If the internet was trying to figure out what I’m all about… it would look something like this:

Find out what YOU look like @ Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman.

new jquery project, originally uploaded by jrossol.

so… havent’ been blogging in a while…. well… there is a GOOD REASON. Just finished teaching myself some basic jquery so I can be more marketable as a web developer. FUN STUFF.  Basically, I built an interactive library of ALL the music I own so people can take a look at what I like, read my reviews… etc.  I used a very powerful yet surprisingly simple-to-use javascript library called jquery, and also implemented some asynchronous database calls that populate the meta-data without requiring a page refresh.  It’s still a work in progress, but I’m excited about its potential.  I will continue to update it with more cd’s, better effects, and more of MY OWN reviews (not the stock Amazon filler that’s currently there).  I’m probably breaking some copyright by doing this but what the hey… FAIR USE!

Check it out @ http://www.blogstitution.com/CD/index.php.  Click on an album to see the effects.

*** YOU will NEED safari or Firefox 3… or else you will have rendering problems.

for REALLY INTERESTING examples of CSS problems and solutions, take a look at Eric Meyer’s open directory of CSS tests and samples…

A while back, I picked up a MXL 992 microphone on a whim after stumbling across a blowout sale at musicians friend. Been trying it out for odd things here and there… and thought I’d contribute to the greater web community by giving them some sample audio.

At any rate, I’m proudly up on Amazon.com as well.

I think I should just start a podcast… I have the gear… maybe Pris and I should do a debate format. What do you think?

I’m a pretty avid itunes user, but lately I have been noticing there are fundamental design issues that cripple the itunes interface. As I have been adding more and more movies to my itunes library, It has become quite clear that this portion of the application needs a facelift.

The Movie Preview Page

I must admit, this page baffles me.. on any number of levels. The thumbnail view is completely lacking in design and usability. Not only is its jet black background fundamentally out of place in the Itunes white/grey design scheme… but with your typical widescreen movie, you are limited to a preview image approximately 100 pixels long — hardly enough information to make out a face, much less serve any preview purpose.

To make matters worse, itunes insists on providing you unnecessary metadata for what is essentially a visual preview mode… without providing room to display most of the data it insists upon. If you look a the example screen-capture, you will see that most titles more then 20 characters long get cut off. This is especially true with the Stanford university video where nearly every piece of information in each content area.

What bothers me about these problems is that there is more then ample space in this view to display twice the information, with a much larger preview, but instead we get huge gaps of black background. Let’s do some quick math… with an average size window (800w x 600h)… you have an area of 480,000 square pixels. If each preview image is 100w x 50h (average approximation for DVD movies), and you only put 15 previews in this area (3 across, 5 down) , you end up using only 15% of the total useable space for preview purposes! (75000 [100*50*15] / 480,000). And this is IN PREVIEW MODE!

I would love to see a movie preview page that did movie previews well. In fact, I would prefer navigating my video library visually instead of textually but alas, Apple’s implementation just isn’t worth using. Apple, you can do better.

I have my issues with coverflow as well; but perhaps that is better saved for another post.

I have been wanting to make an easy-to-administer digital web bookshelf for quite a while now. Delicious Library was a great concept and a good piece of software, but it is not a web application. To my surprise, I discovered the Delicious Library SQL Exporter on macupdate.com… allowing me to get all my Delicious information into a pre-built SQL database.

A few hours later… with some custom graphics, CSS, and PHP… I was able to get the information from the database to display nicely on the web. If you want to play around with the files/code…

download the files here…

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