UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

It’s that time again. Well, OK, maybe I’m jumping the gun a little. If a sonic masterpiece floats down from on high (mixed in with all of the snow) in the next two weeks, I’ll amend my list. Otherwise, get ready because here comes my list of the top 5 albums of 2010!

5. Broken Bells

As I wrote in my midyear assessment of the music of 2010, “Take one member of The Shins and one of Gnarls Barkley — two bands I generally dislike — and put them together, and strangely, you get a band I really do like.” Strangely enough, not long after I wrote this, I was captivated, along with much of the rest of the country, by “Fuck You,” a delightfully melodic and lyrically brazen single by the other half of Gnarls Barkley, and Cee Lo’s full-length album The Lady Killer just missed the cut here. As for Broken Bells, the album has held up well, and I still find myself listening to it on a regular basis. It may not be a masterpiece for the ages, but it’s solid, tuneful and engaging.

4. Field Music (Measure)

Here’s another one I wrote about back in July. I still hear the Gentle Giant similarities I’ve always found with this band’s music, but I have started to notice the band’s stated (although perhaps semi-joking) Led Zeppelin influence as well. This is the kind of music that could make unironic prog rock popular and critically acclaimed tolerated once again. Whatever the case, I’m glad the sibling duo worked out whatever issues they had with each other and/or their departed third member and produced another album, and by any… measure… their best to date.

3. Spoon: Transference

I swear I’m not just stacking this list with albums I already wrote about just to be able to crank out this post faster. Transference was the first new album of 2010 that I bought, way back in January, and I knew right away that it was going to be on this list. It’s great, minimalist, Krautrock-influenced alternative power pop. I don’t know… throw in a few more loosely-defined subgenres and maybe it will all make sense.

2. Kings Go Forth: The Outsiders Are Back

The lead-off track on this album, “One Day,” is one of those amazing pieces of music that leaps out of the speakers and grabs your attention. It’s unbelievably infectious and energetic, and refreshingly lo-fi and organic sounding. It’s the kind of song where you forever remember where you were when you first heard it. In this case, we were driving in downtown St. Paul when The Current started playing it. It was at once familiar, timeless, and like nothing I’d ever heard before. And I’m pleased to say that the rest of the album lives up to the standard. This Milwaukee-based funk/soul outfit is gaining more and more attention from a national audience, and I wish them the best of luck for continued success.

1. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: The Social Network (soundtrack)

This is the first time I’ve ever declared a soundtrack the “best” album of the year… especially when it’s from a movie I haven’t even seen! I’m not sure I ever really want to see The Social Network — it’s one of those movies I avoid far longer than I can justify, like Titanic, which I finally saw when it was in second-run on its rerelease, well over a year after it came out; and I still have never seen Avatar. But my disdain for popular movies is not limited to the oeuvre of James Cameron. It doesn’t even matter if I ever see the movie though; the soundtrack is freaking awesome. It’s simultaneously atmospheric and energetic. It proves that music doesn’t need words, and a soundtrack doesn’t need a film: it’s a great soundtrack for whatever you’re doing. I love listening to it while I work, and it inspires me to want to cultivate more of my own soundtrack recording projects. Put it this way: it beats wasting time on Facebook.

Honorable Mention

As usual, it was tough to pick just five. A couple of albums that just missed the cut were I Learned the Hard Way by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, and Interpreting the Masters, Volume One by The Bird and the Bee. The latter is a strange beast indeed: a collection of covers of the Hall and Oates classics I grew up with. These versions aren’t superior to the originals, and they’re not particularly inventive, but they’re catchy as hell, and it’s fun to hear Inara George’s unique vocal style paired with classic Hall and Oates melodies and lyrics.

The situation: I’m running a web server on Ubuntu Linux using Apache 2. I have two sites on the server that need SSL. I obtained a second IP address (since you can only have one SSL certificate per IP address) and configured Apache accordingly. I was able to get regular old port 80 non-SSL pages to load just fine on virtual hosts configured to use both IP addresses.

