I miss the feeling of paddling out in the pre-dawn glow on a glassy day, when there’s no breeze and the temperature is just below warm. The paddling is easy, settling myself into a rip so that I don’t have to duckdive oncoming waves, and it pulls me out with barely any effort.

I miss the feeling of sitting out the back, straddling my board, half submerged in the water as I wait for the next set to roll-in and give me my first ride of the day.

I miss the feeling of paddling hard for a few seconds, then taking off, grabbing a rail and trimming along the glassy lump of water, about as close to being liquid myself as possible.

I miss the feeling of pulling off the back of the wave once the ride is over, my face covered in spray, heart racing, and beginning the paddle back out the back.

But most of all, I miss the feeling of freedom. Once that first ride is over, everything else goes away. Work, the internet, fights with family or friends, my to-do list, stress, anxiety, the million and one things everyone has running through their minds at any given time. It all just… disappears. And in that moment, when you feel your soul lighten, and as the sun comes over the horizon, you are free.

The first issue – HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith – was a fantastically written, incredibly informative, and beautifully designed book; which I devoured in approximately 2.5-3 hours immediately after receiving it. I can’t speak highly enough of this book, even as a non-professional web “designer”.

The next issue will be CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, which also promises to be a great read. This is set to be followed by The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane, and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte.

While these books sound fantastic, and I will clearly purchase each and every issue, given the focus on web professionals, I think this series has exposed a gap in the market. Whether this gap represents a missed opportunity for the team behind A Book Apart, or such a small niche to be of little to no consquence I honestly don’t know.

The gap that I refer to is the beginner/less than knowledgable web designer/developer market.

Web design is often bemoaned as a crowded field where anybody with a computer, a little knowledge of HTML and a copy of Photoshop can call themselves a web designer. There certainly are a large number of people out there who fit that bill exactly, and they certainly do refelect poorly on the profession.

However, there are also a number of people out there who, like myself, don’t want to be lumped in with the hacks, and want to learn how to do things properly before they even begin to consider calling themselves designers or developers. For myself, I feel that my HTML skills are about 99% as good as anyone else’s, while my CSS skills are about 70-75% of the way to where I want them to be¹.

So, what this exposes is an opportunity for a similar series of books – short, clear, detailed, and written by experts – to help people with little to no knowledge in certain areas. I have actually got a list of books in my mind that I would love to see written, most of which are introductions to scripting langauges:

1. Introduction to PHP
2. Advanced CSS Principles²
3. Introduction to JavaScript
4. Introduction to Ruby on Rails
5. Introduction to MySQL
6. Color Theory
7. Introduction to Typography

I’ve got more, but they tend to get more specific after that. As you can see, a lot of them are quite basic to people who have professional experience, but these topics can seem quite intimidating to those who don’t have someone to show us the basics.

If I thought I was the right man for the job, I would definitely take up the challenge and try to find the right people to write these books, and create my own version of A Book Apart. Unfortunately, I know that I’m not the right person, and that’s why I’m putting this idea out there. Hopefully, someone will stumble across this and run with my idea.

Footnotes

1. There is really only a few things I don’t quite get just yet — positioning being one of them. ↩
2. Subtitled: The box model, positioning, and putting the cascade in Cascading Style Sheets. ↩

For the last 5 or so years, I have had the best of intentions about participating in Movember, but for one reason or another, it never happened. This year, I’ve finally gotten off my arse and signed up. I’ve joined forces with a number of other men from the company I work for to form a fundraising team.

What I need now are your donations and support. Visit my Movember profile and, if you can, click the “Donate to me” or “Donate to my team” button and give what you can. It’s a great cause.

I’ll be posting regular updates and photos of the ugly caterpillar that will be growing on my upper lip once Movember kicks off in earnest on November 1.

This post was originally posted on my tumblelog, but I thought it was important enough to cross post here. Any support you can offer is greatly appreciated.

The act of making a mixtape was a painstaking process, particularly before the advent of the CD player. It involved sitting by your radio for hours on end, waiting for that song that you know is exactly what your tape demands, only to miss the first 20 seconds of the song because you lost focus and had to rush to hit the record button.

Sometimes it even involved pestering the radio station with call after call to request that one song which will perfectly express how you feel. But it didn’t matter how long, or how many calls it took, you were going to sit there until you got that mixtape perfect.

