Josh Reisner

I was browsing around today and came across the website of a Dutch company called Sofa. They make fancy websites and icons; I’m impressed how they manage to have a full site contained in just one page.

In accordance with our mission, the Rock Dove site is now open source! Meaning that if you want to create your own Rock Dove website, now you can with pretty minimal effort.

Two sets of code have now been released: the site code for RDC, which is one thing, and the underlying library which I’m still calling Joshlib, and have been meaning to release for the longest time. I’m hoping that people will be beta-testers of this code and help me extend it further. I work on it pretty much every day because it’s used by pretty much every project I do.

When I get a minute to take a step back and think about it, I’ll create a support site for it and probably ‘brand’ it in a less self-referential way. Am harboring slight concern that someone’s going to find a critical vulnerability and exploit it—let’s hope that doesn’t happen!

Pretty amazing video for the first single on Röyksopp’s upcoming album Junior. You can pre-order it Amazon.

Via Kottke.

Röyksopp – Happy Up Here

I want to draw attention to a new addition to the blogroll at left right: Dear Leader Blog. Take, for example, his crush-manifesto on the subject of Rachel Maddow. Excerpt:

I think Maddow-crushing has more to do with the fact that she has intelligence, integrity, and most of all a strong point of view, which makes her so radically different from the dominant species of lame-brained fembots and money-honeys that men have grown so accustomed to being offered by TV producers. I think most of the women on cable TV are probably more familiar with what it feels like walking on Mars than expressing an original thought or opinion.

There’s a lot more, check it out!

So a beta of Safari 4 is out today. It works well, in my opinion! But in using it again now, I was reminded of the biggest usability block for me between it and Firefox: the different tab shortcuts. In Firefox, brilliantly, you can select each tab with Apple-1, Apple-2, Apple-3, etc. In Safari, you have to Shift-Something-Left or Right to cycle through.

It’s pretty minor, I know. But I did manage to fix it, with the help of this post by Marc Liyanage. I:

1. created a folder in My Home > Library > Scripts > Applications
2. copied a bunch of shortcuts in there (you can unzip this handy folder and drag it in)
3. installed a copy of FastScripts by Daniel Jalkut
4. went into FastScripts preferences, and added each shortcut with the corresponding keystroke

The only slight bummer here is that it’s not a free solution, because FastScripts is commercial software. I originally tried to pull it off by enabling the scripting menu using AppleScript Utility.app and assigning shortcuts with System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, but I couldn’t get it to work. My guess is it’s because these Apple-1, Apple-2 shortcuts were already assigned in Safari to the Bookmarks toolbar, but I don’t know for sure. Any suggestions there please let me know.

I love this idea, and not just because it involves cats. Legalese is obnoxious! For example the recent Sleeping Beauty thing.

It’s one of those petty annoyances that we put up with every day, like why can’t I copy songs back from my iPod onto my computer?

Update 2/15/2010 This program works pretty well for that…

Listen and enjoy. Try to have a guy-on-the-left-type attitude about it, rather than a guy-on-the-right one.

Longwave – Satellites

I made some kinda major changes to the Rock Dove Collective site yesterday. Most of the stuff is behind-the-scenes, but not all. Like for example, there’s a map now in the Provider Directory, which shows provider locations. What’s fancy about this is that it geocodes the coordinates automatically based on address 1 & zip. No entering longitude and latitude manually, or picking points on a map!

Ok maybe it’s not that exciting unless you’re a site administrator. But it does set the stage for upcoming enhancements. More on this soon.

Here’s another site I did with Kate & Molly. Phoebe Mürer is an artist in Pennsylvania. From her site:

Phoebe Mürer works primarily as a painter, though also as a printmaker and in mixed media. Her subject matter is thematic and intensely personal—idiosyncratic and sometimes startling depictions of her curiosities, her childhood and formative years, her experience as a high functioning autistic woman, and her contentious relationship with special education and psychiatric medication.

More music posts! Overdue on this here blog. This song’s great. Referred to me by a man named Razzak. Sounds kind of 60s-ish British psychedelic meets Voxtrot, or something. Better descriptions welcome in comments!

I’m not going to say anything about the band, other than that they’re supposedly pronounced VY-lens, in protest of the fact that they think that having a MySpace page is a substitute for having a normal website.

Violens – Violent Sensation Descends