Was trying to remember how to do JavaScript today, working on a function to remove the offending Ogg file from the audio tag for iPad, but really not doing very well, and I was lacking in time apart from train-time to do much more work on the site, but I did manage to get at least the logic of the script down, even though I’ll need to work on the actual JS itself to get it working. So not really much achieved, but an attempt. And as the other posts from today will show – got a lot of other stuff done too!

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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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Yep, I’ve made a start. Real live code. Real live HTML 5 code. I’m not entirely sure I’ve got the semantics right – I ended up with issues having borders and padding on the positioned elements for the layout so had to do a bit of wrapping to get it all to behave properly and then wasn’t sure whether the non-semantic div should be around the semantic one or inside it. I guess it doesn’t really matter hugely, but it’s too late at night now to be thinking about that. I’m just glad to have the framework in place. Feels like it’s really starting to take shape now and gives me hope that I may actually be on track for the site to go live as planned on the 30th of September. Yay!

Thinking vaguely about using @font-face for the headings in the site, but I’ll need to do a bit of reading up on that. Might not be able to get it happening in time for the launch, but I’ll look into it. Realised that I have a bunch of other tasks apart from just coding pages too – going to have to spend a chunk of time preparing sound files too – all the audio on minim-media.com is embedded in Flash players, but obviously that’s not really the way of the future so I’ll need to re-encode it and really look into the whole codec business – sounds like every file will need to be in at least 2 different formats which is, to say the least, annoying, but it’ll be interesting to see how it works…

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Yes, I know, *yawn!* it’s dull to read about but the reading itself is still very interesting. Today’s chapter (OK, half-chapter) was on web storage. Haven’t quite got up to Web SQL Databases yet, which will be huge fun, but the Web Storage API stuff (described by Lawson & Sharp as “cookies on steroids”) is more than enough for this project. I have knowledge. This is good

I’ve been trying to get motivated to do some more code, but it’s been a crazy, crazy day, rushing about, the landlord finally coming to take away the excess furniture, a spirited attempt on tackling the dust in this place and subsequent discovery that the vacuum cleaner that came with the flat is, in fact, the worst vacuum cleaner in the world. There is a high probability that I will go out in the next few days to buy vacuum cleaner bags and instead come back with a baby Dyson… Not a fiscally sensible way to begin 4 months off work, but I think it would make life immeasurably happier than weekly wrestling with a sucky vacuum that doesn’t actually suck. I’ll chalk it up to the “stress management” account if I do.

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I think I’ve finally come to a conclusion (albeit a temporary one) for the homepage design. I don’t know that it fully meets the objectives I was hoping to meet, but I think it’s a reasonable first step. I wanted the music to be upfront, so I don’t know that the blog post works so well but there’s the featured piece in there and the music-only tweets from @caitlinrowley (a music-related subset of those that go on @minim)  and if I push myself to post more often and more music-related posts, then I guess something will have been achieved. Um… that seems like a lot of ifs.

I’ve spent a chunk of time this evening peering about at other composer’s blogs and they seem to fall into two camps: 1. blog upfront, 2. bio or credo upfront. Well, 2 was never really an option, not as primary focus – I had the credo in there before but it was the first thing to go – I think it’s a useful thing to have in the site because it helps people understand the focus of my music and gives it context (something I’ve had some issues with recently) but it’s probably not the first thing people need to see. If they want to know about my music, then they’ll be clicking into the Music section anyway, so they’ll find it, but it’s probably more important to have the changing content upfront so there’s something fresh for people to (hopefully) come back to. The ‘blog post’ area I see as more of a general new content area – whether that’s an actual blog post, an announcement of a new performance or a new piece added into the catalogue.

So there it is. Not perfect, but it’ll do as a start, so now I guess it’s time to code!

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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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So I haven’t really done that much on my Creative Pact the past few days and today really hasn’t been that different, I’m afraid – we’ve been rushing around trying to get the house in order for my parents’ visit and there hasn’t been a lot of time to work on anything. However, I HAVE managed to do something useful today – I’ve bought Gusto, an IDE for the iPad, which is what I’m hoping to work on the site in Paris with, and I’ve set up FTP to my new site and it’s all ready to go, really. And of course tomorrow starts my first week as a full-time composer (euphemism for unemployment ) so there should be a chance to get some really meaty work done at last.

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Well, not 100%, but I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve really achieved today. In fact, I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve really achieved nothing today. It makes a nice change. I did make a start on continuing with the <canvas> chapter, but I was so exhausted after a crazy week finishing up at work (am now a full-time composer for the next few months and part-time tour guide for my parents – woot!) that I feel sound asleep and don’t even remember now what it was I read. Not a reflection on Bruce Lawson & Remy Sharp’s writing, I hasten to say…

I did also tick a couple of boxes on my website control panel so that it’s tracking activity on caitlinrowley.com and set up an email address, but it’s hardly impressive, is it? Will do better tomorrow..

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It’s taking a while… partly because this week’s been a killer, and partly because my brain has been feeling a little sluggish and is a bit complicated, so I’ve been taking my time and making sure I understand rather than just skim. I think I’m getting it – it looks pretty groovy, but I’m also beginning to think that once I’m done with this chapter, I might skip over to the chapter on offline storage, and then put the reading on hold for a little – I’ve got a couple of iPod/iPad web app projects lurking that will require things like geolocation and webSQL but as I doubt I’ll need them for this project, and time is short (and busy), I think I should be focusing more on design and actual hands-on development. I’ll certainly keep reading the book, because it’s excellent and stuff I do need to know, but I think I’ve been through most of the bits I’ll need for the current project.

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