I created my key files, got the certificates from the CA (GeoTrust, in this case), all that business. Put the files in the right places, configured the Apache files, all that jazz. Made sure mod_ssl was enabled, yes. All of that. Trust me, I did it. Don’t bother asking. And yet, whenever I tried to run Apache with SSL configured… nothing.

And I mean… nothing.

I’d restart Apache at the command line, and nothing. No error messages of any kind. But Apache wasn’t running. I checked all of the log files (and I mean all of the log files), nothing. DOA.

Eventually I tracked down the culprit as the SSLEngine on line in the Apache config file. With it in there, Apache wouldn’t start. Comment it out, Apache starts up just fine, but of course you don’t have SSL.

I’m using the arrangement of Apache config files as they’re installed in a default Ubuntu build. That means /etc/apache2/httpd.conf is actually empty, and most of its usual contents are in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, with a few other settings dispersed into a number of adjacent files. There are some critical settings in /etc/apache2/ports.conf and then everything else is in the individual config files I’ve created for each site on the server, stored in the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory with symbolic links for the active ones in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.

Well… that turned out to be the problem. I’m not sure why it matters, but I was putting the VirtualHost configurations for the SSL sites in the respective sites’ existing configuration files. But no… all of the SSL-related (port 443) <VirtualHost> blocks needed to be put in the 000-default file. That made all the difference.

Well, almost all the difference. My private key files are encrypted with pass phrases, and Apache needed me to enter them when starting up. But, funny thing… it didn’t ask me for them all right away. I had to fiddle around with starting and stopping it a couple of times (which I bothered to do because it still wasn’t running), but eventually it did ask me to enter the pass phrase for both sites, and after I did that, everything is working. Both SSL sites, all of my non-SSL sites, it all works.

I’m a little concerned that Apache is going to require manual input of these pass phrases again whenever it restarts (e.g. if the server reboots). I hope not, but for now I am at least able to move forward knowing it works at all.

It’s that time of year… time to start thinking about my Top 5 albums of 2010 post, coming soon. For now, let’s have a look at this year’s contenders, in a visual format. These are all of the full-length albums released in 2010 that I have purchased, from which the top 5 will be selected…

And here are a few others that are non-contenders for various reasons, but still worth a listen. The Shiny Lights is an EP, but it’s fantastic nonetheless. Anesthetize was a limited edition live album, officially available only in Europe, but it’s great stuff. (I ordered it from the UK distributor at ridiculous expense.) And Three is my own. I’m a narcissist, but not that much of a narcissist.

Today is the fourth annual “Blue Beanie Day,” a tradition established by the father of web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman.

What are web standards? Simply put, they’re awesome. But seriously… the goal of web standards is to establish a set of best practices for web designers and developers, and a set of open, shared languages and tools for building websites and displaying them in a consistent manner.

At the heart of the modern web standards movement are a set of three core languages: HTML5, for organizing and structuring content; CSS3, for designing the presentation of that content; and JavaScript, for providing rich interaction with that content.

HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are all open standards. The specifications are published for anyone to see; they’re open and evolving, for anyone to contribute to; and they’re freely available for anyone to build an application for rendering content delivered via these languages (in common parlance, a web browser, but we’re starting to see “web” content appearing in all sorts of applications for computers and mobile devices these days).

But why are these three web standards so great? Because they create a win-win-win situation:

A win for web designers/developers. By establishing a common set of tools that are open and free to anyone, web designers and developers can get started with no barriers to entry. Plus, by standardizing these tools, the same skills can be applied anywhere a website is being built. And as web browser makers adopt these standards, the last 15 years’ worth of browser-to-browser inconsistency will fade. Our job is made easier, we can get more done in less time, and, with powerful frameworks like jQuery built on top of these standards, this power to do more with less will grow exponentially.

A win for site owners. If you’re paying to build a website, you want to know you’re spending your money wisely. You want your investment to last, and you want to make sure everyone who wants to access your site, can. Web standards are the key to an accessible, reliable, “future-proof” website. Some Internet technologies may come and go; jumping on the latest trend may make your site seem “with it” today, but tomorrow it will be painfully dated… if it even works at all. But these three core web technologies will always be at the heart of the web. Plus, a site built with web standards will automatically be structured well for search engine listings, without the need for expensive and questionable SEO tactics.

