Ian Swenson .com

Wow! Never in the history of the world …

Okay, I’ll skip the theatrics. I’ve updated two sections so far, and two more to come. I’ve added five “new” songs on the music page. They’re not new to me, but they might be new to you. I’m very critical about stuff that I create. I’ve actually composed 14 songs for this “album”–I’m actually doing air-quotes each time I do those–but I only “like” two of them. The posted five are ones I can “deal” with. The remainder are crap. Or is it, “the remainder is crap?”

I also posted a link to a website I made last January for my first and only anthropology class. You can see it on the portfolio page. I like how it turned out visually, and the content’s not too bad neither. It’s about the internal reasons for the decline of the Aztec empire. It’s not in depth or super-scientific or anything. I was just trying to get a good grade in the class (which I did).

I also have two other planned updates, but they require a teensy bit more time than I have at the moment. I’m going to change the gallery page to incorporate flash (from the folks at SlideShowPro). I’ll also add a second work of fiction and a little piece of JavaScript to be able to hide divs for ease of viewing. Yay!

I normally try to stay away from JavaScript because I’ve had it engrained into me that usability is more important than flashiness. If 5% (it’s smaller, I’m sure) of users have JavaScript disabled, then they (A) won’t be able to get full functionality from a site and (B) will leave it. So all these articles I read on web design, SEO, and at places like A List Apart strongly suggest that reliance on JavaScript is a bad thing.

But my opinion is starting to shift a bit as the philosophy of JavaScript is subtly shifting around the web. For the past couple of years designers have been working on websites “degrading gracefully,” as they put it. What that basically means is that if someone is browsing with say, JavaScript disabled, or images disabled, or is on a text-only or mobile browser the website should function just as well for them as for smart users like me who use Firefox. So if I have a nifty drop-down menu system that relies on both CSS and JavaScript, every link should be accessible for any of the users mentioned above.

Since this is now being recognized as a good thing nearly universally, that means smarter people than me are writing scripts and such that I can use! I know next to nothing about coding (I can modify someone’s PHP or JavaScript, but that’s it), I’m at the mercy of the web philosophy. So while I’ve been avoiding scripts for ages, now I’m coming around to their usefulness. So I’ll be able to use a nice JavaScript on the fiction page that’ll hide the stories you’re not currently reading. But if you’re, for some insane reason, reading my stories on your cell, they won’t be hidden from you.

That may or may not be a good thing.