee).
Visit ➔Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS
When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.
That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.
A great idea, I think – come up with one stylesheet just for IE6 that completely ignores layout, backgrounds etc and focuses on making the page content look nice (albeit simple). We’ve stopped supporting IE6 on the sites we make now as the user % has dropped below 5% (finally!) but it would be nice to easily give those 5% something that works and is easy to read, so this fits the bill quite nicely.
Visit ➔Twitter - An application would like to connect to your account
Why on earth would I want universalmusic.com (I was signing in to Eminem.com) to be able to update my information on Twitter?!
At the very least make sure you have it coming up as the artist, as opposed to the big corp name, but also why are they asking for so much access? Of course, it’s because they really do want to spam your twitter given half the chance, which is why I’m inherently untrusting about using Twitter as a 3rd party site log-in system. My Twitter account is too important to be giving out to people willy-nilly, I might as well be logging in using my email account details…
Visit ➔'Photoshop Handsome' by Everything Everything
This is pretty darn awesome, in all sorts of ways:
Via Abeano.
Visit ➔How to send the perfect HTML e-mail
Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.
I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).
Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?
We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.
Visit ➔Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations
Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example, a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. I believe I have done a 180 on this.
CSS transitions are easily my most used piece of ‘new’ CSS, followed closely by text-shadow. It makes it so easy to add superfluous, non-essential but experience-enhancing touches of animation that I’d never have time to add via javascript. I use them on practically every site I build now – it would be great if other browsers (ok, I really mean Firefox realistically) would implement them as well.
Music is not like water
Well, it turns out every generation gets its own version of flying cars—a certain-sounding vision of future technology based on a vigorously embraced present technology, which passing time eventually reveals to be both laughable and impossible. At the end of the 21st century’s first decade, the internet seems particularly susceptible to the flying car syndrome, with all sorts of zippy schemes gaining traction within our net-addled culture.
With the music industry in conspicuous disarray, it’s no surprise to see flying cars promised as inexorable destiny. There are three particular models of flying car most prominently advertised these days by the music industry’s loudest and most insistent hucksters. These are: 1) The “Free Music” model […] 2) The “Access” model […] 3) The “Music-Like-Water” model.
A very interesting – albeit long – article on potential music revenue models. I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the conclusions – I imagine that most of these models will, while probably not becoming the dominant music consumption model, carve out a decent sized niche – but it’s well worth a read.
Visit ➔SoundManager 2 > 360° player demo
Inline “donut player” example (experimental)… Canvas-based UI. Load progress, seek, play/pause etc.
This is totally cool – we use Soundmanager all over the place already; hopefully we can roll this out without breaking things for rubbish browsers…
Visit ➔