Month: July 2007

Bye Shauna

Despite being dropped from CBC Radio earlier this year, the voice of Promo Girl (aka Shauna MacDonald) had still introduced most CBC podcasts. Sometime last week, however, she was removed from those as well, apparently related to a change in the intro text: instead of This is a CBC Radio One podcast it’s now simply This is a CBC podcast.

Here’s hoping that Shauna’s (currently dormant) stint as Micky Brooklyn gets slightly better shrift.

Al’s apocalypse

Hot on the heels of the news that Drive won’t see its final broadcasts comes this equally depressing update:

The Adventures of Apocalypse Al, the twenty part series of five minute radio plays we produced last year (written by none other than J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame), will NOT be aired nationally anywhere on CBC Radio.

It had been delayed several times, and even forgotten about, so this isn’t really shocking news. And all hope may not be lost—it’s been sold to other broadcasters including NPR and BBC, and may be released on CD “eventually”—but it’s still quite disappointing that it’s not going to be broadcast here.

SFFaudio.com has started a campaign to get one of the regions to broadcast Al; we’ll see if it has any effect. For what it’s worth, I submitted Joe’s post to Tod Maffin at Inside the CBC, but it apparently didn’t make the cut (odd, since Tod had recently complained about it being a slow news week).

Gone for a week, I’ve been drunk since I left

Am I really the only one who’s noticed that MySpace’s RSS feeds have been gone (i.e. 404 Not Found) for a week? There’s passing mention of something that might be the problem on their myspacehelp blog but no followup (which seems to be a pattern).

I bet the thousands of artists who rely on MySpace to communicate with their audiences are pretty pissed off right now, and if they’re not they should be.

True Blue

After a long development period, last week I finally relaunched my fan site for Lenni Jabour and her compatriots. It’s even got a title now—True Blue: The Music of Lenni Jabour—and a theme to match, and there’s a whole whack of new content with more appearing on a regular basis.

As part of the redevelopment I’ve been able to take advantage of various tricks and methods I’ve found around the web:

I’ve also availed myself of Flickr’s Creative Commons Search, specifically images using the Attribution license. Credit is provided using a (slight) variation of Mark Pilgrim’s template. In places where I’ve used my own photographs I’ve licensed them either under Attribution or Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

As part of the redesign I chose to change the URL structure slightly; although it’s not cool to do so, I think it’s a lot more future-proof. To keep the web happy I’ve put permanent redirects in place so that every old-style link will continue to work, something I wish more sites would do. I think it’s worth mentioning that the coolness that was present in the original structure—above all, the avoidance of technology-revealing/limiting extensions except where necessary—is still present.

A less-obvious change is that in several places I’ve taken a single lengthy page and split it out into many shorter ones. The original sections were all marked with anchors so they could be accessed directly, so I wrote a quick little function that would direct any #fragment-id links to those sections to the new pages. For example, Alex McMaster and Claire Jenkins (as well as the rest of the members of The Third Floor) now have their own pages; a browser with JavaScript enabled will be directed to the individual page, while others will be taken to the location on the page as before.

Finally, there are a couple of spam-prevention measures in place, one of my own devising and one from the web at large. (I could tell you what they are, but then I’d have to kill you.) The former has been remarkably successful in the five-plus years I’ve had it in place, but I decided to add the latter to be a little more proactive.

The new site has been a labour of love, to put it mildly, and I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. Thanks to those who’ve looked at preliminary versions and provided feedback, particularly and especially Jo-Ann, Ed, and of course Miss Lenni Jabour of The Third Floor.

O Canada, our English Christian land

Today we received a bookmark in the church bulletin — from our MP Bev Shipley, with his smiling face, quoting from 1 Timothy 2 and asking us to pray for the PM, MPs, opposition parties and their leaders, MPPs and their leaders and municipal government. It ended with As your MP I covet your prayers that we may lead according to the scriptural foundation upon which our country was founded and Conservative Party of Canada.

On the back was O Canada, all 3 verses, in English only.