When writing about the start of the Sick Ship songwriting project I forgot to mention that Steve and I had a very similar band about a year ago with Kristen of Wheels On The Bus. We wrote a bunch of songs at a real rehearsal space, no headphone jams, but we recorded the same way, in my apartment live off the floor into a mixer into one track in GarageBand.
Here are 3 complete songs, these ones even have bass!
As usual, Sick Ship wasn’t our real name, we didn’t have a name and that was the best we could come up with.
The other day I came across this “accessible flyer” on the No Frills website. Upon first glance it seems pretty good, it’s basically just plain text which is way more accessible than the usual scanned images they use for their regular online flyer. If you look behind the scenes it doesn’t look so accessible to me.
Tables? iFrames?
Here are a few reasons this accessible flyer is not as accessible as it could be:
The links to get to the store nearest you don’t have title attributes. This isn’t a huge deal since the words you need are there as the linked text anyway but the title attribute is still an accessibility recommendation.
The entire flyer is in an iFrame. There’s no real reason I can see to do this except to prevent loading the header and footer each time or to make it impossible to permalink to expired deals. I wouldn’t have such a problem with the iFrame if it had a heading but as it is it just contains a table.
Tables! The entire accessible flyer is laid out in tables. There’s no reason for tables, it’s not tabular data, there’s no layout, it’s just headings and descriptions. It looks more like a definition list to me. The table doesn’t even have a summary.
I think including an accessible flyer is a great idea but this is not the way to do it. For the extreme cases a screen reader (or search engine) is going to have a really hard time figuring out how to interpret that table if it can even get to it in the first place. Not to mention how much extra code was used to mark up that definition list as a table.
Accessible flyer - great idea, poor implementation.
A friend of mine is currently battling a giant media company that thinks it owns his company, it’s a mess. In sympathy I made this Creative Commons desktop wallpaper, I know, big help…
I’ve started playing drums again with some old friends of mine. We all grew up playing in different bands in the Brampton area and now we’re old and just looking to have a good time playing whatever we feel like.
The band consists of me, Steve Fennell (Wheels On The Bus) and Pat Kelly (Ten Speed Hero). We play in my apartment, we call it a headphone jam. We run electronic drums, bass and guitar into a mixer and out to a headphone amp, it always ends up sounding good and it doesn’t make your ears ring like a real jam, but it also doesn’t rattle your soul like standing in front of a wall of amps. We’re not really called Sick Ship, we don’t have a name yet.
We do a lot of recording direct from the extra headphone output into my Macbook Pro using Garage Band. We write songs collectively so I thought I’d start recording that process and put it up for anyone who is interested. It’s rough as we work things out and unfortunately you can’t hear us talking because that’s an important part of it.
Here’s the first in this series.
Pat brought in a riff he’d come up with earlier that day and we just jammed on it. Near the end we Started working on a riff Steve and I had messed around with a few months ago. Have a listen, there might be something good there.
For the past 2 days I’ve been in Boston at the An Event Apart conference. I kept a live blog of all of the presentations on the controversial upstart Scribble Live.
The conference was great and I think there’s something for everyone in these live blogs. Take a look, I’ve marked my personal favourites with an asterisk:
I wrote a about a NXNE show featuring Moneen, Casey Baker & The Buffalo Sinners and Songs From A Room for the Much Music blog, check it out. NXNE: Moneen @ El Mocambo - Much Music.com Blog
“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this. They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”
For the love of God I hope the music industry doesn’t “pop its head up”. The last thing we need is another album full of joke songs by a bunch of assholes that think they were anything but a joke band. Kiss were worse than Britney Spears or NKOTB ever were because they disguised their shit pop as rock and roll, dicks. This quote just proves Kiss was never in it for the music, they’ll just wait until they can cash in again, why would they play music otherwise?
I just thought you dudes should know about this, that’s all.
If any option in the main menu of your website drops down to reveal more options you’ve failed at usability 101 (according to me, and I’m all that matters.. according to me).
The internet exists so people can get information quickly, when you take that statement into consideration you might come to the conclusion that drop downs are a good idea, allow users to drill down right from the start. Not so fast, if you give people 20 options right away it’s gonna slow them down, a lot. Let’s use a band website as an example, when you show up looking for tour dates you don’t want to be met with a drop down with the options “upcoming tour dates, past tour dates, booking information, tour photos”, you just want tour dates. If you want past tour dates, that’s fine, have a sub menu containing the other sections inside the tour dates section.
Presenting every option available right from the start is never a good idea, make your main menu options very broad and just get the users inside your website. When you walk into a department store you want to go to a specific department and go from there, you don’t want 100 signs hanging from the ceiling saying “men’s underwear, hula hoops, cat food”, you’d have to read all 100 signs before acting rather than just getting into the department you want and going from there.
Don’t make people stand there at the front of the store reading signs for 5 minutes before buying underwear!
You can do a lot with transparent PNGs but it’s not very often that I come across someone doing something useful with them. Sure you can make a scuba divers light get brighter as you scroll deeper (CSS Zen Garden) or make icons look sweet with a drop shadow on all types of different backgrounds but that’s basic, almost useless stuff compared to what MAC cosmetics is doing with transparent PNGs on their site.
Kat was trying to send her friend an image of a colour of eye shadow, but every time she sent the image it was grey instead of the colour of the eye shadow. She asked me “WTF?”. I checked it out, they’re using a solid background colour with a transparent PNG over top. Amazing.
Instead of having to generate thousands of images and load them individually, they have one image with a bunch of background colour hex codes stored in a database. It’s genius and it probably saves them a bunch of money.
Check it out by clicking on the link below and then checking out any of the thumbnails. You can also click on the thumbnails for a bigger version of what’s going on. They have to use some simple JavaScript to force the PNG transparency in IE6 but it’s well worth it.
I wrote a blog post about My Morning Jacket’s new single, album, Saturday Night Live appearance and Toronto show for the Much Music blog. Check it out: New Music From My Morning Jacket
A friend of mine is currently battling a giant media company that thinks it owns his company, it’s a mess. In sympathy I made this Creative Commons desktop wallpaper, I know, big help…
For the past 2 days I’ve been in Boston at the 
If any option in the main menu of your website drops down to reveal more options you’ve failed at usability 101 (according to me, and I’m all that matters.. according to me).
You can do a lot with transparent PNGs but it’s not very often that I come across someone doing something useful with them. Sure you can make a scuba divers light get brighter as you scroll deeper (CSS Zen Garden) or make icons look sweet with a drop shadow on all types of different backgrounds but that’s basic, almost useless stuff compared to what MAC cosmetics is doing with transparent PNGs on their site.
I wrote a blog post about My Morning Jacket’s new single, album, Saturday Night Live appearance and Toronto show for the Much Music blog. Check it out: 
