Getting this post out quickly because I suspect I may be the first to report this bug - me! First! Either that or my Google skils seriously suck.

Anyway, IE8. The browser Microsoft tried to convince us would work the way a browser was supposed to work. Did they really expect us to swallow that?? I should probably admit that it is a bit of a leap forward, even if it's not the cat's pyjamas we were told it would be. Mostly it seems to behave a bit like Firefox 2 and at least, thanks to the backwards magic that is conditional stylesheets, we can target it for its little inconsistencies.

But, alas, just like its predecessors it has moments of total insanity and it was one if these the tester on my current project discovered a few days ago. This afternoon I spent some quality time with IE8 and made the following interesting discovery.

If you zoom a document which contains block level elements with non-repeating background images where the vertical positioning of the background image is anything other than 0 or a multiple of 4px, you are likely to reveal a bug where the first 1px of the image is repeated below it, displaying as a 1px line (for vaguely box-shaped images - I guess circles and irregular shapes might not yield such an obvious result).

Fun, eh? The 4px thing I discovered through lots of trial and error and 'whaa...?' - but it only applies to the 'standard' zoom options and may break under custom zoom levels - I suspect this is because the standard zoom ratios - 50%, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 400 - are based around quarters (well up to the 150, I guess). I tried setting different heights on my block and inline-block elements, but always the 4 came through. Mind you, I haven't tested with different heights of background images, so I don't know whether that's a factor too, but this is hopefully a starting point for others who are battling similar things.

I have another issue awaiting me too which I'm certain is related - a repeating background image (a dropshadow) is showing a 1px line to the right of it when the page is viewed at 105%. On closer inspection it too is the 1st pixel-width of the background image - but how to fix it? No idea yet. Let me know if you have a suggestion!

Labels: browsers, bugs, code, website

Finally I have started the daunting process of moving all my blogs - this one, the Minim-Media news feed, One Creative Thing and the 16-week blog I sort-of kept in the last semester of my Grad. Dip. - over to WordPress. Blogger's been annoying me for quite a while now because it's got so incredibly slow and every post, no matter how short, takes 5 or more clicks of "This is taking longer than expected - do you want to wait?" just to get the wretched thing online. With the result that I haven't really been posting anywhere other than Vox for the last six months, and now that we've sorted out a UK host who has given us unlimited space, it's time.

And so the past two days I've been sorting out a template for One Creative Thing, because for the past year since it was created, it's been languishing in a prefab (but nice and clean) Blogger template and that, of course, is a case of "You can't take it with you when you go", so I got out my pen and watercolour pencils, and then Photoshop, and then Dreamweaver and made up a new design and coded it, and today I've been tweaking that code to turn it into a proper WordPress template. I'm rather pleased with the results, but I have to say, it's been very frustrating trying to add in widgets - everything seems to assume that you already know exactly how to get your widget into your page, and when I discovered that I needed my template to be "widget-aware", I was sent to this article on automattic.com as what seems to be the standard reference for "widgetising" a WordPress theme, but could I make head or tail of it? No. Part of the problem was that it sounds like they're widget developers themselves and I couldn't tell when they referenced a chunk of code whether that was for general widgets or their own widget (Answer: mostly it seems to be general), so, having figured it out, I thought I'd write my own description of how I did it, which hopefully might help others who are similarly bewildered.

1. You NEED a functions.php file. This is non-negotiable. You need this to put the code that will alert WordPress to the fact that you want widgets.
2. You can have either one or multiple widget-spots in your sidebar. It's no big deal to make multiple placeholders for them, so go to town and widget up your page like mad!

OK. So now that you know these two vital pieces of information, how do you go about it? Firstly, I am indebted to How to widget-enable WordPress Themes in 3 Easy Steps for actually making sense of everything.

functions.php

This is the file that contains functions specific to your site. What you need to do is to invoke the register_sidebar function to warn WordPress that you have a sidebar you want to add widget(s) to. You do this with:

 '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
?>

(Note that this assumes you are not using WordPress's default markup which uses H2 for all sidebar headings and an unordered list for the sidebar content - if you have this sort of setup, have a look at the "3 Easy Steps" link above for the right code.

