Author: Peter

In response to a comment about my being a real fan of someone’s, I just deleted this line from my unsent email: yup, I’m no mere integer!

Say it with me, everyone: You’re such a geek.

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.

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:

• Stretchy backgrounds. After trying to create a markup-free version I gave in and changed the page template.
• The 1pixelout audio player, in standalone mode. I found this via Scott Andrew, whose addEvent function (also present) might be the most widely-used JavaScript routine in the history of the web.
• CSS manipulation and utility functions from Stringify.
• Display of blockquote attributes which browsers generally don’t make visible. I hacked Dunstan Orchard’s original version to work in XHTML and to support the title attribute.

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.