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Stuck Between Stations Redux

The little music writing project I run with some friends, Stuck Between Stations, is now officially three years old. Until yesterday, we were still running with the original design, left over from a time when narrow content columns were in vogue (usability studies still say 420px is the ideal content column width for maximum readability). Trouble is, we run a lot of embedded video on the site, and YouTube/Vimeo have increasingly been defaulting to much wider video dimensions since more and more people have high-resolution displays. Web developers started assuming a baseline pixel resolution of 1024 a few years ago.

But simply widening the old design wasn’t really an option, since it all hung off a photographic banner image that came with a WordPress theme, and so couldn’t be altered. Decided to chuck it all and start from scratch. Chose the Titan theme as a starting point and went from there. Dug up shots of old radio dials from Google Images and pulled a new banner together, keeping only the broadcast tower from the original design.

Was able to run a series of search/replace operations in the database to increase the size of all the embedded videos already on the site. Interesting to see how many different aspect ratios we had accrued without even trying. Also interesting to see how many of the videos had been “Removed due to violation of terms of service.” Seems like the big publishers have been digging deep in YouTube’s bowels to find and skewer copyright violations, even if they do provide free publicity.

Added a bunch of new features while I was working:

Pretty happy with the results, though the banner still feels a bit crude to me. We’re no Flavorwire, but without a few dozen more unpaid writers and some Sand Hill investment, this is about as good as it gets for a while. Would love a plug if you’ve got one to give!


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John Stewart Skewers Glenn Beck

… by acting like him for the first 15 minutes of recent show. This kind of brilliance knows no bounds… and it’s also the best possible way to make a point that so desperately needs making. Go full-screen on this one, you won’t regret it.

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Spectacles

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote or offer advice about my first pair of glasses. To be honest, the process was a bit of a rush job, because I wanted to have them in time for SXSW. Not that I like to rush decisions like this, but my distance vision was blurring out fast, and I knew I’d be spending a lot of time in big halls looking at far-away projection screens. In the end, I’m glad I did. I had no idea just how blurry my vision had gotten until I was able to A/B them in a real-world setting. I think I honestly thought that projection screens were inherently blurry – classic “boiling frog” situation.

As for the for the frame choice, it was tough – it really was. There were a lot of options I would have been happy with. But in the end, I defer most aesthetic decisions regarding my person to my wife, who knows these things. Her choice matched the choice of an artist friend of hers whose taste I also trust, and to be honest,  this was the one pair that just felt right from the first moment I put them on.

It’s not all peaches and cream though – it’s been a mixed experience. Distance is fantastic. But these are bifocals, and that part isn’t cutting it. The close-range reading thing doesn’t focus until the very, very bottom of the lens, and then I have to tip my head way back to make it work. I’d rather just hold the page farther away than deal with that. And at the computer, where I spend most of my working hours, things are in way better focus with them off than on. So I’ll have to make a return visit to see about working stuff out.

I have a new-found respect and sympathy to everyone who’s dealt with glasses all their lives. I never really stopped to think what a pain in the neck this whole glasses thing is, or just how lucky I was. Ah well, I’m here now. Age stinks.

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Pencil Art

… but not like you’d expect.

Jennifer Maestre creates incredible sculptures out of pencils and nails, inspired by the form and function of the sea urchin. Not quite like anything you’ve ever seen. I love the idea of taking things that are inherently linear and creating something so distinctly non-linear. Gorgeous.

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Jaron Larnier Presentation

Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session Untitled by Jaron Larnier.

Wasn’t sure what to expect from this session, which had no title and no description. But a few weeks ago, the photo professor at the J-School handed me a copy of Larnier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget, a sort of backlash manifesto against the digital age. Well, that’s not entirely fair — it’s not so much a backlash as it is a reasoned, thoughtful wander through some of the gotchas and backwaters of the digital age. Larnier talks about dignity, culture, black boxes, the history of our relationship to technology, mean-ness in online communities, and everything in between. His talk was as meandering as the book is, but inspirational and amazing at every turn. Though difficult to encapsulate, Larnier and his thread is something I feel everyone and tech should be listening to.

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RIP Content Management System

Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session RIP Content Management System by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.

Unfortunately, the “R.I.P. part of the session title was never addressed, nor were any of Drupal’s core shortcomings or architectural annoyances. This was unfortunately just a 30-minute informercial for Drupal.

Would really have preferred to have heard Dries talk about plans to address Drupal’s deep archtitectural problems like lack of object orientation, lack of an ORM, lack of MVC, and annoying templating system. Took notes anyway.
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