Wanna be hip and check out the new cool website to go to? Wanna get a taste of the music I like? Well now you can do both. Muxtape is a cool new way to make an MP3 mixtape and share it with the world.
I uploaded 12 songs (the max) and organized them to go from rockin’ to chill music. It’s a lot of my favorite artists, and I hope you find something new you like. It’s almost an hour long, so check it out, play it while you work or something.
While working on a simple website that didn't need any kind of CMS with it, I came up with a very simple way of creating a dynamic navigation bar with PHP. The code is pretty simple, but I've always done this manually before and this just makes it simple. So here it is.
First we crate a function in PHP:
function createNav($title, $link){
if("/".$link == $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']){
return "<li id=\"current\">".$title."</li>\r";
}else{
return "<li><a href=\"".$link."\">".$title."</a></li>\r";
}
}
And then this is how you call it:
echo createNav("Home","index.php");
So if you are on the page that navigation button relates to it will give you <li id="current">Home</li>. If you're on any other page, it gives you <li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>.
Easy enough. So just call that for each button you need between your <ul> tags:
<ul>
<?php
echo createNav("Home","index.php");
echo createNav("About","about.php");
echo createNav("Products","products.php");
echo createNav("Contact","contact.php");
?>
</ul>
I know it's nothing spectacular, but it sped up the coding process for me once I figured it out, and it will certainly be a lot faster in the future if anything needs to be changed or added.
If you don’t already know, I’m a huge advocate of the Ban Comic Sans site. It’s a bad font, and it’s just plain overused. Look for it next time you see anything that’s been designed, I’ve seen it everywhere from menus to billboards. Another font that I similarly despise is Papyrus, so much to that I own http://banpapyrus.com - one day I’ll get around to making a real site for it, I promise.
I suppose you can link the use of comic sans to print design, but it really can be used in any kind of media. But, I got to thinking the other day, every different type of media has it’s own “comic sans” per se. These are all extremely common to see in their respective media types, but that’s because they’ve become overused and bland now. Whenever I see any of these, it makes me wonder if the designer behind it is actually aware of how incredibly overused they are! The problem with any of these is that when you look at a design, I shouldn’t see the tools or fonts used, I should see the design and overall message.
I’ve got a more detailed write up about all these after the jump.
Read more...When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the default view is a 320x240 video stretched to fit in a 640x480 player with a low audio bitrate. For some newer videos, youtube also retains a full 640x480 copy of the video with higher quality audio. Sometimes you will be allowed to see a button that allows you to watch the higher quality videos, but it’s not on every video.
I recently discovered that by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, you can view the higher quality video for those that have it! Check out the screenshot comparison below from the Starcraft 2 trailer:
Watch the videos here to see the real difference:
Standard: http://youtube.com/watch?v=30MBljXxg3M
High Quality: http://youtube.com/watch?v=30MBljXxg3M&fmt=18
For another example, here’s Radiohead’s ”Nude”
Standard: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JsLn9Wl1u_Q
High quality: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JsLn9Wl1u_Q&fmt=18
I found a new artist today, and he's got some great music. Jack Conte classifies his music as Indie / Alternative / Electroacoustic, and he's a great songwriter as well. He also has done a cover of a Radiohead song, which is my favorite band and what got me interested in him in the first place. Visit his myspace page, and listen to his music. If you liek it, please consider buying his album and supporting him! It's less than $4 on iTunes and Amazon, which is less than what I paid for dinner last night!
Click the link to see some of his music videos. They're great, I promise!
Read more...It's crazy. Also, I need more RAM. Now off to my Linux box to test more browsers...
Eclectic 2.0 is an incredible time-lapse movie all shot with DSLR cameras. Ross Ching went to some amazingly beautiful locations and set up his camera with a special slow moving tripod and the camera set to take photos at a certain interval. Watch and be amazed. Read more about this project on Ross Ching’s site.
Download it here: (Quicktime required)
480p (17.6 MB)
720p (182.9 MB)
1080p (359.6 MB)
After watching this, I’ve gotten really interested in making these types of movies. Unfortunatly for me, my camera doesn’t support taking photos at an interval without a special intervalometer I’d have to purchase.
I’ve used Google’s text messaging service before to look up movie times and such when I’m not near a computer, and it’s great. If you’re not familiar with it, just send a text message to GOOGLE (466453) with the message being “movies 32466” (thats a zip code by the way) or something similar, and it will text you back with movie listings for that area. It’s a great service that’s free and I use it all the time. Read more about it here.
Now Amazon has done something similar, which I’m just as excited to try out. Send a message to AMAZON (262966) and then type your search term in the message. You can put product names, authors, artists, or even ISBN numbers for books. It will reply with the results, you pick the one you want and it calls you to explain more details. You can even set it up to be able to purchase items over your phone. Check it out here.
I know this sounds like a big ad for Amazon, but this is seriously a great idea and it’s something Ill be using in the future.
Well I haven’t posted on here in a while because I’ve really been working hard to get my personal portfolio online. I started sometime last week, and it’s really been a much larger project than I first thought! The hardest part was finding old projects, and deciding how the portfolio itself should work. Now that I’ve selected all my work and completed it, take a look! Just click on the new tabs up top.
What’s that, you need a link right here? Ok, fine. http://chris-barr.com/portfolio/
I finally signed up for Twitter today.