PianoMarvel

At Rain (the company I work for) we just helped develop some pretty exciting new software for learning piano for a client of ours: PianoMarvel. It’s a subscription based software solution that allows you to learn with your MIDI keyboard and a computer at your own pace. The brilliance of it is that it makes practice time more goal-oriented, requiring certain scores to move on to the next lesson. This makes practice time fun with the user trying again and again to improve their score. It also is great for parents and teachers who need to track student’s practice time, emailing them reports of hours logged.

Checkout the video for more info or sign up here.

How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?

(Notice: this post reads weird for a specific reason. I’m attempting to use 19 HTML elements that I have either never used, or used rarely.)

This was fun. In fact, I have been quoted saying of it:

The HTML element quiz at justsayhi.com is probably one of the greatest HTML element quiz’s on the whole entire world wide web. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who does HTML markup and for educators who teach it.

At first I wasn’t sure how to use it¹. But realizing that all I had to do was type the element’s title (without the carrots like so: “table“) only took 2 of my precious seconds.

Thought I would do better than I did, I was told my score was like 100% 50%. I blanked on some obvious ones like “center” and “dl”. But there were a few that I either have never used or didn’t even know about. Like one that extends abbr. text. After sorting through them and eliminating the those elements marked as “deprecated” by W3C, I made a list of every item I either needed to familiarize myself with, or needed to use for the first time. So, in this post I am using all 19 of them in very creative ways.

<abbr>

Used to mark something as abbreviated.

<acronym>

Used to mark something as an acronym.

<address>

Indicates the author’s address (probably a good reason I never use this one )

<blockquote>

Used to indicate block quotes.

<cite>

Indicates a citation.

<code>

Marks text as code.

<del>

An item marked as “deleted”.

<dfn>

Indicates a word that is a definition (like in textbooks when a term is used the first time).

<dt>

The term in a definition list.

<dl>

The definition of the term in a definition list.

<dd>

List of definitions (used with dd, and dt).

<ins>

Text marked as inserted.

<kbd>

Text marked as keyboard insertion by the user.

<samp>

Text marked as output.

<sup>

Superscript.

<tt>

Indicates teletype text (like DOS prompts).

P.S. The address I have in the postcard background graphic of my other blog is a fake. But for those who can’t read it, here it is:

¹: Yes, I was talking about the quiz with this very unclear pronoun.

LoveYourSong.com Got a Facelift, a Tummy-tuck, and Open Heart Surgery!

For those of you who may not know, I maintain a site dedicated to indie music which has been in operation for three years (pretty long considering the shelf-life of most blogs!). However, much to my chagrin, due to an errant mouse click or two, I somehow managed to delete the whole site in one singular moment of terror. At that moment I knew it was either the end of my much-neglected site, or the opportunity for a rebirth. Deciding upon the latter I have spent much of the last few days salvaging what posts I had on a database and redesigning the site. This all might turn out to be a great thing for the site, since the biggest reason for me not posting new content was the difficulty I had with my custom CMS system I had built in days of yore when I was just learning PHP. Now I’m using WordPress and life is better.

So, without further ado, I give you LoveYourSong.com 1.9 (not 2.0, that’s for you John). I can’t take all the credit for this most awesome design. iStockphoto helped a bit.

404

I’ve been a little behind on my rss reading so I’ve been trying to catch up this week. This morning I read this one at Simplebits on unique or outstanding 404 pages. It was fun looking at all the creative/useful ways people found to customize their 404 pages, but it was about when I got to this one that I thought, why make 404 pages with lots of helpful search info? I mean, most sites do nothing but show 404′s when the URL doesn’t resolve. So that means most users are pretty used to seeing them. At least for me, when I see a custom 404 page with “helpful” info it takes me a few seconds to realize that this isn’t a content page that I searched for. If it looked at least something like a typical un-custom 404 page then I know exactly what to do. But that one or two seconds of “wait just a minute, this is a 404 page!” is far too costly for my liking. So as for me and my site, all you get is this, or if you’re really lucky, this.