NEWS… 
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Navigational Aids
In a few procrastinatory moments this afternoon, I added a little more functionality to the pages on the site that have archives—News, Musings and Faves. In the past, someone jumping to an archive page would be confronted with a long list sorted in reverse chronological order. In the Faves archive, which right now has only six entries, such a list was fairly easy to get through. The Musings and News archives, which now have fifty-five and forty-one items, respectively, were a little more challenging.
To make browsing more seamless, therefore, I made some minor tweaks to the code and the layout. Right below the title of each archive page, there is now a horizontal set of links which, when clicked, will allow you to jump to a specific year. The content is still sorted as before, with more recent items at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. I had been toying with the idea of splitting each of the archives into several pages, but I think this solution is the better one for now, minimizing as it does the number of clicks one might need to get to a particular post or set of posts. At the very least, digging back into the archives might be easier for first-time readers or casual browsers. Enjoy…
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Saturday, 1 May 2010
JPlayer to the Rescue
A few months back, the computer technology news followers among you might have noticed stories about Apple Computer’s purchasing the online music streaming service Lala. Each reporter or media outlet that bothered to comment speculated on what Apple's intentions might be, particularly as rumors swirled about the imminent release of the iPad. For now, those intentions remain unclear, but one thing is certain: as of May 31, Lala will be no more.
Why should this matter to you, dear reader? It has something to with a change you might notice in some of the more recent posts in the Musings section.
You see, last summer I started using Lala to make it easier for readers of that section to hear the songs I discussed when there were no other high-quality options already available online. I originally saw the service as a useful alternative to imeem, whose selection seemed limited and uneven. The latter was occasionally handy, as it contained some tracks (like a wonderful version of "Goddamn Lonely Love" by the Drive-By Truckers, recorded live at the Cannery Ballroom in Nashville) that weren't available elsewhere. Last August, however, MySpace purchased imeem, and by December imeem was effectively shuttered. It was around that time that I started looking for alternatives to both services. I had seen good notices for jPlayer, but, upon investigation, realized I didn't then have the time to create a custom interface (its default would have looked terrible on this site). So I left the matter for another time.
This week's Lala announcement got me to reconsider, and in fairly short order yesterday I did the coding and image creation/editing work. It was much easier than I thought it would be—though there was a lot of tricky CSS math to do. The payoff is that, for the time being, I have a much more reliable solution for embedding audio, and you have better options for hearing it and interacting with it—even if you're using an iPhone. So, check out one of the Musings (say, the one about Felt), and give the new player a try. I think you might like it…
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Monday, 26 April 2010
Commenting Restored … Again
Sometimes I have to take some time out from my everyday life to ask some non-everyday questions … like why folks who learn, from a certain elsewhere, of updates to the Musings page comment in that other place rather than here. I think of my small cadre of readers as highly intelligent people, ones who wouldn’t read something here, then waste time going back there when there’s a convenient link handy at the bottom of a page. Something else had to be happening, I figured. So, in the midst of some other under-the-hood updates, I did some investigating and learned that the commenting code was broken. It was so broken, in fact, that anyone wanting to comment would be confronted with some bewildering error messages and incompletely rendered pages.
The commenting system is fixed now.
If those of you who read those Musings choose not to comment in the future, I’ll have to figure out whether there are other reasons—beyond your perhaps obvious lack of time. More to come…
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Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Back from Somewhere
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. Nor have I abandoned this site (though I am passively abandoning Facebook—but that’s another story).
Given the long breaks between my two June posts (on Prince and Michael Jackson, respectively) and the news item that appeared on 2 December as well the months that have passed since the latter, one might be forgiven for thinking something wicked might my way have come, but nothing so vile has occurred. There have been the usual ups and downs as well as new ones for good measure, but the good news is that everything is resolved (or being resolved) and that there are potentially good things on the horizon.
Most immediately, note that I’ve finally posted my 2009 Faves list and its accompanying list of also-rans. The former is somewhat bittersweet, for it includes discs by two artists whose work I started exploring in earnest last year, both of whom died recently: Vic Chesnutt and Lhasa (de Sela). While their respective back catalogs are not that extensive, each one has lots of gems, and one might argue those two artists were producing some of their best work right at the end. Who knows what might have come next?
As for items further out on the horizon, I’ll mention only two. One, I’ve got a backlog of half-finished posts that I’ll get to soon to post here—musings on music, mortality and many other things. And, two, there’s finally some Honey-Flavored Soap news. Remember that? The long-promised album, some of whose demos are on the Songs page? Well, I’m finally working on it again after my February convalescence left me with few options for activity beyond reading and listening. During that time, while cleaning out a closet, I found a hard drive that was my only link to material I recorded before 2005—everything else was stolen in an early 2006 break-in. I’d long assumed that said hard drive was broken (it was pretty violently thrashed by the thieves), and even if it weren’t, I no longer possessed the (older) technology to get it up and running. On a lark, I plunked down money for an adapter and, when it arrived, put together the most outstanding technological kludge—a chain of adapters terminating in a USB cable fuelled by a poorly matched power supply. Miraculously, it worked long enough for me recover all of that precious data (e.g., the original backing tracks for all of those demos as well as things only my friends Erik and Albin have heard). After I’ve converted all of the tracks from my old programs and gotten everything up and running with my new setup, the re-recording and mixing will commence. Stay tuned…
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Wednesday, 2 December 2009
The Obvious and the Surprising
So, there’s not much to report here—beyond the obvious and the surprising.
First up, the obvious. It’s December, and 2009 will be coming to an end soon. What that means for me, of course, is that I’m beginning my annual jaunt through all of the new releases I’ve purchased during the calendar year to pick the best for this year’s compilation. It promises to be as strange as any of them have been over the last several years. I’m still not sure whether I’ll stick with the two-disc format (which definitely makes decision-making less agonizing) or return to the original single-disc version. Either way, expect to see a list over on the Musings page within a week, give or take, of 1 January 2010.
The other, surprising, news concerns one Elizabeth Fraser. She’s the vocalist who is best known for her work as a member of Cocteau Twins in the 1980s and ’90s and for appearances over the last two-and-a-half decades on recordings by Ian McCulloch, Felt, Craig Armstrong, Peter Gabriel and Massive Attack, among others. After being largely silent since the late 1990s, she’s recently emerged with a single on Rough Trade called “Moses,” a tribute to the late Jake Drake-Brockman. You can read her first interview in over a decade as well as hear a stream of the track at the Guardian’s website. Enjoy.
