I'll refrain from lamenting that I should post on here more, because that, I'm sure, would leverage that particular subject above 50% of my musings here. Instead, here's what's going on in my world:

My beautiful girlfriend is in London for the summer. :(

Workwise, I am maintaining two jobs, both design related (hurray), and keeping up with a few ongoing freelance projects. One of which is particularly interesting if you're in on the local scene: Durham Central Market, a new food co-op in the works for the Durham Central Park/downtown area. In the coming weeks, the website (durhamcentralmarket.org) will be up and running with info on getting involved. This is cool. Really cool.

Speaking of really cool, I trekked out to Charlotte last week with a couple friends to see Tiësto spin at The Forum. Scott Modie opened for him, and was pretty impressive himself. Of course, the man himself was amazing. It was fantastic to see him in such a close club atmosphere as opposed to the big venues he usually does in the U.S. This club is really a good find for us NC trance- and house-heads. Armin Van Buuren is coming on August 7th, so keep an eye up for that.

Stepping down the DJ ladder a few rungs, I've posted a new, slightly shorter than usual mix in the DJ section. The transitions aren't flawless, but the tracks are so good I had to post it anyway. Leave a comment or otherwise get in touch with me if you want the tracklist. Also, apologies for volume issues. My recording setup is ghetto.

'Til next time. :)

Last edited Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 4:08 pm.

My graphic design studio this spring focused on recycling signage, research, and suggestions for design-fueled initiatives. Our teacher wrote a great article on her experience teaching the class, and managed to get it published on Design Observer, one of the biggest design blogs (permalink here).

Some of our work is shown, and she's linked one of my web projects that shows some more of our class work.

The page, by the way, was a class project and browser compatibility was not part of the criteria. :) Safari and Firefox should work fine.

Instead of homework, I decided to add an RSS feed to yorb.net! It took a few hours, mostly because I had to find out how to make an RSS file (pretty simple it turns out), and then I had to figure out a way to auto generate it.

And in characteristic analness, I had to make sure it adheres strictly to RSS 2.0 specs and that it validates.

The solution I went with was to have the RSS file generated on request by PHP, pulling blog entries from the MySQL database and writing them each time.

Now, I realize that this is probably not the best way, because the MySQL server will get queried every time someone's aggregator updates the feed. Lodge complaints/suggestions as necessary.

As a side note, the part of this that presented the biggest problem to me was relative URLs in description tags. I frequently use relative URLs in my posts, but an RSS reader doesn't have the capacity to complete those URLs (and hence the validator doesn't like them). So I had to use PHP to match all the hrefs and then fix them if they didn't contain "://". This will have to be amended for srcs later when I add embedded image support. Oh well.

Biggest issue I have with it now is that my post modifying code doesn't actually put the modification date in the MySQL database, it just sticks it in the message body. So the feed ignores modification times. :( Half-assed code comes back to haunt.

New theme added, based on a linoleum block print I did for class. And yeah, that's a split fountain blend (or whatever). Some changes to the site theming were also needed to keep everything smoov.

Also the About page got content, and two new Things arrived. Next on the agenda: RSS, some portfolio additions, more compatible formats for media files.

Oh and also I wanna add an ability for me to put pictures in blog posts easily. 'Cause, you know, I think that's cool. Pictures in blog posts.

Look at these cats.