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The site
I started putting this site together in 1999. It's a fun hobby -- I pick up bits and pieces of knowledge about web site programming and design, and (God willing) come into a little more fluency in expressing myself. These are posts about developing and maintaining the site.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Last night and this morning, I added another feature to the site, which you might not notice if you don't use my blogroll often; but it's a neat feature so I'm going to tell you about it. The expandable categories in the blogroll will now remember between invocations of the site, whether they are open or not; so if you click on "Blogs | Politics" and then visit Obsidian Wings, next time you come to READIN, the Blogs | Politics links will be open. A little thing but I had been wanting to do it for a few months now.
Ideally I would like to have the categories be prefaced by a "+" or "-" character to indicate that there is material beneath them; right now you just have to know that something is there "because it looks like a blogroll", which doesn't seem ideal. I think this is within my Javascript programming abilities, look for it to happen sometime in the next month or two.
Also, I improved the formatting of the indentations in the blogroll. I had been doing it with blocks of characters; instead I am now using <span>s with padding-left. This means that long link titles wrap with a hanging indent rather than wrapping to the leftmost column; much prettier.
If I have an AVI file that is 128bit, 29 frame/sec, and I want to copy a clip from it into a new AVI file, what is the best tool to use? I am trying to use AVITrimmer, but the output file doesn't look any good. It still claims to be 29 frame/sec, but the video is wrong. It is not synchronized with the audio any longer.
Hmm... wait, that might be wrong... Yeah -- that was just weirdness from Windows Media Player.
posted evening of January 9th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Projects
I think I am not going to do any more Songs posts until I buy a microphone and an audio processor. I have been planning to do this sometime soon -- I think I will feel much better about the music I am posting if the audio quality is a little better. What I have been doing up till now counts as a sort of a proof of concept -- the concept is pretty well proven.
If any of you have got advice about what sort of mics and audio converter I ought to buy, please leave them in comments, or e-mail me if you prefer. I will be most grateful.
This afternoon I thought of a short tune. Played around with it on my violin and I came to realize that it integrates really well with "After Midnight".
I came up with guitar chords to accompany "Creepy Charlie" -- I am looking forward to recording the piece with viola and guitar, and maybe to writing a "b" part as well. (In the recording I posted the other day, there is something that sounds like it might be a "b" part but I think it is actually just a second voice on the "a" part. This is something I don't know how to figure out.)
Update: bullet two is no longer operative; I have ordered an Edirol E-MU EM8740 audio interface (which I will call "emu") and a pair of Behringer C2 microphones.
posted evening of January 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Guitar
Wow, look! This is my nine-hundred and ninety-ninth post to this blog. The counter's about to roll over. Fun! Just in time for the new year.
So I came up with a little air for viola; I am inaugurating my new policy of giving my songs titles, by calling this one "Sally's Sleeping"; as Mr. Fritz observed in comments a few days ago, fiddlers name their tunes "after any damn thing". This is my first song (a) in 12/8 meter and (b) for which I was able to correctly work out notating the rhythm without help from ABCEdit's playback feature.
I found a streaming music player which is not dependent on Windows MediaPlayer, so I am going to try using it. Please let me know if either you were not able to play my music files before, and now you are, or you were able to play them before and now you are not. Thanks!
Here is the music for it, ABC format and PDF. Note that I didn't play exactly the same fourth bar that is written down; the whole point is to play a different variation every time.
posted morning of December 30th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So it seems like people using Macintosh computers will not be able to play the streaming audio in my Songs posts, but will instead get a "This playlist format is not recognized" error. I'm trying to figure out why; in the meantime I will put links to download the mp3 files next to the streaming objects.
Update: If you can't play the songs embedded in my site, could you try the two players I posted here and let me know if either of them works for you? Thanks.
posted morning of December 28th, 2007: 5 responses
So I have a letter in the in-box this morning from Network Solutions, letting me know that my domain name is expiring in a year. This seems like a good time to ask: what's the story with other domain name registries besides NS? I understand there are some, and that they are cheaper -- do they do the same thing? NS is charging $100 for a 5-year registration which seems a little steep -- seems like it was less than that last time I renewed. I'll pay it if switching is a big hassle; but I reckon it's probably not a hassle. If you have any experience with this please let me know.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: 2 responses
Martha comments a few posts down that the media players are starting up automatically when she loads the page. This is not what I was wanting to have happen -- does anybody know what I should change? I have <PARAM NAME="autoStart" VALUE="false"> inside the <OBJECT> definition for each of them. They do not autostart when I load the page. Is anybody else seeing this behavior?
posted afternoon of December 9th, 2007: 2 responses
So here's how I came up with the new color scheme for this site, of which I am kind of proud -- I think it looks really pleasant, and might even potentially cause someone to remember the site who would otherwise not.
To start with, the blog had no colors specified, so it used the client's Windows (or whatever operating system) colors. Usually this means black text on white background. Now I have my Windows colors set to a little different, so the background is a very light shade of gray and the text is a dark violet color -- I find it easier to read that way. I was reluctant though to specify colors because I did on the old READIN web site and came to regret having done it.
But, well, I think this combination is good enough to use. Light yellow color for the background, deep violet text in the main portion of the window. Here, links are purple and bold if unvisited, dark gray and normal-weight if visited. If the mouse is over them, they are the horrible iridescent color unknown to man which is represented by #009900. (This is true for all links in the document.)
In the sidebars, a lighter color background* and charcoal text, with the links a brighter sort of aquamarine color if unvisited and teal if visited. The links on the right-hand side (which is practically nothing but links) are not bold but the color should be light enough to draw attention to them -- the text around them is sparse. The links on the left-hand sidebar are the only ones that do not change appearance when visited, because they are small and easy to miss.
(Note: Firefox renders this site better than Explorer. I am not sure why and I don't think it matters much because I think most of the visits to this site are with Firefox or such like. But MSIE does funky things with the borders and the positions of table elements.)
*The two are actually slightly different light colors, the one on the right a little blue or green, the one on the left a little orange or brown. I'm not sure why or what is the use of this.
What do you think? More readable or less? Pretty or ugly? Let me know. (Elements of the new look: colors and borders, varying font sizes and styles, dingbats. Everything sort of gradually being moved over from element attributes to style sheets.) Feedback please.
Somebody commenting at (IIRC) Matt Yglesias' blog posted a link to this entertaining cover version. (If you're not familiar with the original Flea Market Montgomery commercial, by all means check it out.) Oddly, Gabe reports that the rest of Groves' recordings are in the "adult alternative contemporary christian" genre and make him feel creepy.
