I’ve got a couple web services I’d like to share.  One I’ve been using for a little while now and feel comfortable talking about, the other I just came across today but am anxious to try it out.

Last.fm is a music streaming service.  It is most interesting (to me) as a music discovery service.  And it’s completely free.  To discover music, type an artist that interstests you into the “Listen to Last.fm Radio” search box.  The service will play random songs from that artist and any other artist with similar tags, many of which you’ve probably never heard.  You can also search by tag (alternative, rock, Celtic, 80s, classical, etc.)  Just type in a tag and sit back and listen.

Last.fm also keeps track of the types of music you listen to, and there is a social aspect to the service as well, but I don’t use that.  It just makes a very convenient radio when I find myself without my own music collection, or when I’m in the mood for something new.

Finally, in my search for ever-increasing control over my online persona (yeah, I’m still not over that facebook thing), I came across chi.mp today.  In light of facebook’s recent content ownership and terms of service controversy, this site interests me.  It is currently in closed beta, and available by invitation only, so if anyone’s got an invitation code, please share the love!

Some select quotes from their website…

“Chi.mp lets you own and define ‘digital you’ and to share different versions of ‘digital you’ with your selected contacts. More than a life-stream or an aggregator, chimp allows you to take control of how you share your self with the world.”

“With chi.mp, you own everything you put on your chi.mp site – your domain, your content, your contacts – everything. With chi.mp, you own your identity.”

“Your chi.mp site includes a granular privacy feature – Multiple Personas, allows you to create multiple versions of you for different visitors when they are on your site. You assign content and contacts to each Persona that you create – this allows you to control ‘who sees what’. For example, people you don’t know see ‘public you’, your boss sees ‘work you’, your close friends might see ‘crazy you’ and your family members see ‘family you’.”

That sounds great to me.

I thought IE7 was going to be the holy grail that brought global CSS compliance to the masses and made life for the average web designer once again worth living. What happened?!

I’ve been doing CSS development for a couple years now. My standard M.O. is to get the site working perfectly in Firefox, then tweak the CSS to make it IE5/6 friendly. The purpose for this, in theory, is that by developing for Firefox you can pretty much be sure that your code is standards compliant. If it looks good in Firefox, it should look pretty much the same in all standards-compliant browsers. Then you add little tweaks here and there to make it look good in the non-standards-compliant browsers (IE). I generally don’t worry about the smaller browsers – between Firefox and IE5/6 I am covering about 97-99% of the browsers out there, depending on whose stats you believe.

Ironically, I did not follow that procedure when developing my own site, as those of you using IE can attest to right now. Incidentally, today was the first day I actually looked at this site using IE6, and yeah, I was shocked at how mangled it is. So curiosity bit me and I fired up IE7 to see if it really is more standards compliant (as was promised). To my shock and dismay, the site does not look all that different than it does in IE6. But there are differences. I looked at another of my sites which I had perfected for both Firefox and IE5/6, and there were elements of the site that just did not line up right in IE7. This means I am going to need a new bag of tricks to get IE7 to look right without affecting IE5/6.

What is Microsoft trying to do to us?

I came across a post on 33′ Rockers by Karthik Kastury called the 10 Commandments of Web Design.  Very nice message, perhaps not inspired, but I agree with most of it.  Karthik is not the original author, he’s just an evangelist — spreading the word.  So I follow the link to the original site that the post came from.  Now that site looks like it follows most if not all of the commandments.  Very nice indeed – must be the Jewish synagogue.  But who is the author of the post?  Jim Edwards, author of the “MiniSiteCreator” — which he will tell you himself if you visit his website.  Aiiiyyee!!  That guy’s gotta be going to Hell.

Come on, don’t be offended.  It’s an analogy.  He’s the one that started with the biblical reference, I just carried it through to a logical conclusion.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

For the web developers out there: Do you regularly use a CMS framework in your projects?

First a little background about me
I’ve been developing websites seriously for about 6 years. I’m self-taught and have no formal training. I started out by learning HTML and table layouts — no CSS, no <DIV>’s, etc.

Pretty soon I began hearing some talk about server-side scripting and became interested in JSP. I had a short period of formal “C” training in my past, so I caught on to the Java syntax and language structure very quickly. However, for most of my clients, JSP was not a practical solution.

I started to notice that something called “PHP” was included in most hosting plans, and after some investigation discovered that it was a “lightweight” server-side scripting engine without all the overhead and server configuration required for JSP. So I dove right in and before long abandoned JSP entirely.

Then about a year ago I finally discovered the wonders of CSS and table-less layouts. What a liberation!

So up until about a month ago, my design process has been as follows: