Poplicola

The 2009 Collection – An Assortment of Good (mostly Indie) Music from 2009

February 8th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

Two months ago, I started a project that inevitably became “The 2009 Collection.” The project began out of frustration, but quickly became a labor of love that consumed countless hours of my free time every week. None of the 2009 music lists offered in popular magazines and blogs satisfied me, and I had no knowledge of music from 2009 to compare against the – to be frank – crap they offered. After sifting through hundreds of new albums and collecting a sizable library of new music, I culled an original list of 20 songs down to 10, and out came this.

A quick list of the bands that made the cut: The Heavy, Voluntary Butler Scheme, Phoenix, K’naan, Balmorhea, Givers, Jay Reatard, The Flaming Lips & Stardeath and White Dwarfs (with Henry Rollins), The Protomen

But this post isn’t just about the immense amount of work that went into creating the collection, but some of the great resources I found along the way that helped me gather the music. To list some of them, and then go into specifics for two:

Thesixtyone.com is both a beautiful music website, and a great tool to discover new and upcoming music. It helped me find quite a few of the songs that inevitably made the final list. I’d recommend checking it out if you’re interested in new music, and don’t mind sifting through crappier music to find stuff you love.

The All Songs Considered podcast was incredibly useful to me, and also a pleasure to listen to. All Songs Considered is an NPR music show with less talk and more tunes. I’d recommend listening to this if you want to hear (mostly) great music that’s just breaking onto the scene.

I found the other sites and the podcast I listed to be useful, but not nearly as much as the two above. I was particularly disappointed by Sound Opinions, both because I’m a Chicago native (the show is from Chicago Public Radio), and because they usually played absolutely nothing I found interesting. Let’s hope they find their way again, because they used to be a delight to follow.

So what’s next? Well, this website doesn’t mark the end of The 2009 Collection. A forthcoming disc with original art and contextual information about artists and songs on the list is in the works. E-mail me at hello@jaymargalus.com if you’d like a copy.

I hope you found this useful, and don’t forget to check out The 2009 Collection right now!

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Poplicola Debate on Programming for IE6

January 20th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

Starting tonight and ending next Wednesday night, Poplicola will be hosting a debate between 5 panelists on one question: should web developers still build websites for Internet Explorer 6?

Following the recent hack on Google HQ which exploited some major holes in Internet Explorer, and particularly IE6, the IE6 debate has begun to receive more attention in the public. According to w3schools, around 10-15% of all internet users still browse in IE6, which was released on August 27, 2001. Along with security problems, IE6 is also known to have issues with rendering modern websites, creating a dilemma for web developers: do they create websites for a user base that still comprise a large percent of the internet browsing population, or do they begin to ignore this population?

To get the discussion started, I’ve gathered four individuals with differing views on the issue. Hopefully, by the end, we’ll have developed some criteria for when, if at all, IE6 should stop receiving support. So hop on over to the Discussion page and remember to keep checking in!

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What were they thinking?

January 19th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

Insert implicit pornographic reference here

via Pixelpipe

Posted via web from Jay’s Posterous

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Tall Shadows

January 13th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

I love working for myself

via Pixelpipe

Posted via web from Jay’s Posterous

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Getting Ruby on Rails Working with MAMP (Mac)

January 7th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

I just spent about two hours trying to set up Ruby on Rails on my Mac with MAMP. Here’s a quick and dirty of how to do it for those of you who don’t feel like going crazy.

Follow the installation steps for RoR here: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/getting-started/installation/mac

Edit your MAMP MySQL installation using the steps provided on this website: http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/175-MAMP-and-the-Ruby-MySQL-Gem.html

After you’ve created your first Rails project, locate it on your computer, then go to config/database.yml and enter the following:

development:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX_dev
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX_test
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

production:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

Finally, follow the steps provided here to create your MySQL DB for the project.

Good luck.

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You Should Get Out and Hike Today

January 4th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

I took this picture on one of the trails near my house in Mokena, IL today.

It’s beautiful outside. Why don’t you go for a hike?

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I Made a CueCat Decrypter in PHP

January 4th, 2010 by Jay Margalus

I wrote a :CueCat decrypter for Workshop 88 based on the following scheme:

	A	B	C

0	C3	n	Z
1	CN	j	Y
2	Cx	f	X
3	Ch	b	W
4	D3	D	3
5	DN	z	2
6	Dx	v	1
7	Dh	r	0
8	E3	T	7
9	EN	P	6

You should check it out here, where I’ve also included the process.php file for download.

