Blog posts

The first public fruit of my collaboration with The Image Shoppe has just launched in the form of a new site for Bazzani Associates. Anyone living close to downtown Grand Rapids will recognise the name Bazzani as they have been behind numerous high-profile building and renovation projects lately. I was particularly glad to be able to work with them because of their emphasis on sustainable building practices that go beyond ‘green building’ to look at the long term viability of the communities within which they are building. ...

Unsurprisingly, Bush’s scheduled appearance at Calvin has generated considerable discussion within and without the college, online and offline. The most prominent mention was in the Washington Post which initially ran this article, which predictably characterised Calvin as a hotbed of conservatism. Kate and others responded to the article, and the result made for more pleasant reading. It was also picked up by Kos, leading to some hundreds of comments. A group of students whose graduation is being compromised by the decision have launched a google group to discuss ways to respond. You can find that good discussion here. And Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma has written a great open letter, which is to be found here. ...

Yesterday, Tom Coates posted a piece entitled " Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?" His argument is that trackback spam has put an end to an interesting attempt to knit together posts between different blogs, that we should allow time for mourning, but we should also begin looking for alternatives. The Six Apart Pronet list has carried a number of posts from people agreeing with his analysis. Trackback never really took off outside of techie circles. The lack of support for it in blogger and the lack of education of new bloggers as to its advantages ensured that. For those of us who are interested in the technical aspects of blogging, and in the potential it offers to change the way we have conversations, it was a great starting point, but it never hit the primetime. ...

It’s probably been reported extensively elsewhere, but today was the first time I’ve run into this issue. I was trying to lay out a page which contains quite a number of alpha-transparent PNGs, a few JPEGs and a variety of background colours, and one fade wasn’t working right. In Firefox and Internet Explorer, the background image faded neatly into the background colour. In Safari the background image seemed distinctly darker than anywhere else, and wouldn’t match up properly. ...

The gallery script I posted about on Friday was a nice improvement on plain image switching, but didn’t quite have the elegance I was looking for, particularly when switching between images of different sizes. Yesterday, I managed to grab some time to play around with resizing images using javascript so as to produce a smoother transition. The effect is rather pleasing. It works by preloading each image shortly before it might be needed, and using the dimensions of the preloaded image to calculate increments to change the displayed image dimension by. After stepping through the resizing, we then switch the previous image to the background, change our container’s source to the new image, and fade it in. ...

Some months ago, through a long-forgotten source, I came across this technique for fading in images without using flash and I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with such techniques. Today, work on a new page for Calvin gave me such an excuse. I wanted to use the technique within a javascript image gallery. I needed to be able to advance through a set of images and wanted to fade each in in turn. Since the images were named numerically, all it appeared to involve was a couple of javascript functions to increment or decrement a counter and update the photo accordingly. Because I’d be using the same image tag for all the images, I also tweaked the original’s functions to use a predefined object rather than making use of the DOM each time. ...

Among other things, I’m currently working on a relatively large CMS/membership site. At the project’s initiation I decided to steer clear of off-the-shelf solutions, partly because I wanted to take myself through the learning curve that the project was sure to involve, partly because none of the CMS or framework options I looked at really appealed to me, and partly because it seemed as though the customisations required to manage this dataset would take nearly as much time as a from-scratch solution. ...

I’ve been following the chatter over microformats ( XFN, xFolk, hCalendar, and their kin) for some time, but having been having a hard time formulating a response to all the discussion. In particular, the discussion over at Ryan’s blog and some postings such as this one by Danny Ayers have triggered further thinking. ...

Today’s source of disgust is the fact that Calvin College will be hosting President Bush as the speaker for this year’s commencement (Brits read: graduation) speech, bumping out the previously booked Nicholas Wolterstorff. You can read the official announcement here or media mouse’s report here. It’s a remarkably divisive move for a college that has been trying to position itself as transcending the narrow confines of the world of “Christian education”. While the honour of being recognised by your country’s president is significant, it is diluted when that president is this divisive, has a track record of excluding people from his events on the basis of their political allegiance, and consistently attempts to co-opt the Christian faith into a narrow partisan agenda. While the appearance of President Bush may shore up support for the college in conservative circles, it’ll hurt attempts to reach out beyond them. ...

I suspect I won’t be the only one excited to hear that T-Bone Burnett’s new album has a release date. It’ll be the first new album from T-Bone since 1992, and is due in August on DMZ (a Sony imprint). According to the story, there’ll also be a 2-CD career retrospective released around the same time. “It is very primal,” Burnett says of his liberating new work. “It’s emancipation. Everyone who works in the record business is a victim of Stockholm syndrome, and I’ve finally been deprogramed. … We’re doing this to supply some liberty in the horrible environment we’re living in.” ...