Sorry, rubbish title

It's been an entire month since my last blog, so I'd begun to feel the tiny nips of responsibility. You might be tempted to believe that enough has happened to me in the past month to allow for an interesting blog, but this is a dangerous assumption. However, things that have vaguely crossed my mind include my favourite albums, web design, graphic design and flash animation.

My favourite albums

As promised, I finally got around to putting up the essential albums section. Apart from the tutorials, it's taken the longest to do, mainly because I've had to write the reviews, get the information for each album (*cough* Wikipedia *cough*), then write the script that handles them all. I'll keep adding albums as time goes on, as I only have 14 at the moment. And I welcome suggestions, as long as they are exactly what I'm thinking. As I've mentioned before, they're not reviews as such since I don't give them a rating. In my mind they're all essential albums to own, but that is, of course, merely opinion. I did it partly because I wanted the world to know about my music collection, and partly because I wanted to give myself a little PHP/MySQL challenge. Obviously things have been a bit slow in the life of Jon.

Paul Boag on a rant

If you have a spare 31 minutes and 10 seconds, watch the following video on Paul Boag having a rant about web designers (don't worry, he is one). I haven't quite worked out where the good advice ends and the irony begins, so therefore can't decide what I disagree with and what I don't, but it is funny. However, I do think that he caught the audience in a particularly strange mood, as they seem to laugh at just about everything.

I have an unusual appreciation of people who are being arrogant but know it (see Jeremy Clarkson, Jeremy Paxman - hmm, all called Jeremy. Maybe this is actually where my appreciation lies?), so this is up my street. Besides, it's where I discovered what is probably the best website in the world: havenworks.com.

Wow.

Don't be a sheep

I suppose that one thing the aforementioned website manages is originality. One might suggest that this is not done in the most graceful manner, but the principal is good. I mention this because there are a huge number of pre-packaged, glossy websites that all look pretty much the same. After seeing endless versions of basically the same thing (blogs are particularly prone, as are designers who are three years behind), I've compiled a list of essential graphical elements to include in your site if you want to particularly avoid standing out:

1. Drop shadows - I've used them. If you're a web designer, you have used them too. The curved rectangle with a drop shadow is a staple, which brings me on to...
2. The rectangle with curved edges - I miss corners! Bring them back, please. You can still make them look good, and all those curves are beginning to get on my nerves.
3. Grunge - I admit, I do quite like the grunge look. But throwing some circles within circles around the place doesn't make for a grunge look. It's all about the detail.
4. Reflections - why are so many logos sitting on glass? It tends to be a way of making a boring, unimaginative logo look shiny.

I don't want to call for a cull of all these techniques, I just want to ask for a little more imagination. Inevitably, the next big graphics thing will come out, and certain designers will whack out hundreds of templates to match. But the real gold will be in the original, individual websites.

Ooh, how very flash

There isn't, as of yet, any flash animation on my website. I'm not totally against it, like some designers. However, if I'm ever wondering whether to build a website entirely out of flash, I always consult the handy flowchart that I found at TheGoogleCache:

(If you weren't paying attention in the "how to use a flowchart" lessons at school, the answer is always "no, don't use flash".) I've found many flash websites in the past to be very annoying, where the novelty rarely masks the exceptionally bad usability. Unless you really, really, really know what you're doing, they are generally pretty inaccessible, difficult for Google to crawl (kinda shooting yourself in the foot) and generally unecessary. However, flash buttons, videos, galleries, etc. are great. Flash is most definitely the icing on a delicious XHTML cake, as demonstrated by the following helpful diagram:

I hope this makes my beliefs clear.

Interesting stuff will only start happening after I finish this blog

I may as well accept that as an inevitability, and naturally I'll have forgotten it all by the time I sit down to write another entry. Any logical analysis of the situation would dictate that smaller, more frequent blog entries are the way to go, but that requires some sort of time awareness. Maybe one day I could have a ghost blog writer, to go with my impending fame and fortune. Until then, I'll keep producing blogs roughly when you start thinking that the site is dead.