And then, only once you were done recording both sides perfectly, you would spend hours making the perfect cover art or case insert to accompany the tape; giving it that special something to make it even better.

These days, the art of the mixtape seems lost. Adrift in a sea of smart playlists, audioscrobbles, and genius mixes. The art of song selection is no longer an act of persistence and determination, but simply a matter of sifting through the 50,000 tracks you have in your iTunes library to fill a CD, or compose a playlist.

But even setting aside the art of the mixtape, is a mix CD or a playlist even remotely as personal, as visceral, as important as an actual cassette tape painstakingly recorded by hand? No, it’s not.

The mix CD seems like the natural progression from the mixtape right? But it’s not. It’s the poor cousin of the mixtape. The mix CD lacks the panache, the personal touch of the mixtape. Choose your playlist (you are burning a playlist, right?), put the blank CD-R in the drive and click burn, then 5 minutes later out pops your CD ready to give to that someone special. Maybe spend a little bit of time in Photoshop creating cover, and if you are feeling extra adventurous maybe a label, and you are done.

The playlist is an even poorer cousin. Literally the only effort that goes into creating a playlist is the song selection. Good luck winning your crush over with that — all you’ve done is prove to him/her they’re worth approximately 5 minutes of your time

And now, we have the online mixtape. The online mixtape is as far as I am concerned, the new natural progression from the mixtape, if only for one reason — it’s just as easy to get wrong, and just as hard to get right, and it all boils down to effort.

You can put some work into it: use a proper domain name, you know, one you’ve paid for; learn HTML & CSS¹ and create a beautiful, personal design for the page; slip them a handwritten note with something cute or romantic on it along with the URL, the wait and watch your effort pay dividends¹.

Or alternatively, you can take the easy way out: dump the mixtape into a plain, undecorated HTML page (or worse, a generic “free” template); upload it to some modern version of Geocities, littered with ads because you were too cheap to pay for even the cheapest of hosting; send your crush an impersonal email or SMS with nothing but the 157 character URL, then watch in horror as they spend two minutes on the page and never return.

Often, as technology is made obsolete, we lose some of the charms we hadn’t considered about our old stuff; but then, occasionally, something pops up that allows us to resurrect the spirit of what has been lost.

Or, you know, you could just buy a tapedeck, and record a proper mixtape, old timer.

Footnotes

1. If, for some reason, you don’t already know it. I’m sure you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making an online mixtape, for crying out loud. ↩
2. Or not, because you really should know that a mixtape rarely actually works. ↩

This is a rewritten version of an old article, called, strangely enough, The Mixtape Dilemma. Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email at dean@harris.tc and let me know if I’ve gotten better or worse at this.

I decided for the sake of future proofing my articles, I would give them the gift of proper markup. If I didn’t do this, any time that I redesigned, I would have ended up with mangled, nasty posts that didn’t fit my designs. Never mind the fact that its just bad practice to allow that type of code.

At first, it was perfect. I was writing like I never had before¹, and I was furiously adding all the markup my articles needed with full on HTML. Unfortunately, this new found desire to use the right tools came at a cost: readability.

It turns out that its damned hard to read the unrendered version of an article when it is full of HTML tags and encoded characters, and its just as hard to edit those articles.

After writing this way for a while, I miraculously came across a tool that I somehow hadn’t heard of before: Markdown.

Markdown seemed like mana from heaven. It was easily readable, there were WordPress plugins that allowed me to publish untransformed Markdown, and it was easy to understand. Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, Markdown never really caught fire in my mind, and as a result I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly trying to learn the syntax, and constantly checking the dingus to make sure that what I was writing was correct, and would actually render once I published. I returned to the dark days of doing all my markup in HTML

Of course, the issues I had previously been struck with were back, but this time I noticed something new. I was writing less complete articles.

What was happening was a result of a failure to prepare. I would sit down with an idea in my mind, and start to write without doing any research or resource gathering first. Then, when I cam to the first place I wanted to put a link, I would have to hunt out the URL. By the time I found the URL, and added the link, I would have either lost my thought, or decided that I didn’t want to write about this subject anymore. I have a huge amount of files in my “Drafts” folder that fell victim to this; simply stopped at the first link.

Recently, however, I decided that I wanted to give Markdown another shot. I started by trying to type out all the required Markdown elements, and I was failing miserably, and just as I was about to give up on Markdown again. Then, there came articles from Minimal Mac, MacSparky, and One Thing Well, all about how to make writing Markdown more simple by using TextExpander.

