Floodwaters (lush techno)
My first original techno track in a long, long while. Lush, layered, moody, epic. Composed in daily 20 or 30 minute stolen workday moments over the course of several weeks.
Finished this during a moment in history when 2,000 Pakistanis have died and 20 million are injured or homeless as a result of massive flooding which in many ways is eclipsing the last three major natural disasters combined.
If this creative-commons released free tune gets your head bobbing and heart throbbing, I gently ask that you consider making a donation to one of these many four-star charities providing relief to those displaced by the waters.
Deadmau5 vs. Rainbow Guy (unintentional mashup)
Just now I was checking out the website belonging to techno legend Deadmau5, enjoying how his home page was bumping out a tune called “Word Problems”. Then I noticed he’d tweeted about some over-exuberant rainbow guy on YouTube. I opened the YouTube video in a second browser tab — didn’t want to lose my place on Deadmau5’s page — and then oops! Unintentional mashup. Listen below. Very trippy.
Does Gmail support HTML imagemaps?
Thank you Gmail!
Short answer: Yes!
I ran a test myself because if you search for email client support of imagemap-clicking, you’ll see everyone pointing to this article from 2007 which sadly reports that Gmail is the only significant email client that does not support HTML imagemaps.
Sometime between then and now (July 2010) Gmail added HTML image mapping support, so those of us who are in the business of designing email newsletters can rejoice and take advantage of this useful oldschool feature.
By the way, if you are an email newsletter designer and you had given up on using background images because of Outlook 2007’s terrible support in this regard, have a look at this interesting workaround.
Chanson pour Monsieur Du Serf (1993)
“Il y’a un truque que m’a frappé: Tu a quatre-vingnt ans, il y’a des vins que tu ne boiras jamais.”
(This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, there are some wines that you’ll never drink.)
This afternoon I was digging through my collection of digitized cassette tapes as part of a journaling / diary project I’m looking into. One of the more precious things I stumbled on was this song I made during a music composition course while I was a sophomore at Northwestern University in 1993. The professor’s instructions were to “compose something of personal and emotional significance.” You can hear the song I composed below.
Nineteen-ninety-three was the year in which I was saddened to learn that a close family friend had died, Monsieur Du Serf. This was a gentleman I had known and loved since early in my childhood. During summer visits to my grandmother’s home in France, Monsieur Du Serf and his dog — a high strung Daschund named “U.F.O” (but prounced “ooh-foh”) – were regular visitors. He always treated me with great kindness and generosity.
A few years prior to this music composition assignment, I had started making sneaky recordings of conversations people had around me on a tape recorder. So as it turns out I was able to find a fairly recent recording of Monsieur Du Serf for the project.
The voices you hear in this composition are primarily those of my grandmother, Lucienne Bert (1912 – 2003) and Monsieur Du Serf (19?? – 1993). This pair liked nothing better than to sit around the dining room table and argue about wine and food. Discussions even about seemingly small things inevitably rose to fever pitches punctuated with table-slapping and disgusted exclamations of “baaaah!” and “ecoutez! (listen!)”. If the conversation got too quiet, Monsieur Du Serf would slip a bit of sausage or cheese to U.F.O I think just to elicit a grunt of disapproval from Lucienne.
Listening to this song again today (for the first time in the 17 year interval since it was recorded to a 4-track cassette recorder) I was moved by this conversation in which these two old friends, now both dead, were discussing what it meant to be eighty years old and buying wines that wouldn’t be ready to drink for ten or fifteen more years. In recent holidays, my mother and I have enjoyed drinking some of the very wines they discussed in this conversation.
Du Serf: This is the thing that struck me: You’re eighty years old, so there are some wines that you’ll never drink.
Lucienne: I bought some yesterday. I bought some yesterday because it gave me pleasure. I know I won’t drink them either.
Du Serf: When you’re old… when you’re old you buy wines for your <<héritiers>> (those who will inherit from you.)
Toryanse Dance Remixes
Before listening to these remixes, watch the video below to hear the usual interpretation of “Toryanse“, the traditional Japanese children’s melody played at pedestrian traffic crossings all over Japan:
This morning I flashed back to 2006 when video game maker Konami hired me to compose a dance remix of Toryanse for their Xbox release of Dance Dance Revolution. Did you listen to the melody in that video above? It is plain eerie – a definite timewarp into feudal japanese history – and making it danceable at all was a huge challenge.
All in all I think I went through 13 rounds of remixes back and forth before Konami finally settled on a techno genre tempo-warping version of the melody. Here’s an early draft version of the final mix (to which Konami still has exclusive rights):
Toryanse Techno Mix © Copyright 2006 Konami
While digging through my files this morning, I rediscovered three completely different remixes I composed that Konami didn’t like. I’m releasing the following three tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means you can do almost anything you like with these songs — download them, remix them, mash them up, extend them, even sell them — provided that you give me credit and link back to this website.
