| Adactio |
The online journal of Jeremy Keith, an Irish web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
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- NihonNovember 3
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I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year. I intend to cut back (or attend more virtual conferences like Aral’s). I’m worried that my carbon footprint will require a few forests to offset. I mean, I’ve got the velocity of a squirrel, for crying out loud.
That said, there are certain opportunities that are just too good to pass up. Like, for example, when John asked me if I would speak at Web Directions East in Tokyo next weekend. Yes; Tokyo. A place I’ve always dreamt of visiting.
Tomorrow I’ll fly from Heathrow to Narita and I still can hardly believe it’s really happening. While I’m extremely nervous about my presentation and workshop, I’m also unbelievably excited about visiting the land of sushi and manga. Even better, Jessica is coming with me and, if anything, she’s even more excited.
We’ll be in Tokyo for the best part of a week before heading on for a couple of days in Kyoto and a couple of days in Osaka. We don’t have much of an agenda apart from soaking up the atmosphere and—being the foodies that we are—
- Audio ga-gaOctober 27
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Huffduffer is written in HTML5. For the most part, this is no different to writing in any other flavour of HTML, just with a simpler DOCTYPE.
For the time being, I’m not using any of the new structural elements like section, article or footer. I am, however, making use of the audio element. Browsers that don’t understand this element—that would be most of them—aren’t left with nothing. Between the opening and closing audio tags, I’ve included an old-fashioned Flash movie for streaming the audio. This is exactly what is envisioned in the spec:
Content may be provided inside the audio element. User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support audio, so that legacy audio plugins can be tried.
Right now, Safari is about the only browser that includes support for audio. Alas, the way it implements that support is flawed. Safari pre-loads the file referenced in the src attribute. That works fine as long as there’s only one or two audio elements on a page but as soon as you get above that—as you do on Huffduffer—then everything starts to drag and your internet connection takes a hammering as the browser tries to suck down every file.
There appears to be no way of stopping this through the DOM. There’s a
- </head>October 26
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The <head> conference—a title designed to screw up a thousand CMSs—has just wrapped up. It spanned three days and as many continents. It was a preposterously ambitions undertaking and, incredibly, it worked!
While there were some meatspace hubs, the majority of the action took place in cyberspace. That means the carbon footprint of the attendees is considerably less than that amassed by travelling to a “regular” conference. It also means that the logistics involved were an order of magnitude greater. That Aral was able to organise it all is a testament to his dedication, enthusiasm and sheer bloody-mindedness.
Ironically for a virtual conference, the London hub of <head> was one of the best IRL geek gatherings I’ve been to. It was held in the salubrious surroundings of The Magic Circle. While there was no prestidigitation, Aral did manage to conjure up a great day.
I kicked the day off with a short talk called The Long Web. It covered some similar ground as my keynote from Accessibility 2.0—one passage was lifted verbatim—but the emphasis this time was very much on digital preservation and long-term thinking. The audio and video should be available before too long.
After my talk, I had
- Mad Libz, Yo!October 23
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It seems that quite a few people like the signup form on Huffduffer. This pleases me.
I share Luke W.’s rallying cry that Sign up forms must die! While I wasn’t able to kill off the signup form on Huffduffer entirely, I was at least able to make it human-friendly.
Ideally what I’d like to do is build a signup form that has one text field—What’s your URL?—and use that single piece of information to derive login credentials (OpenID), identity (hCard) and relationships (XFN). Alas, time constraints put the kybosh on that plan …for now.
Amongst the kind comments for the current signup form, I saw that Dan referred to it as Huffduffer’s ingenious Mad Libs style signup form.
This turn of phrase “mad libs” was new to me. I took it to be a compliment of some kind, perhaps along the lines of “mad props”, “mad skillz” or other stock phrases in the vernacular of the youth today.
Tracking the word “huffduffer” on Twitter, I noticed that other people were also using this phrase “mad libs” to describe the form. How very gratifying, I thought. I’m getting a ‘shout out’ from ‘my peeps’.
It turns out that
- Announcing HuffdufferOctober 19
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Back in April, I wrote:
I’ve been thinking about maybe putting together a podcast — just an RSS feed — that points to interesting inspirational talks, sort of like Jon’s Found Sounds podcasts but for spoken word instead of music.
Well, as soon as I started trying to do that I discovered that, contrary to what Tim Bray says, creating an RSS feed by hand is a pain in the ass. So I decided that I would automate the task of creating an RSS feed complete with enclosures. Then I realised that if this was going to be useful to me, it might well be useful to other people looking to create podcasts of found sounds. So I made a website:
The term Huff-Duff derives from the abbreviation HF/DF. It refers to a technique, widely employed during World War II, to triangulate the position of radio transmissions. I thought that was a suitable term to revive for the practice of finding interesting MP3 files on the web.
Using the service is pretty straightforward. First of all, you have to sign up. No, I haven’t implemented OpenID su