TextExpander is a tool that allows you to set up “snippets” of commonly used text, and assign a hotkey to insert those snippets into anything that accepts text. Why I had never thought to use TextExpander to add markup to articles is beyond me. using TextExpander will make the insertion of the Markdown elements both simple, and reliable

I won’t go into detail about how I’ve set TextExpander up to expand snippets of Markdown, other than to say that I’ve set up a bunch of snippets based on those found in the above articles, and I’m giving Markdown another shot.

I do still want a dedicated Markdown Editor, as I think that the aspects I outlined in that post² would definitely assist in helping to learn the syntax faster, and also allow me to see at a glance if I have made a typo in my usage of the syntax.

For now though, I’m focused on continuing to work on my writing, and integrating Markdown into my process so that one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will feel natural to use.

Footnotes

1. Take that how you will. ↩
2. One day soon, I’ll go into more detail about the shape this would take. ↩

As for the specifics of it, I am using Tumblr to power the tumblelog, and I have come up with a completely bespoke theme to house the content. It is very plain, possibly bordering on boring, but I’m happy with it. Personally, I think it is my best design work to date.

On Using Tumblr

It is rather ironic that the bloke who wrote “My Problems With Tumblr“, which is essentially a post about how I don’t like the service, would start up a blog using it. Ultimately, it came down to this: Tumblr is currently the best platform for creating a tumblelog. There are a couple of other options, which I will go into, but none of them felt as good as Tumblr for what I want to do. So what where the other options?

WordPress

I’m not a big fan of WordPress, despite running this blog on it, and am in fact in the process of trying to move away from using it at all. In order to get what I wanted out of WordPress, I would have had to hack away at the functions.php file, and seeing as I have no experience at this, would have involved days, or even weeks, worth of extra work. And even if I had, I doubt that posting would have been anything other than a chore.

TextPattern

TextPattern would have been a great candidate, if I had the ability to set up custom post types. Without that ability, posting would have been a chore, with a delicate ballet dance around custom fields, which is never fun.

ExpressionEngine

The thing that is stopping me from using ExpressionEngine can be boiled down to a single word: cost. Put simply, I’m not so sure I can afford the cost of an ExpressionEngine licence, just to set up a tumblelog. It certainly would have been a great solution though.

Chyrp

At this point, there really isn’t much to say for using Chyrp, as the project is officially dead, and documentation is no longer available for it. If I can find the documentation, I might just end up switching over, but at this stage, thats not a likely eventuation. (Alex Suraci: If you happen to come across this, get in touch, I’d love copies of the documentation, and the required files).

Gelato

It looks pretty cool, but I couldn’t find any theming documentation, so that pretty much killed any likelihood of being able to successfully use it for me.

With those options gone, I had no choice but to go with Tumblr. It hasn’t been a bad experience so far, but it has also been far from good. Already I have tried to log in, and ended at a “Maintenance” page at least twice, something that would never happen if I hosted my own CMS. There are other things as well, but they will likely come in another post, after I have been using the service in anger, again, for a while.

Theming Tumblr

Setting up a tumblr theme was, surprisingly, an amazingly easy experience. I’m incredibly impressed with the quality of the theming language that the guys at Tumblr have created, which allowed me to take a full HTML mockup of the design, to fully working Tumblr theme in about an hour and a half. Considering I had never created a Tumblr theme before, that time is astounding. Creating a fully working WordPress theme usually takes me around three days.

So, in conclusion, I’m using Tumblr, because it is the best option available to me for what I want to do. I’m not the type of person who will dismiss something out of hand without trying it out in earnest, and I’m now giving Tumblr a second chance. The issues I have with the service are still there, but I’ll try and keep an open mind.

Ian P. Hines

Ah, yes. Ian. Ian is someone that I consider a friend. Ian’s blog covers a range of topics, but could probably be best described as a personal blog, with a productivity, technological, and slightly policital bent. My all time favourite post of Ian’s³ would have to be his piece on Google and Privacy. It is essentially a response to posts from Gruber and Kyle Baxter, but expands on these in a way I hadn’t considered previously.

Chris Coyier

You probably already know Chris, even if you don’t realise it. Chris is the brains behind CSS-Tricks, Digging into WordPress, and Are My Sites Up? Chris’ personal blog, surprisingly, rarely strays into the realm of web design and development. Usually, it is purely personal, with a technological bent at times. My favourite post from Chris is definitely 10 Things To Do if I Die on the Operating Table. It gives us an insight into Chris’ family life, and made me think about all the times that we could conceivably be taking our last breath, and we do nothing to acknowledge that fact.