A win for Internet users. Web content that is built and delivered with a diligent adherence to web standards will work reliably with any device, any software, that is used to access the Internet. Plus, no well-formed, standards-compliant HTML page ever crashed a web browser.

Web standards: Win-Win-Win.

This morning, as I do on most mornings, I eased the transition between my peaceful slumber and the mayhem of conscious life by lying in bed, catching up on the goings-on of humanity on planet Earth with the help of my iPhone and the Internet.

This usually consists of checking Twitter, Facebook, and my Google Reader feeds, but when that isn’t enough, I’ll occasionally search the web for whatever random piece of information crosses my stream of consciousness. Today that happened to be the Tim and Eric comedy tour that’s currently underway, since I’ll be seeing it when it arrives in Minneapolis on Wednesday. So I googled Chrimbus Tour review and one of the first links that came up was a review on BuddyTV.

BuddyTV is not a site I think of often. I believe I was vaguely aware of its existence before today, but I didn’t know what it was all about and I never had any inclination to visit it. But I was certainly happy and willing to click the Google link and read its review of the Chrimbus Tour.

Unfortunately, the site did not reciprocate that happy willingness. Instead of taking me to the desired review, it detected I was arriving via iPhone, so it shunted me off to an annoying splash page imploring me to download the BuddyTV iPhone app. No thanks, I really just want to read the article I came here for in the first place. Oh, great! You’ve provided an “Or continue to BuddyTV.com” link at the bottom. Thanks!

But — and this is so often the case in this scenario — that link did not helpfully take me to the article I wanted. (And as a web developer, I can tell you it is not at all difficult to make it do that.) Instead it just went to the BuddyTV home page. Now what? I’ll tell you now what: I closed Mobile Safari and got out of bed. Not only did I not download their app; I didn’t expose my eyeballs to any of the ads that pay for their website; I didn’t get to read the article I was interested in; and I was left with such a negative impression of the site that it drove me to this public rant.

All of this is not really to single out BuddyTV for its bad behavior, though. BuddyTV is just one site among many I’ve encountered over the past couple of years that all adhere to this same pattern of deplorably ill-conceived UX design. Surely this is not the reaction the owners of these sites hope to elicit. But it’s exactly what happens with me, every time, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

There is a solution.

We frequent users of web browsers on mobile devices just want to see your site. We want to see the same pages we’d see on our computer. The same content. But it doesn’t hurt to have that content optimized for the mobile browsing experience. Resized to the smaller screen. A streamlined layout that’s easier to navigate with a touchscreen. But, fundamentally, the same experience.

While there are some tools out there to help turn a regular website into a mobile website (most notably Mobify), there’s a far easier solution: CSS3 media queries.

CS-what media what now? CSS3 media queries are, simply, a set of stylesheet definitions that are applied to a web page selectively depending on certain characteristics of the media the page is being viewed on, most notably, screen size.

With CSS3 media queries, you can define an entirely separate set of stylesheet attributes to be applied only when the user is visiting the site from a small screen. Or an extra large screen. Or you can describe a bunch of intermediate sizes, so with the exact same HTML content the user will see a perfectly laid-out page, optimized to their screen, whether that’s an iPhone, a netbook, a “standard” computer monitor or a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display.

I’ve begun working more extensively with CSS3 media queries on some of my own projects lately, and I am very excited about the potential. If you’re a web developer or designer, you should learn about CSS3 media queries now. And if you’re a website owner, you should know that “mobile” sites are sooo 2008. Now you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have the best of both worlds. Insert cliché here. Just don’t subject your site visitors to any more obnoxious plugs for your iPhone app, or dump them thoughtlessly on your mobile home page with no way of tracking down the article they were coming for. It’s not fair to your users, it’s not fair to your public image, and if you’re supporting your site with ads — or, for that matter, if you’ve been convinced to drop a ton of extra cash on developing a separate mobile site, or an iPhone app that just displays your site’s content anyway — it’s costing you money.