Updating my blog from an iPhone app

Could this be the key to an active blog again? Probably not but we’ll see.

Might sort this site out

job for the weekend maybe

Autorate ruined my life

The Autorate application ruined my life.

I use to have all of my music rated in a way that made it perfect for listening to while I was riding my bike.

5 = Awesome songs that would get me pumped and that I would never have to skip while riding
4 = All the songs that I just really liked to listen to while riding
3 = Songs that I like but that aren’t really riding songs
2 = The songs that I don’t personally like but other people do
1 = Everything that should be deleted

Now my music collection isn’t the biggest in the world, I have 1878 tracks all of which were perfectly rated according to the system above. Until for some stupid reason I decided to run the Autorate program on my entire library.

The autorate program rates tracks based on playcount and skipcount so I ended up with a library full of songs with ratings of only 1 – 3 stars.

I made sure to rate each album as I added it to my library so the task wasn’t so big, it’s now maybe 3 months since I ran autorate and I’m still discovering songs that should be rated 5 but are rated 1.

Moral of the story: Don’t trust anything but yourself to rate the songs you like.

Another redesign

Well I finally came up with a layout involving a sidebar that I actually quite like. It’s not finished yet as I’ve still got to sort out some of the little things, like the individual blog post pages and comments etc. but it’s good enough to start moving everything into it.

I’m really pleased I’ve actually got this far with it because I always seem to start making new designs then get bored of them half way through. At the moment my working folder (the one with my design in it) contains seven possible designs, six of which I started off loving and only one that I still like.

The joy of css frameworks

When I began web development 4 years ago I started out learning HTML and CSS on a ‘Web Design & Programming’ forum, the forum was full of very elitist people who would completely rip apart a design and give harsh (but very useful) criticism (usually to do with web standards) if the code was not 100% perfect.

By learning from other people’s mistakes and having every small flaw pointed out I became quite an elitist too, but I think when learning how to make websites it’s very important to have a strict set of ‘rules’ that you will always follow.

Here’s my (short) list of elitist rules:

All code MUST validate
All code MUST be semantic
The less markup the better
WYSIWYG is for losers
If you didn’t make it yourself then you suck
You MUST use a text editor and write everything from scratch
Don’t use images if you can use code to get the same result
Div abuse is VERY BAD