Anders Pollas

Banksy sneaks work into Tate

I just fin­ished a client web­site, Smag & Behag — and I’m quite pleased with it. Not because of lay­out, archi­tec­ture or some­thing like that (although it hope­fully isn’t too bad), but because it val­i­dates 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict, sends application/xhtml+xml to con­form­ing user agents and has rea­son­ably semantic/meaningful (fol­low this dis­cus­sion of terms else­where) markup. Head­ers are actu­ally marked with the appro­pri­ate header tags or replaced with graphic through CSS, rollovers are CSS-based as well, the use of DIV and SPAN are kept to a min­i­mum. Evan Goer of goer.org fame has a list of com­pli­ant sites at goer.org: The X-Philes where I just added the site, one of the first com­mer­cial ones. Hope­fully the list will be utterly irrel­e­vant in the near future as I hope more and more sites will take use of web stan­dards. For now, there’s not even a real point (besides “because we can”) in send­ing the proper MIME type, as not all browsers under­stands it and the need for access­ing a fur­ni­ture site through XML must be quite lim­ited. But it seems as if devel­op­ers are slowly start­ing to pay more atten­tion to the seper­a­tion of con­tent and form, to proper markup and to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of CSS, my point being, that once you get the hang of it, there’s noth­ing hard about using CSS — and prac­ti­cally every­thing is pos­si­ble. Now all we need is CMS devel­op­ers and the likes to do their bit… and Microsoft to brush up on their .Net…

Down­load .pdf

George Hotelling off 90% Crud is test­ing whether you really “own” music pur­chased at iTunes or not by sell­ing a tune on eBay. Beside being an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment and mas­sively blogged, it made me won­der if the pre­vi­ous owner part of buy­ing sec­ond hand will play a role in the future. Just like it’s cool to be able to say “this Cadil­lac was owned by The King him­self, you know”, will I some­day be able to brag about “own­ing Eminem’s copy of ‘Hit me baby one more time’” ?

What’s going on here? This pre­vi­ous post’s com­ments now, as you can see for your­self, includes what seems to be the usual email porn spam. Of course of less value as MT strips the html (orig­i­nal com­ment includes links). Has some­one real­ized the value of hid­ing their dirty spam in the blo­gos­phere because of the good search engine rank­ing? Or is it just plain teen fun; adding obscene mes­sages to ran­dom people’s blogs? Once in a while I have to erase such bril­liant stuff as “Die!” and “Fuck you” from the com­ments around my blog, so actu­ally I thought it was just a prank, but it keeps turn­ing up…

Update: As read at Dan Gillmor’s eJour­nal I’m not alone…
Update II: Not alone at all — but Kalsey’s got some ideas on how to pre­vent it.

The famous Vol­ume­One just launched a new issue. I see trucks, snakes, spi­ders and skulls. I hear elec­tric gui­tars. See, this would have made a good ‘remain­dered links’ side­blog post…

From the Medi­a­monks inter­view at Lounge72:

The main Medi­a­Monks ser­vice is that we take care of stuff.
When a client wants stuff to get done we will sit down with the client to dis­cuss the stuff in ques­tion. After that meet­ing we will do a quick inter­nal check to see if the stuff can be done inhouse or if we need some spe­cial­ist stuff-doers to get involved and then we will actu­ally sit down and do the stuff. We call this process the Medi­a­Monks cycle of“stuff doing”. Our main skills are in con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing a solu­tion which deliv­ers the biggest pay­off for the client. We never think within our own skillset or skew what a client needs to what we like doing. We always look at the bot­tom line and go from there.

Excel­lent plan. A bit of hon­esty and respon­si­bil­ity gets you a long way…

Mus­ing’s now got a ran­dom Bushism from the list from Slate on the side­bar. Asked by goer how he did it (copy-paste to a flat file) he answered: “My motto is, ‘Low-tech solu­tions for a low-tech pres­i­dency’.” Very well put, indeed… My own side­bar, by the way, des­per­ately needs that ‘remain­dered links’ thingie. I’ll look at it as soon as I get the time — it’s a nice concept.

Down­load .PDF

Still work­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Copen­hagen I’ve run into a bit of trou­ble. The com­puter I’m using is locked so I’m not able to install cer­tain pro­grams etc. I can’t even install the oth­er­wise hor­ri­ble RealPlayer. Which nor­mally would make good sense in the kind of office I’m using, but kinda sucks when you know what you’re doing alright. And then this: Super­model Kate Moss becomes a pole dancer in the video for The White Stripes’ new sin­gle ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ – a cover of the clas­sic made famous by Dusty Spring­field. See, that’s three things I like a lot. And you guessed it; it’s only avail­able for RealPlayer… Damn.

Our sad gov­ern­ment does its best to “nor­mal­ize” Chris­tia­nia (read: shut down) which, I might add, is a hor­ri­ble idea. A protest march is being held on the 30th of August and while I’ve been rant­ing about the lack of fresh­ness in just doing another march before, I strongly sup­port the project; with a gov­ern­ment indif­fer­ent to debat­ing, you might as well show your sup­port by show­ing up, hope­fully with thou­sands of oth­ers. Please don’t allow this to turn into an issue of being pro or con on drugs–it’s NOT what this is about.

Good to see Cory giv­ing this some cov­er­age, by the way. Yeah!