I’ve been using iTunes for quite some time now, and I must say that I’m pretty pleased. It’s easy to control, it’s automatic file organization is fantastic, and the Party Shuffle is very intuitive and flexible. There are a few things, however, that I think could make it an even better product, while not taking away from it’s ease-of-use.
I was the lucky song winner today over at Your Total Site. I used it to by a song that I’ve been wanting for a while, but never got around to getting it; Somewhere Only We Know by Keane. Garrett thanked me for broadening his musical horizons, and it got me to thinking… I haven’t expanded my ‘new music’ horizons in a while. I’ve been too busy.
About 2 weeks ago, the power connection on my Toshiba laptop started to flicker in and out. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed by fiddling with the power chord, but it started to get irritating. And then the battery stopped charging… sometimes. I would have to restart the machine to make the battery take a charge again. Very strange.
Point: The wrapper div (a generic div element placed just inside the body, encasing all other elements) can be an effective way of producing a sub-body element of which you can have full control.
Counterpoint: The wrapper div has no semantic meaning whatsoever.
This morning I read this article about IE7 and Standards. When I got to the end of the article, I was very excited. It seems as if the IE7 team is really getting a handle on what they need to work on. They’re even asking for advice. That takes a lot of guts. But as encouraging as the article was by itself, the comments that have been posted are doubly depressing. The very first comment is not only argumentative; it doesn’t even suggest anything at all. It’s just a complaint. And it’s petty one at that. How disappointing.
The time is here. I’ve been thinking about making this switch for a few weeks now, and I just made up my mind last week. Along with a graphical cleanup, I’ve made the switch to WordPress. I had, up until now, been using a home-brewed system. I was quite happy with it, and it was doing the job quite well, but now with version 1.5, my need for fiddling is perfectly matched with ease of updates.
This is an idea I borrowed from a popular ecommerce system, OSCommerce. This is not the exact class, but I need to give idea credit where it is due. I simplified and rewrote the class for my usage.
This is the method I use in the comments area to turn everything between code tags to html entities. A php function that takes a string as a parameter, and returns the result, all formated and ready to go.
For anyone who’s interested, here’s how I bent the navigation bar at the top of my site. It’s a variation of the Navigation Matrix posted on Superfluous Banter. (Spanish Language Version)
Steve Smith