VERY excited today. I’ve been playing round with webfonts when I should have been doing any of the ten billion other things on my list, but it’s been such fun I haven’t wanted to stop. Anyway, the short story is that it’s working! Thanks to the marvellous super-easy generator at Font Squirrel (which also has some great fonts, all of which are free for commercial use) I’ve got these up and running really quickly and now have two different fonts working on the page.

First up is Scriptina, the curly one I’m using for the site name (although I think I’ll leave this as an image so that where the webfonts don’t work at least the site won’t be totally plain), which I’ve used as a webfont for the headings in the right-hand column. I don’t know that this will be used anywhere else much on the site, but I think it gives the homepage a bit more of a sense of occasion. It’s not a very easy font to read though, which is why I’m not using it for the content headings.

The second font I’m using is Bebas, which is on the navigation headings and for the blog post title. I like the feel of this – makes the whole nav feel kind of 50s/60s businessy but I’m having some problems with it with spacing between words. Between characters seems OK, but it’s not really leaving enough of a gap between words for it to be clear where one ends and the next begins. Not sure if there’s a fix for this in CSS. If there isn’t I may go hunting for another font along similar lines.

I’ve also dug up a PHP class which apparently will pull tweets in from a user’s timeline, so I’m hoping to be able to pull the last 3 tweets from my @caitlinrowley account to go on the homepage. I’ve not really used anything like this before, so not sure if I’ll be able to get it working for the launch, but I guess I’ve got to try. It doesn’t look too hard to implement. And I’m about to save down some reading about whether it’s possible to import a WordPress blog post into a normal unconnected PHP page (because the blog is separate, for the time being at least) so I don’t have to manually update the homepage every time I post something.

I’m likely to be a bit quiet here over the next week as I’ll be in Paris and I’m not sure what the wireless situation will be like, or even if I’ll be able to find enough time to get some solid work done on this, but I’ll have the iPad with me and will write posts in the WordPress app, ready to post when I get access to the internet. Crossing fingers I won’t have to spend a whole 7 days without access….

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… because we’re about to go and pick up a van and go out to Ikea. Probably won’t be back until the depths of night. Probably will be completely exhausted by the time we do get back. I’m loading up the iPad with lots to read because Djelibeybi wants to look at some stuff for his new (renting) flat in Scotland, so I’m expecting to be a bit bored.

Today the iPad came into its own for this project. I had to go into town to get my hair cut, so I loaded up Gusto on the iPad with the files I needed from my FTP server and did some editing and tweaking and made up the basis of the two-column template, so barring font thingys and side margins and getting it all to work in IE6 of blessed memory, this is pretty much ready, I think. YAY! Gusto’s actually pretty good. Limited at the moment, but really it’s quite useful. I wouldn’t want to code everything on it but for the moment it’s meeting my limited needs, and of course the iPad is SO much lighter and quicker to turn on than the laptop (also doesn’t have a DVD stuck in the drive which keeps trying to start itself up).

Did discover a slight issue with <audio> which I hadn’t found yesterday though. The gurus of HTML 5 online have been saying things like this:

you need to be careful about the order of the <source> elements. Because of a bug in Firefox, if you list the MP3 first (which Firefox doesn’t support), it will silently fail and refuse to render that particular <audio> element. The trick is to list the Ogg Vorbis file first and the other formats after. Webkit (Safari and Chrome) handle unsupported formats just fine.
HTML5 Doctor: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/

This seems to be fine and dandy (although I should say that it seems to be fixed in Firefox 3.6)… until you try to play it on the iPad. I haven’t tried the iPod Touch yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be much the same – with the Ogg file first, the iPad’s version of Safari chucks a wobbly and won’t play anything. With the MP3 file first, all is fine and dandy. Except of course, that it isn’t because by the sounds of things earlier versions of Firefox may break down and cry. I think it’s a case of JavaScript to the rescue here. For my current website audience, Firefox seems to be more important than the iPad, and I think (warning: gross generalisation ahead) that iPad users in general are less likely to be thinking about or switching off JavaScript than desktop users who may be constrained by workplace policies or mostly unfounded fears that their files may be attacked. At any rate, even if this isn’t the case, there are way fewer iPad users currently visiting the site and the proportion of those who may have JavaScript switched off is probably microscopic, so I’m planning on leaving the code set up for Firefox and using JavaScript to (probably) remove the offending ogg file source tag from the DOM at the first available moment. Hopefully this will work.