This seems fairly self-explanatory, and maybe it is for you, but alas, my brain did not work that way and it took some time to work out the following:

• 'before_widget' and 'after_widget' are for code that you want to be dynamically included around the widget - e.g. a div with a particular id. They do not indicate code that will show where the widget needs to go - that sits within the sidebar.php file itself
• Similarly, 'before_title' and 'after_title' contain code that you want to go before/after the title that the widget will place in the page before its content. If you don't want a title but the widget is insisting, use '' in 'after_title'

If you plan on having more than one widget in your sidebar, you need to call register_sidebar as many times as you plan to have widgets on the page, each with its own name, so adjust as follows:

register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'sidebarname',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));

Note the addition of the 'name' attribute at the top of the array? That's the only difference. Just drop these one after the other, each with its own name (it may be best to make these a bit meaningful so you and anyone else who may use your theme can see what you intend to go in there. For maximum flexibility, the automattic.com article describes a good failsafe method that will show a static sidebar, should something go wrong with adding in your widgets).

Where do you want your widgets?

Once you've registered however many sidebar areas you need to cover the widgets you want (and more than one widget may go in a sidebar area, but you might want to specify different areas for specific purposes), you're going to have to specify those areas in the sidebar.php file itself.

In each place you want the widget to appear, you need to put in a call to the 'dynamic_sidebar' function, each one customised to the name of one of the widget areas you specified in your functions.php file, like so:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
|| !dynamic_sidebar('sidebarname') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Note that if you put any code in between the first php tag and the second, it will be overwritten. Change the name of 'sidebarname' to be that of whichever widget you want in that space, the same as you did when registering that sidebar area in the functions.php file (that is, if you called it 'calendar_widget' in the functions.php file, you'll need to use ... !dynamic_sidebar('calendar_widget') in the sidebar.php file too.

Then in WordPress all you have to do (probably) is install your widget(s), activate them and set them for the spaces where you want them to appear. The names you gave each sidebar space in functions.php will appear on the widgets page, so you can easily determine which one you want where. Some widgets may require further tweaking of the PHP, but that is a topic for someone else to cover as I haven't yet played with any of those.

Labels: code, tools of the trade, website

At last! Some momentum! This week being the first I've had entirely to myself since Christmas, I've really set to and started to apply myself to my work, and how wonderful it is to be working again, unfettered by anything other than door-to-door researchers and salesmen. I'm making very good progress on the psalm, which I think is likely to be finished this week, although I'm thinking of adding an organ part underneath it, but the vocal parts should be done at any rate. I've also started to think again about the set of Walt Whitman songs I started before I went to Australia and to start contemplating an accompaniment for the second one which till now has been merely a lonely tune. And this week I'm determined to iron out a couple of runkles in old pieces and get them all fixed up, and finish off the Satie arrangement which just lacks a part for live snare drum and a little finessing of the tape part then it can be laid out.

And all this in spite of a sudden overwhelming obsession with genealogy. I've been digging about in records of various sorts and disproving all sorts of family myths, which has been a bit shocking I think for my poor mama, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it and find out where her family comes from. However, I'm not going near the family legend of my great-grandfather saving a maharajah from a rampaging tiger, or the one about him fixing the organ in malta by removing birds' nests and then accidentally agreeing to marry the local dignitary's daughter and the army having to spirit him out of the country so he wouldn't be assassinated for trying to back out of it. Those ones I think we need to keep!

For now, I'm putting the idea of a day-job on hold for a few weeks. Now that djelibeybi has a new job, things aren't looking quite so critical, and i think I can afford to at least take a month to really forge ahead. After that, I think I've decided to try a little freelance work rather than taking on a big bloaty permanent job that will have me tied down every day for goodness knows how long. But I think short-term contracts for a while will be good - ease me into it, hopefully help me to maintain a little compositional momentum, and if I need some extra time to work on something, I can just not take on any work for a week or two, or however long I need. It's not really a practical long-term plan, but I think it will suit my needs quite well for the moment. So if you're reading this and need any website coding done, get in touch!

In the past couple of weeks I've also been very pleased to have finally finished updating the design of this site. And no sooner had I done it than djeli's cousin impressed upon me the big fun that is PHP, and then I had to go and improve it right away, didn't I? :-) And he's right - huge fun to be had with PHP and I definitely want to play with this a bit more. I also think it might be exactly what I need to implement the tricky bit of my online Vexations project, which I also hope to get a move on with in the next few weeks. I guess AJAX will have to wait a little!

Labels: choral music, composition, family, php, vocal music, website

I'm about to go through another hiatus - we have to go to Australia for six weeks. Which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except that I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth removed while I'm there, which is miserable to contemplate and painful on the wallet. I'm taking the laptop (of course) but I'm not expecting to get any proper work done while I'm there - too much being on show and not enough silent time being on my own and tinkering with stuff, but I have grand plans nevertheless.