I’ll be working on additional features in the future, including product listing and price comparisons.

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I forgot to mention

January 2nd, 2010 by Jay Margalus

That I went to Robinson’s in Oak Park and had their pulled pork. I’d give it a 5/10

via Pixelpipe

Posted via web from Jay’s Posterous

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jQuery SerialScroll Tutorial

January 2nd, 2010 by Jay Margalus

jQuery SerialScroll is an excellent tool by Ariel Flesler that allows you to “animate any series of elements, by sequentially scrolling them.” In other words, it allows you to do stuff like create slick newsreels and slideshows on your website. I’ve created a short, comprehensive tutorial on how to create a simple, three tab scrolling list since I couldn’t find anything similar online:

Download jQuery

Download jQuery ScrollTo

Download jQuery SerialScroll

Create a new folder called “js” and load the jQuery files into it

Create a new file in your text editor and call it init.js. Insert the following text and save it to your js folder:

jQuery.easing.easeOutQuart = function (x, t, b, c, d) {
return -c * ((t=t/d-1)*t*t*t - 1) + b;
};

jQuery(function( $ ){

$('div#screen').serialScroll({
target:'div#sections',
items:'li',
axis:'xy',
navigation:'#navigation li a',
duration:700,
force:true,

onBefore:function( e, elem, $pane, $items, pos ){
e.preventDefault();
if( this.blur )
this.blur();
},
onAfter:function( elem ){
}
});

});

So we’ve marked four elements to look for in your website: <li>, any linked list items inside of <div id=”navigation”>, <div id=”sections”>, and <div id=”screen”>. Screen will be the wrapper for your entire scrolling element; it will contain two things: the scrolling panes, and the navigation corresponding to them. Navigation will contain your navigational elements in list form. Sections will contain the scrolling panes in list form. Each list tag will mark either: a) a navigation element, or b) a single pane corresponding to a navigation element.

In the header of your HTML, insert the following in red (note: versions of script files may have changed):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>jQuery SerialScroll Example</title>

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="screen" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.serialScroll-1.2.2-min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.scrollTo-1.4.2-min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/init.js"></script>
</head>

<body>

Now we have to implement the jQuery on your website. We’re going to be using elements we need to style in our CSS, so let’s go to our CSS first and insert the following:

#sections ul, #sections li, #sections h3, #sections h2, #sections h1 {
	list-style-image: none;
	list-style-position: outside;
	list-style-type: none;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

#sections {
	background-color: red;
	clear: left;
	min-height: 300px;
	overflow: hidden;
	width: 750px;
	padding: 5px;
}

#sections ul {
	width: 3660px;
}

#sections li {
	float: left;
	width: 750px;
	padding: 5px;
}

#navigation {
	width: 760px;
	font-size: 18px;
	color: #fff;
	text-align: center;
}

#navigation ul, #navigation li, #navigation h3, #navigation h2,
#navigation h1, #navigation p {
	list-style-image: none;
	list-style-position: outside;
	list-style-type: none;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

#navcontainer {
	float: left;
	width: 487.5px;
}

#nav1, #nav2 {
	background: gray;
	height: 43px;
}

#nav1 {
	float: left;
}

#nav2 {
	float: right;
}

#nav1 a, #nav2 a {
	display: block;
	width: 215px;
	height: 29px;
	padding: 10px 0 0;
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #000;
}

You can style each element to your liking, but the key is that we’re setting each successive <li> after the first outside our view, so that when we click on a tab to scroll they look to be appearing for the first time.

Next, go to the place in your website where you want to insert the SerialScroll element and paste this:

<div id="screen">
	<div id="navigation">
		<ul id="navcontainer">
			<li id="nav1"><a href="#">Tab 1</a></li>
			<li id="nav2"><a href="#">Tab 2</a></li>
		</ul>
		<ul>
			<li id="nav2"><a href="#">Tab 3</a></li>
		</ul>
	</div>
	<div id="sections">
		<ul>
			<li>
				<h2>Tab 1</h2>
				Content for Tab 1.
			</li>
			<li>
				<h2>Tab 2</h2>
				Content for Tab 2.
			</li>
			<li>
				<h2>Tab 3</h2>
				Content for Tab 3.
			</li>
		</ul>
	</div>
</div>

That’s it! I’ve zipped a demo here for you to reference if you need help: serialscrolldemo

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