And now to face the horror that is Ikea…

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This evening I’ve been cleaning up some bits and pieces with the design – capitalisation, the background graphics making the connector lines between the heading and the nav, spacing out and recolouring the navigation links and so on. I’ve also added in the audio to the Featured work box, as my first attempt to get this working.

I should say before I proceed that I’ve done a bit of thinking and I think that I’m not going to have time to re-prep all my web audio in two different formats and have the site ready to go live by 30 September – not least because I’ve discovered that some of the original (ancient) files have got corrupted and barely have a note left intact in them, so I’ll have to see if I can dig out clean versions from the CD copies my mother brought over last time she visited, re-rip, re-make the extracts, re-encode (in two formats) and so on. So I’ve made an executive decision that while I want to get proper HTML 5 audio working on the site for launch, it won’t, alas, be for all the sounds on the site, but just a very few to start with, with the rest being upgraded from their incredibly ancient Flash players (I built those myself! Way back in… um… 1990-something) gradually after launch.

But back to today’s work. The good news is: IT WORKS! Some niggles, but overall I’m very pleased with it – Firefox, Chrome and IE6 all find the sound files and play them nicely (IE6 using the fallback link but really doing quite a nice job of it. Shame it’s not doing such a nice job with the site layout… that one’s on the to-do list). Things to be fixed:

1. Safari’s not playing back the MP3. It’s the same file IE6 is playing without problems but I don’t know if I’ve specified the wrong codec or there’s something off with the encoding (could be, it’s not a recent encoding), but it shows up the controls with a play button but when you click the play button nothing happens [Update: My MIME type was wrong - the problem with everything on HTML 5 apparently thinking that video is more interesting and the two are more or less interchangeable, so not providing MIME types for audio... Anyway, it's working beautifully in Safari now]
2. I’ve been able to resize the controls with CSS so they fit neatly in the ‘featured’ box but Chrome is losing display data when I do this – it’s playing back still and showing the progress bar, but it’s no longer displaying the total track time. Suspect this might have to do with font-size – it was pretty generously sized when the player was using its default size, so maybe it’s just slipped into a hidden overflow or something. Safari’s also not showing much data, but this seems to be because it’s having a problem with the file – setting the width for this browser actually seems to lengthen the control box

I think I need to do some more reading on this topic. Might print some stuff off the web tonight – big Ikea trip tomorrow night. Bound to be bored at some point…

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So after chatting with Broken Haiku last night about baking, bread and cinnamon rolls in particular, and after he introduced me to a Japanese Animé series called Yakitate!! Japan, I figured that perhaps now was the time to have a go at making my own cinnamon rolls. I’ve always avoided them because of the high sugar and fat quotient – really not great for someone with no gall bladder who has an insulin resistance – but I’ve been wanting to get into bread baking a bit more while I’m off work and it seemed a fun place to start.

So this afternoon after my physio appointment, and craving a little sweetness after the agony of having her remove a TON of tension from my feet and calves (apparently I store tension in my feet. My masseuse says I store tension in my shoulders. My osteopath says I store it in my back. The scary thing is that I think they might all be right!) why not give them a go?

I was quite surprised to find that Rose Levy Beranbaum actually doesn’t have cinnamon rolls in her inimitable The Bread Bible – shock! horror!! – but Nigella Lawson came to the rescue with the Norwegian Cinnamon Rolls in How to Be a Domestic Goddess. And they were surprisingly easy, really. I mean, bread is a lot easier than a lot of people think, but this was super-simple. And with a limited rising time (25 minutes, then 15 minutes) the whole thing was actually pretty fast to produce. The main surprise was just how sticky the dough was. Nigella talks about “kneading” it, but really it’s a case of prodding at it and wondering how the hell you’re going to get enough off your fingers later to actually be able to cook! But the result was well worth it and with the judicious application of plenty of flour when rolling out, it all worked a treat.

