The Examining Room of Dr. Charles: A Doctor and a Pimp – Via Authentic Boredom
Archives for December 2004
SilverSpider Play List Users
Just a quick post to keep track of all of the sites that are making use of SilverSpider Play List. Well, all of the sites I know of…
- Easily Amused
- LifeForce Liquid
- reinhardt.ws
- Alex Jones (my site)
If you use SilverSpider Play List, and aren’t on the list, please let me know, and I’ll add you!
What is SilverSpider Play List?
SilverSpider Play List is a set of PHP scripts that helps you add a recent music list to your Web site. Each time you listen to a song, your media player will send song information to your Web site which will gather the info, and with the help of Amazon, compile it into a list of entries, each containing the name of the song, the artist and the album cover.
The markup provided by SSPL is very clean, and each of the six markup formats relies upon CSS and valid XHTML to control layout and style.
You can see it in action right here on this site.
A Developer's Progression
Steve Smith adds to the many reasons that a developer should learn and apply standards-based design in his post A Natural Progression at
OrderedList.com. Pointing to recent articles about the business value of Web standards, he discusses his experiences working with businesses, who have begun to specify Web standards within their specifications, and takes it to the logical conclusion that the average Web developer needs to learn and use standards compliant code to remain a viable competitor in our crowded market.
Thunderbird 1.0 Takes to the Skies
As reported on mozilla.org, Thunderbird 1.0 has been officially released! This is great news!
I expect I will be installing it on several family machines over the upcoming month. Why? Because it has been a solid e-mail client throughout its beta period, and has gotten easier to use with every release. It also provides a wealth of great features, including:
- Adaptive spam filters – “Thunderbird’s junk mail controls learn and improve from emails that you receive to stop spam.”
- “Saved search folders and search bar – To help you find emails faster you can save common searches in virtual folders and find emails with the search bar.”
- Extensions (just like Firefox)
- Simple migration from other e-mail clients
- Message grouping (I haven’t used this much, but plan to soon)
- Cross-platform support – You can use it on a Mac, PC or *Nix without any problem
IPac Blog Improvements
A quick note to let everyone know that the IPac Blog has added a couple of extra features, including a blog roll and Atom syndication.
Accessibility: On a shoe-string
Andy Clarke has posted a great article entitled Accessibility: On a shoe-string. In it, he provides some great ways to the accessibility of a site when “testing is often beyond the client’s budget and the profitable scope of the job.” The article explains a few methods that they use for these types of projects at his design firm, Stuff and Nonsense, providing specific details as to how to replicate the steps in the browser as well as links to some great online tools. Make sure to read the comments as well, several of them include some additional tools and ideas that are good to keep in mind.