July 2010 Chart

14 Jul 2010 • , ,
  1. Girl Unit IRL (French Fries) (Night Slugs)
  2. LOL Boys – 123 (Palms Out Sounds)
  3. Dubbel Dutch – Fool In You (VIP) (Palms Out Sounds)
  4. Heisenberg – Meow (VIP)
  5. Samo Sound Boy – Five (Palms Out Sounds)
  6. Renaissance Man – Scat Track (Made To Play)
  7. Brodinski – Arnold Classics (Egyptrixx remix) (Grizzly)
  8. Melt – Don’t Leave Me This Way (Palms Out Sounds)
  9. Inner City – Good Life (Geeneus)
  10. Lil Silva – Night Skanker (Night Slugs)

View my chart on Resident Advisor.

DIY CSS / WYSIWTF

6 Jul 2010 • , , , ,

As humans, we are always looking for the easiest way out; searching endlessly for an algorithm to solve our latest dilemma. However, I’ve found that you will almost always be most satisfied if you do things the hard way, by hand, using a little elbow grease.

And here we have another story that tells such a tale: John Nack remarking about CSS taking over Photoshop’s territory and pitching ideas for semantic markup from Photoshop. Thankfully we have Jeffrey’s always brilliant remarks to bring to light the ultimate problem:

Moreover, authoring good HTML and CSS is an art, just as authoring good poetry or designing beautiful comps in Photoshop is an art. Expecting Photoshop to write the kind of markup and CSS you and I write at our best is like challenging TextMate to convert semantic HTML into a visually appropriate and aesthetically pleasing layout.

…

But that’s the point. Some things, to be done right, must be done by the human mind.

via An InDesign for HTML and CSS? – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report.

Eddie Fowlkes Influences Glasgow

2 Jul 2010 • , ,

Numbers lays down their biggest influences. Eddie’s track comes flying back from the past. It’s all about Detroit.

When I was about 14 or 15 growing up in Glasgow, me and my pals used to listen to loads of 150BPM hardcore and gabba music with heavy Hoover bass and stupid vocals. Every Friday after lunch we went round to Nok’s sisters house to hang out and listen to all the classic Detroit Techno and Chi-town House records stacked everywhere in her flat.

Frequent requests included a Beavis & Butthead sampling Dance Mania tune, some Juan Atkins tune we nicknamed ‘toothpaste’ and this absolute seminal number by a geezer from Detroit called Eddie

‘Flashin’ Fowlkes who made a Detroit Techno Soul double pack vinyl LP with some little known German guys in the 90′s on Tresor Records.

‘420 Low’ is one of those tracks that made all of us do a complete musical bodyswerve and start to get down to the wealth of mind-blowing music being sold in our local record store, Rubadub.

via Numbers: Influences and Classique, A 7th Birthday Special ~ fabricfirst blog.

Tweet This WordPress Function

2 Jul 2010 • , ,

I wanted to provide and easy way for visitors to tweet that they were reading an article on my site. At the same time, I didn’t want to slow down the page with any excess javascript. A plain link did just fine, so I wrote this little function for use in my WordPress templates.

Copy this to your theme’s functions.php and then use <?php tweet_this(); ?> in your templates.


function tweet_this() {
global $post;
$tweet = sprintf( __('Currently reading %1$s %2$s'), $post->post_title, wp_get_shortlink() );
echo '<a class="tweethis" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=' . urlencode( $tweet ) . '">Tweet this</a>';
}

Zé gets credit for the il8n tip and thanks to Westi for the wp_get_shortlink tip.

Update: for those that want a nice and pretty Tweet this button, just use some CSS like mine:

a.tweethis {
background: #73A4FA;
padding: 3px 7px;
color: white;
border-radius: 4px;
}
a.tweethis:hover {
background: #333;
}