I do suspect I may need an oven thermometer though as the tops burned quite quickly. Not totally charred, but darker than preferred, and definitely darker than the ‘slightly caught edges’ Nigella indicated may happen. But the inside was quite perfect – light and buttery and not too sweet. Scarily moreish. I have packed up most of them and deposited them in the freezer to prevent instant snacking…

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So I think I finally got a grid sort-of working. It’s not fab, but I’m running out of time and – as I’ve probably mentioned before – the important thing for me here is to get the wretched site off my to-do list and onto the web. Once it’s up there I can always start thinking about redesigning it, but the big hurdle is to send it out to the world. So I’m trying to keep it simple, both in look & feel, and in approach to coding. And I think I’ve now got designs for the content pages of the site – one for pages with attached media, such as composition detail pages and my composer bio which will have the Tate video embedded in it; and another for pages which are simply text, or possibly text with embedded media such as blog posts and my artist’s credo.

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I tried to start some sort of design yesterday in Photoshop, and it was all a bit of a disaster, really. I don’t know how anyone works with text in that programme. And obviously, this was a very text-and-line-heavy concept – and I find lines difficult in Photoshop too, so today I thought I’d have a stab at it in Illustrator, which was much more successful.

It’s still got a way to go – it feels too cluttered and is still missing a couple of things I was going to put on the homepage – but I think this is a fair start to the concept I’ve been playing around with in my head.

Started reading the <video> and <audio> chapter of Introducing HTML 5 on the train today, but didn’t get terribly far with it, really (exhausted after a stressful day and napped most of the way home – nothing wrong with the writing!). Oh well. Will have another go tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I’ll have enough time while I’m standing around waiting for public transport in the middle of a Tube strike. Heigh ho. There has to be an upside, right?

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More reading today (I suspect there’ll be a lot of this!) – finished Chapter 1 of the HTML 5 book and now powering through Chapter 2. Very interesting to read about the outline model – that’s going to have interesting implications in the future. Plus it appeals to my cataloguer’s heart

Also made a rough list of content I want to include in the site and started thinking about how to display it, esp on the homepage. Currently thinking along infographic lines. Possibly not hugely original, but I’ve got to start somewhere. Most of the designs I’ve made for this site in the past have never got past the scribble stage simply because I lack the illustration skills to make them work. At least flowcharts don’t require much in the way of drawing!

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Just because I don’t have enough to do, I’m taking on the Creative Pact challenge. Yup, that’s it. Not content with the 50 + tasks on my to-do list, I’m deciding to go forth and take up a new challenge. Except that actually it’s an old challenge combined with a new challenge. And it’s something that’s been on my to-do list for rather longer than it ought. 3 years at least, in fact. So I figure the time has come to do something about it.

So what is this thing, I hear you clamour? Well, you’ll be amazed to hear that it’s a website. Wow. That shook you, didn’t it? But not just any website. It’s bugged me for a while (see the thing about 3 years) that my minim-media.com site is such a mish-mash of stuff – music, publication, webstuff, writing, blog, photography – most of which don’t really belong on a business site, and mostly they just serve to take focus away from the music stuff, so I’m rethinking it all and want to build a site that’s music-focused (but not exclusively) and which will be a better forum for random me-stuff too: sort of a digital exploration of caitlin-the-composer covering all the various bits that actually go into my music. The new challenge is that I want to use this project to learn more about HTML5 and CSS3.

So my Creative Pact is that I’ll do a bit of work every day for the month of September (advance warning now that I’ll be in Paris for a week later in the month, so posting may not happen every day but I’ll try to at least do the work every day) with the goal of sending the site live on 30 September. That’s the plan.

Because work on this may cover a number of categories and overlap with some other stuff (design, art, music, etc.) I’ll tag each post on here that’s related to the pact with creativepact2010 so they can be easily perused as a group (because no doubt I’ll still be baking and walking and composing in between, so it could get muddled otherwise).

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Found an interesting-looking graffittied gate on Brick Lane on my way to the station and just had to pull out my new camera and have a play.

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Messed about with the Pianist app on the train – discovered you can record one line, then record another directly over the top, so you can do chords in 2 or 3 passes rather than trying to crush your fingers. Also had a look at ranges in the Whitman songs. If I move everything up or down a bit in every song, I can get them all to fit within my range at least, if that’s suitable (problem being a composer with a not-so-common voicetype – i’m a true contralto, bordering on female tenor) – but now they’ve all shifted away from the same basic related keys, it feels a bit haphazard and like it needs some glue to fill in the cracks *sigh* Might have to try another tactic.

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