Audio Recordings with Yahoo Medaiplayer

Happy Birthday to Me (original by Cracker)
Space Oddity (original by David Bowie)
Jackie's Lament (original by The Baseball Project

Had problems getting Firefox to play Window Media Audio. Although the player was helpful in suggesting an add-in to allow wma files to play in Firefox browser.
So I ripped the songs in iTunes and uploaded these m4a files. I'll be curious to see how the player handles two different media type, also I wonder if you can create multiple playlists per page.

Happy Birthday to Me (original by Cracker)
Space Oddity (original by David Bowie)
Jackie's Lament (original by The Baseball Project

Next I am going to add the playlists via an XSPF ("spiff") xml file, as recommended on the Yahoo! Mediaplayer Wikia support page.

Yahoo Music Player

Just discovered this Yahoo! Mediaplayer that operates as a JavaScript include. I don't know anything about it other than from listening to music on Steve Wynn's website. It looks pretty awesome and easy to use. Just include the Javascript library and apparently it will id all the links with audio files attached. Pretty awesome implications for local musician and bands (not having to sign rights to their content away to MySpace).

I am wondering about the impact on user experience and how that will be affected by using sure a free tool. Experiment to commence soon!

New Buisness Cards and Personal Branding

Just created a new business card template. Its kind generic, without explicitly declaring any job title so it is useful in just about any professional setting (ie: Interactive Communications Coordinator, Freelance, etc). Has the basic contact info stuff, my broader professional identifications and some of the more prevalant activities that might be useful to let people know I am involved in. Not sure I am into the color scheme, but I know I am into something understated and more grayscale.

I had a little bit of fun thinking about creating personal logo.


Something that could be easily identifiable from a quick glance and scalable to icon like size with some relevant meaning. Figure it might have an impact as people go from meeting me in person, to looking at my card, to taking a look at my website, to stumbling across other content online (such as a blog entry). Not sure how far I plan to take it, just experimenting right now.

Using Visio to Draw a Vector Sticky Note

To work on my chops with Visio I have been tracing over digital images and creating a vector rendition. I find this both helps with improving familiarity with Visio and helping along my artistic/sketching skills. I have to think about how to compose a drawing within the limits of the tool. This project I wanted a clean, simple, cartoon-like illustrated sticky note. I liked the incremental, block shading effect. Here its is along with the Visio file. Please feel free to download and use, so long as you give me credit where appropriate, under a Creative Commons license.

• Visio Sticky Note file (vsd 123kb)
  

Sticky Note by Andrew D Szydlowski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.stickynoteexplosion.com.

I am Going to WordCamp

After having used WordPress for the last couple year, with varied degrees of success, I think its time for some for me learn a bit more about it! Thats why...

The main purpose for me to to find out the cool usages of WordPress, specifically ways in which I can use it as a CMS. Think this could hold some good potential for some new way to employ WP. And for the price, $25 + service charge, it's worth it just to see what it may hold. Also seems like a great warm-up for InfoCamp! Seems to have a similar unconference-hybrid setup. Could be very cool!

Interactions and CSS

Just had an "Aw shit this is awesome!" moment using CSS to implement some interactions instead of javascript. Advantage being, CSS is more accessible because JavaScript can be turned off, on top of just being plan easier and more elegant.

While trying to put together an awesome button for a registration task for InfoCamp, I use a pretty handy buttonmaker tool from CoolText.com.

This code...

<style>
#reg-button { background-image: url(cooltext430521759.png); }
#reg-button:hover { background-image: url(cooltext430521759MouseOver.png); }
#reg-button:active { background-image: url(cooltext430521759MouseDown.png); }
</ style>

<a style="float: left; width: 264px; height: 53px;" id="reg-button" title="Register for InfoCamp Button" ></a>

Does the same as this...

<a style="float: left; width: 264px; height: 53px;" id="reg-button"<
<img src="http://www.blogger.com/cooltext430521759.png"
onmouseover="this.src='cooltext430521759MouseOver.png';"
onmouseout="this.src='cooltext430521759.png';"
onmousedown="this.src='cooltext430521759MouseDown.png';"
onmouseup="this.src='cooltext430521759.png';" />
alt="Register for InfoCamp Button"
</a>

and actually the iteractions are a little bit smoother and more natural, win-win!

Frustrated by Twitter Search

I have been constantly frustrated by the time limitations on Twitter searches. I have noticed that you can only go back a couple weeks using the Twitter provided search engine. Seems they don't have the capacity to do the extensive searching back any farther. Most third-party sites focus on the "real time search" and only use the Twitter API. I guess maintaining an index of all tweet would demand a lot of resources.

This has been something I have wanted to fold into the the InfoCamp materials for this year, because the participants were so active on Twitter last year. It would be a great way to give an idea of what happened. So the best I could find was doing a Google search for InfoCamp and limiting results to twitter.com

site:twitter.com infocamp

I did eventually find one tweet tracker/archive download. Thanks Mel Carson for blogging about The Archivist. I think I am going to check it out.

-------------------
Okay after looking into The Archivist, it required a .NET upgrade that I didn't want to deal with so I have been finding some other options:

• Twapper Keeper - supposedly will scan based on Hashtags and archive tweets. No account needed to create and there are some other sorting functions I didn't get into.
• Print Your Tweet - Mainly for your personal archive, but they seem to have added a search archive function. Required login with my Twitter account gave me pause and I haven't used it yet.
• What The Hashtag?! - Define what the hashtag means. Seems to have some archiving but not complete.