Kyle Steed

Kyle is an amazingly talented designer and illustrator from the US, who I have been following for a while now. Kyle’s blog is also probably best described as a personal blog, this time with a definite web design bent. In fact, Kyle used to include his portfolio right alongside his blog, although this has changed with his most recent redesign.

Kyle’s posts can, and in fact used to, be broken down into three distinct categories: Life, Design, and Faith. My favourite post of Kyle’s is definitely When is my break. At the time it was posted, I was less than happy with my employment situation, and my life in general, and this helped me get off my arse and do something about it.

The Setup

The Setup is, in the words of its creator, “yet another waferbaby snafu”. To put it more literally, and less esoterically, it is a collection of interviews with interesting people, who go into detail about the technology they use to get the job done. Daniel Bogan, aka waferbaby, started The Setup over a year ago, and has managed to interview such notables as John Gruber, Alex Payne, and Gina Trapani amongst others.

My favourite entry on The Setup would have to be the interview with Richard Stallman. Not because it is particularly illuminating, but because it demonstrates the lengths that RMS will go to in order to use Free Software. Other notable posts include Derek Powazek, Dan Benjamin and Garrett Murray.

Minimal Mac

A technology blog written by Patrick Rhone, if you use a Mac, or have a wanderlust that brings around to looking at Macs, then you should already be reading this blog. If you fit either of these criteria, and you don’t read Minimal Mac, then shame on you. That is not to say that the site only applies to Mac users. In fact some of the best content on the site is universally applicable. The general thrust of Minimal Mac, as I see it, is not to necessarily promote minimalism as such, but rather to promote simplicity and the idea of “enough“.

My favourite post on Minimal Mac probably has to be the one linked to above. In it, Patrick, by way of Chris Bowler, expresses wonderfully the idea of using only the tools that help you get stuff done, nothing more, nothing less. Beautiful.

It turns out that the “holiday” house that has been booked is the very same house that my grandfather lived in before he became incapacitated and was moved into a nursing home. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away late last year, which makes it even more awkward for me to stay in that house.

Thankfully, whilst expressing the randomness of this situation to the buck, who is a lifelong friend, and has been at this particular house many times, he made the gracious offer of allowing me to stay in his parents house, which is nearby, to avoid the uncomfortable feeling that staying there would bring me.

What has really surprised me about this situation, though, is not the measure of kindness that my friend has shown to me, for which I am grateful, or the fact that by sheer coincidence I would have been staying in my grandfather’s house, but rather the fact that this has hit me so hard.

Before this, I hadn’t really been affected deeply by my grandfathers death, as sad as that is to admit, because I rarely saw him, and in the last few years we had slowly become strangers. Because of that, I hadn’t dealt with the emotions that come with losing a family member, and the prospect of staying in his house brought many of those to the surface, and really shook me.

I won’t spend any time going into the amounts of data that Google collects from its users, Ian has a few links in his article, and outlines the basics very well, but I would like to talk about a couple of points that Ian makes:

“There has to be a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t seem to me that enough people who are in a position to find it are doing their best to. We’re all just hoping that some abstract governmental force will step up and guarantee it rather than taking concrete, actionable steps towards ensuring it. I find that disconcerting.”

I find this disconcerting too. That people are willing to be concerned about their privacy on the internet, yet seem content to sit on their hands and wait for someone else to fix the problem, is in itself a problem.

I know I’m certainly guilty of it. A massive part of the problem is that most, if not all of Googles consumer products have never been equalled, let alone bested, especially when it comes to online products.

With that said, and if you don’t mind losing some of the benefits that come with being a Google customer, here are a few tips that you can use to minimise the amount of data that Google compiles on you in the future.

First and foremost, switch your search engine. Google won the search war, sure, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, perfectly capable search engines out there that you can use. I personally switched recently to Duck Duck Go entirely because of their statement that they will collect no user data.

Secondly, manage your own email, or farm it out to your webhost. Admittedly, this is more of a task for the nerds and geeks amongst up, but chances are, if you have a decent web host, they will provide you with a webmail solution. It won’t be as good as Gmail, but do you really need all of that power? I know I sure don’t.