Toryanse Urban Mix
Toryanse Dark Children Mix
Toryanse Broken Children Mix
Podcasting website for Future Primitive
Joanna Harcourt-Smith has been recording her interviews with visionaries and innovators for almost five years, so the most important part of this website redesign was to reorganize her 150+ recordings into topics and collections using WordPress. This also presented the opportunity to create a striking graphic design and logo to reflect the earthy and ambitious spirit of the project.
www.FuturePrimitive.org
To extend the reach and audience for FuturePrimitive.org, the website is now connected to Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner (email) so that followers are automatically notified whenever a new episode is broadcast. Furthermore, fans can embed individual episodes as streaming audio widgets on their own websites by copying and pasting a single line of code (as is done with YouTube videos). For example, the episode you see below was embedded by inserting this single line of code:
<script src="http://futureprimitive.org/embed.php?show=142" type="text/javascript"></script>
Using the TGFI SEO plugin for WordPress
Here’s my response to a client asking for guidance about filling in the fields offered by my favorite WordPress SEO plugin, TGFI.net SEO:
1) No need to set the TITLE if it’s the same as the name of the page. Only set it if you want to make a bigger fancier more keyword-rich TITLE. (Not a bad idea.) at the top of the page than the name of the story itself.
2) In my opinion, you can leave the KEYWORDS field blank; consensus seems to be that these are pretty much ignored by search engines at this point because of abuse.
3) Instead, make sure your most valuable keywords appear in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION fields. This counts for quite a lot with the search engines. Don’t worry about making the description field read like a really nice sentence. On the other hand, don’t turn it into keyword salad. Strike a balance.
4) If you have particular keywords you’re aiming for (e.g. Arizona Immigration) then make sure that the PERMALINK (URL) contains those keywords, even if they’re not in your title. Keywords appearing in your URL make a huge difference, so don’t just accept the WordPress-generated URL without giving it a look-over.
And just to go all meta on you, look below for the TGFI settings used on this very post with which I am trying to attract web visitors searching for tips on using the TGFI.net SEO plugin. Notice I’m using both “plugin” and “plug-in” to account for both searches.
The TGFI SEO settings for this post
Drinking chocolate recipes and building a site in 4-hours
Lately I’ve been trading Internet business consulting for exquisite chocolates made by my friend Mark Sciscenti, the man behind World Tree Chocolates.
Mark had purchased the domain name for WorldTreeChocoaltes.com some time ago, and last week in a frenzy of chocolate-induced mania, we planned, designed, and launched his new website in under four hours. (We cheated some by starting off with one of my favorite off-the-shelf WordPress templates.)
The site doesn’t have a shopping area yet, so you’ll have to be patient before you can purchase your own soul transporting confections from Mark. However, the website we put together does include a blog, essays on chocolate history, and best of all: chocolate recipes. You can also subscribe to his blog via email so that each of Mark’s missives are delivered directly to your IN box.
"The Ancestral Puebloan peoples (commonly known as the Anasazi) had drinking chocolate brought up from Mesoamerica for use at Chaco Canyon. The medicine people, who were also astronomers and astrologers, used this chocolate elixir only in a ceremonial fashion..."
Click here to continue reading Mark’s post on how to replicate Mesoamerican or Ancestral Puebloan styles of drinking chocolate.
Website redesign for MMD France: MindManager experts
This project involved redeploying an extensive static HTML site as a WordPress site with a brand new look and feel. MMD France is made up of a team of experts in MindManager, software used for “Mind Mapping” ideas.
www.mmdfrance.fr
To distinguish MMD from its competition, the goals for this redesign included:
- Becoming content-driven: Focusing attention on MMD’s 10 years of expertise by deploying a blog made up of tutorial videos, tips, and free “maps” for download
- Making the human connection: Demonstrating that MMD is operated by real and approachable people with unequaled experience in their field.
- Simplifying content management: Using WordPress, MMD can easily update nearly 100% of their website content using a web browser. Adding new training videos or products takes minutes.
Tutorial: How to crop images within WordPress
WordPress is great for resizing the resolution and file size of images you upload using its editor. If you upload a huge 3000 x 2000 pixel 8MB digital camera snapshot, WordPress will do the work to reduce the image to a web-friendly 600 x 400 pixel 100KB file.
And now (as of WP version 2.9) it’s also possible to crop and rotate your images from within WordPress. No Photoshop required! Watch this video to learn how.
Click above to see how to use the WordPress "Edit Image" function