The first project is to redesign minim-media.com - this is long, long overdue, as I'm sure you can tell :-) It's time to ditch the "my-first-Dreamweaver-site" look and work up something a little sleeker, more modern, more standards-compliant.

The second project is to split out my personal composition bits and pieces (and this blog) into a separate site with its own domain name. I feel that minim-media has been suffering from crossed purposes in that it's trying to be my business site and my composition-promotion site all at once and I don't think it's managing it very well, so I'm going to split out the composition stuff and the articles and so on into a separate site, and leave minim-media as business-only. You'll still be able to order scores and things through minim, but hopefully this way will make things feel a little more flexible for anyone who just wants to ask about the music rather than buying it. One always hopes, of course, to make one's fortune selling scores and recordings online, but a more realistic approach is that if people are interested in playing my music, then i'm more interested in helping them to play it than in taking their money, so a different approach is needed from my side.

The third project is one I'm especially excited about. When I left Australia, I thought I'd be away for six months, so I recorded a small amount of my vinyl collection to minidisc and ripped a few essential CDs at the last minute which then turned out to be very poor quality rips and some of them (the pop music ones in particular) are so poor quality as to be virtually unlistenable. So while I am recuperating from having my teeth ripped from my skull, I plan to sit quietly in my parents' loungeroom surrounded by boxes and boxes of CDs, ripping them one by one to an external hard drive. I've been doing a little bit of research, and an open-source programme called Max seems to be getting the best reviews for sound quality. I'm currently running tests on an assortment of formats to see what gives me the best balance of sound quality and filesize. Unfortunately, there's the added ookness of whatever format I use needing to work in SonicStage, Sony's version of iTunes, because that's the only programme I can use to haul music across to my minidisc player. I've set up my old laptop (an ancient Sony Vaio) as a music server and will be entirely cleaning off and reinstalling the OS, so everything should be shiny and new. I can't wait to have my CD collection back at my fingertips - I've missed it so! At one point last year I even came close to rebuying bits of it. Right now I'm keenly looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Veljo Tormis, Arvo Pärt, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Elena Kats-Chernin for starters. It's going to be great.

I've already embarked on a related project, with the help of djelibeybi who is somewhat of a whizz with database applications - I'm moving my recordings database out of Paradox and into OpenOffice Base. I've heard mixed things about Base, but I'm keen to be able to dump my ancient copy of the WordPerfect suite because it's just too old and installs all sorts of rubbish on my hard disk that I then can't remove. Also, obviously, it's Windows-only and I'm barely using Windows at all any more and am keen to keep it that way. OpenOffice is proving very nice so far, and as my database requirements, all things considered, are pretty straightforward once the links between tables are sorted, I'm hoping it'll be OK. At the moment my challenge is working out how to design forms for it. Hoping to sort this one out today.

The composition is going well though. We went to the Sounds Expo music technology exhibition at Kensington Olympia the other day, which taught me some stuff and planted some ideas, and I started playing around a little with the musique concrète tutorial in the current issue of computer music magazine, which has now nicely set me back on the path to working on the Satie arrangement for America which has been a long time brewing but which finally seems to be pulling itself into shape. I'm hoping to have the first draft ready by the end of this week so it can stew over the next six weeks and be ready for some sort of preliminary airing when we get back from Australia. I'm just loving playing with Pro Tools again and everything's starting to come back to me a bit, although there's still a lot I need to learn how to do. Still, there's time enough to do that...

Labels: composition, travel, website

It's been a while, eh? The past few months have really been just incredibly busy - and as a result, I've had pretty much nothing to say here, but all this will change in the very near future, because the result of all the busy-ness is that I have liberated myself from my day-job and will be working full-time on my composition for the next six months! Very excited about this, as I'm sure you can imagine. So much to do. First up is to really get to work on an arrangement of a Satie song that has been lurking for a while now, then maybe a choral piece. I've just about finished my set of two-part inventions too. I'll also be redesigning this site so it doesn't look quite so "my first Dreamweaver site" and bringing it up to date with all the latest usability and accessibility guidelines. I'm also hoping to establish a new site which will separate out my composition activity from the more businessy side of things. Then there's my article on Satie and Dada to finish researching and actually write and a ton of other stuff to be done too - busy busy busy!

Hope you had a very Merry Christmas and that 2007's looking as exciting for you as it is for me! :-D

Labels: change, composition, Dada, life, music, musicology, Satie, website