Alternatively, if you are a real nerd, you could set up your own email server, and point your MX records at it, to allow you to feel entirely comfortable in what data is kept is entirely yours.

These are just two options that you have in terms of moving your data away from Google. Certainly, inertia, and the quality of Googles products can keep you from doing this, but if you are terribly concerned, then it’s easily worth the effort.

Finally something Ian said about Eric Schmidt:

“Schmidt doesn’t see the world like a normal person. He seems to think that an expectation [of] personal privacy is naïve. I think most people disagree with him.”

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Ian here. I’ve had lots of conversations with people who are absolutely enamoured with the fact that Google knows every single intimate detail of their online life. In fact, one person, with whom I had the misfortune to work, once told me that they hoped Google became a world wide government, and that then they wouldn’t need to think for themselves.

Granted, this person is a moron, but many people I know are only three or four steps short of this type of thinking.

All of this is to say, something needs to be done, and whilst nothing is being done on a governmental level, perhaps it is time we took the action into our own hands. With enough people making noise about this, maybe Google will one day listen.

This curiosity came to a head last night, whilst coding up a redesign for my lifestream website, that required me to get that album artwork. After much googling around, I finally ended up hacking together a solution that I thought I would share with you.

But first, a little background.

The code that runs The Nicotine Diaries is incredibly simple. It is just a one page HTML document that uses SimplePie to parse the RSS feeds from various social sites that I use, and extract the data that I want to display.

Sounds like it should be simple enough to grab the album art then right? Wrong. You see, Last.fm doesn’t include the album art for tracks in the RSS feed that it provides for your recent listening history. Personally, I would album art is kind of important information about a track, but I can also understand the rationale behind not including it — bandwidth issues, etc.

I ended up sending out a tweet expressing my frustration at not being able to work it out, and received a response from the current maintainer of SimplePie. It turns out, that I couldn’t do it with SimplePie, and thats cool, because I could do it with SimpleXML.

Now, the only problem I had was, I still didn’t know what feed I needed to use that would provide me with the album art for my recent tracks. I headed to the Last.fm API docs and came across this beauty, which, contrary to the example response does include album art. In four sizes no less.

The only problem is that I need an API key to be able to pull that in. No problem, because getting an API key with Last.FM is as simple as heading to the API page, and applying for one. Once you have your API key, its a simple matter of requesting the right feed, and parsing the response with SimpleXML. Here is the code I came up with:

<?php


// Set up the required variables first
$username = ""; // Enter your username here
$apikey = ""; // Enter your API Key here
$tracklimit = 5; //Enter the number of tracks
$emptyart = ""; //Display this if no art found

// Construct the URL, and feed it through SimpleXML
$feed = simplexml_load_file("http://ws.audioscrobbler   »
.com/2.0/?method=user.getrecenttracks&user="   »
 . $username . "&limit=" . $tracklimit . "&api_key="   »
  . $apikey);

$tracks = $feed->recenttracks->track;
foreach($tracks as $track) {

$url = $track->url;
$img = $track->children();
$img = $img->image[3];

if ($img == "") {
        $img = $emptyart; }

echo "<li><a href='" . $url . "'><img src='"   »
 . $img . "' /></a></li>\n";

}
?>

Linewraps indicated by“»”

It isn’t perfect, or even good by any stretch of the imagination. There is no caching at the moment, mostly because that is beyond my level f PHP expertise, but if you get yourself an API key, fill in the variables, and stick this into your page, between some <ul></ul> tags, you will get a list of cover art for your recently listened tracks, linked to the track page.

I’ve spent the better part of an afternoon trying to break this down into a set of functions or classes to make it a little bit nicer and more maintainable in your raw source, but alas, my extemely limited PHP knowledge won’t allow me to do that. If you want to give me some pointers, or take this, tidy it up, turn it into functions/classes/whatever they are actually called, or add caching, feel free. That said, if you do, I’d love it if you could share it with me so that I can put it to use.

Update 9/8/10: I’m trying to update this a little bit to grab the artist name and track title form the XML document as per the below code, but it is falling over on any punctuation in the <name> and truncating the string. If anyone who happens to read this had any idea’s, please let me know.

$artist = $track->artist;
$title = $track->name;

with the output updated to:

echo "<li><a href='" . $url . "' title='" .$artist.  »
 " - " . $title . "'><img src='" . $img . "'  »
 /></a></li>\n";

Linewraps indicated by“»”