My Blue Heaven

Jumping on the Scrobbling bandwagon..

For those who don’t know what scrobbling is. It’s basically a music-technology social networking website & software. It tracks the music you listen to on your fave media player (eg itunes) using some simple software and plugins, and then displays the tracks on your profile page. It also displays charts of your listening trends – eg most played artist or track of the week, of all time etc – and can find music recommendations based on your history. You can also display your scrobblings on your website. Like the one above is my 10 most recent tracks listened to in iTunes. Visit the wiki page for more info. And the Last.Fm website.

The g33ks prayer

Our W3C, which art on the net:
Hallowed be thy markup.
Thy workingdrafts come.
Thy Specs be done in Mozilla as they are in Opera.
Give us this day our daily XHTML and forgive us our hacks and workarounds, as we
forgive all tablebased designers.
And lead us not to invalid code but deliver us from IE5.

Ok I have to admit, I found this “prayer” rather hilarious. And yes I understood every line. @_@ Oh dear. I think I’ve just eternally condemned myself as a total g33k.

Current listening :: “Sexy Back” – Justin Timberlake (ooh I like this song.. makes me wanna bust some krumpin hehe)

Days gone by

Found some old photos from Frankfurt taken last year. *sigh* Makes me miss Frankfurt and the continental life. Anyway, these photos were all taken by Kwai with his digital SLR.. thats why they’re so nice. 🙂

Only thing I can claim is the new functionality I’ve implemented on this weblog. Notice anything new? (Hint: click on the photo thumbnails). Yep I implemented a rather fancy web 2.0 lightbox script which uses the prototype javascript library. (Ok, so I didn’t program this script, but it’s still cool – I’m trying to learn how it works.. hopefully I’ll be able to program some fancy js and even ajax soon using this cool, albeit slightly bloated, prototype js library). I’m also in the process of cleaning up this old web site of mine, in an effort to try bring my code up to scratch, make it “W3C standards” compliant and use it as more of a learning playground… perhaps even making a portfolio worthy of being added to my CV.

Anyways, enjoy the pics. Mouseover the right or left of the photo to navigate through the pics. Full gallery here. 🙂

Anyway, we have a long weekend this weekend! Woohoo!! Plans include Kwai’s birthday bash on Sat (he turned the big two five on Wed), lots of rest and relaxation, church, and the Notting Hill Carnival. 😀

Advice needed about weblog software

Hey guys! Just wanted to gather some information from you bloggers out there. My current web hosting expires soon, and as it is quite an expensive package, I’m thinking of changing to Kwai’s server which has unlimited space, and is cheaper! However I’m stuck on what weblog software to install? I think I have this old version of movable type somewhere still, but maybe I should upgrade. Does anyone know what blogging software is good these days – I’m looking for something free and something you can install and run on your own server (linux based) and have full control over. I’ve heard about TypePad, but that costs money. Is the latest free version of MovableType any good – it seems be restricted to only support 1 user now. Anybody know about any other weblog publishing software?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Video killed the radio starrr (more updates)

I forgot to mention yesterday that I’ve also added some videos to the Downloads page. These were taken with my digital camera – they’re in mpg format, 320×240 res. There are five videos of Coltrane (from his first day at home, to the latest one taken last Tuesday – see how much he’s grown over 6 months!).. and one of our band Jonny Panic, during a rehearsal for the “80 Years” recording.

Current listening :: “Whistle while you walk” – Yellowjackets

Updates

Check out the new contact page! It has an instant (icq) message form.. and an email form that I wrote using php (ooh my first php page!) Give it a try. 🙂

I’ve also added more pics of Coltrane and other pics to my gallery.

Current listening :: “In Between Days” – Ben Folds

More updates!

Notice anything different? 😉 I just couldn’t resist. I had to do a redesign.. even if its just a minor facelift.

I spent half the day at work making modifications to this site (when I probably should preparing for a software release…err.. *cough*). I guess the main changes are to the navigation bar and the layout. I finally decided to (after many weeks/months/years of pestering from Fjord) get rid of the boxes surrounding the content. So no more scrolling an invisible scrolly bar. Happy now!? 😛

Anyway, what do people think of the changes? Well I like them.. its nice seeing something different every now and then. 🙂 (Btw if you can’t see the stylesheet, try clicking here).

Current listening :: “Falling” – Ben Kweller

Made the move

Lookee here. I’ve finally set up my movable type account, and even figured out how to change the template to accomodate my layout and design. Yay! 🙂

So this is a first post to see if it all works.