I’ve used Spotify for a long time now, been paying them over a year for Spotify Premium as well now and they are continually improving the service, and this extra step this a nice little touch. Pretty easy to use as well; copy the Spotify URI link and then paste it on the form on the site then grab the code and copy it in to your page.

Even thought that is really easy, I thought I’d go one step extra for WordPress users and make a plugin with that makes it even easier; make a plugin!

That’s it running through the plugin at the moment, the code is dead simple too.

[spotify-play src="spotify:user:wolfiezero:playlist:5v4LEKODutewLOP9zYTGyg"]

The code is dead simple, and I managed to do it in about 10 minutes in my lunch break at work.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to download it through Github as the WordPress admins think I’m “name grabbing” despite the source code is out there already and @SpotifyPlatform had already retweeted me.

But I’ll be keeping an eye on things and will post when it’s live on the WordPress official plugin site, but till then, download and enjoy.

UPDATE: The plugin is now live on the WordPress Plugin Directory!

If you got any issues then feel free to contact me.

Scary that despite being born late 1985, I remember using interfaces like this when my dad would bring his desktop computer home… before laptops where that practical for business use! Got to love the floppy disk drive (A:/) sound as it's loading into memory and the dial up noise.

Okay, it’s pretty obvious this is their main April Fools this year, if you where a fan of JRPGs back in the day then this brings a certain nostalgia that reminds me heavily of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy on the NES. Also, the other cool thing about this is that although the cart may not be real, the mapping is! That means you can actually go to Google Maps and check out. Funny thing is, when you go into street view, the street comes out in a crappy 8-bit colour pallet; check out the view of my old college in the image above.

I hope they keep this and give users API access to those tiles; I could think of a few cool ideas!

It’s impressive that something basic like getting back to the previous screen is so difficult for a first time user. Now, it could be said that this is an older user and thus may not be so savvy; this is very true but this isn’t asking the user to perform a system task that would require some manner of technical knowledge but rather do a basic task of getting to the home screen. It’s not obvious basically and requires some manner of thought process that strays away from the normal flow of user experience.

Watch the full session here.

If you want to see the comparison of this experience with Mac then it’s worth watching this follow up video.

Never heard of The Rubberbandits before, but their video, Horse Outside, is an absolute classic! Want to get a better idea of these guys then you need to see them on The Late Late Show.

It’s a little slow to start with but once it’s going you’ll be impressed. BTW, the guy on the far right… epic!

2011

This is was a pretty big year in regards to my life in general in a positive way; the first and formost was I got married to The Girlie on the 2^nd of September, which was nice and pleasant. Thanks to that I spent my first holiday in a different country not leaving the hotel; typically that would que some joke with suggestive innuendo but alas it was more the whole planning of a wedding takes it out of you! If you’ve not planned a wedding you have no idea what it’s like, and if you are about to then I suggest you watch this video to better explain it all.

The next big thing was leaving my previous company of 4 years, Infoactive Media, to pursue my carrer further with Fubra. I’ve mentioned previously that it was sad to leave the old company, but it was a move I needed to take and thus has done me wonders, but I do keep in contact with them, which is pretty awesome.

I’ve taken a step back from photography a bit while other parts of the year take president, but that’s not to say I’ve given up with it, just on hiatus. I was also planning on getting fitter this year; that didn’t happen!

On the gaming front, I’ve gain more games that I’ve played but this has causes me to change my look on things that I’ll explain in a moment.

2012

So with the massive distraction of a wedding out of the way, The Girlie and I can focus on our next goal; moving to Bennie Hill’s home town, Eastleigh. Well, it’s in fact my hometown, but I moved away to live with The Girlie, but we made the choice that thanks to Eastleigh having something that sucks you in (akin to that feeling those people keep going to Silent Hill or the creepy cabin all those cheerleaders where murdered). I think people don’t realise what Eastleigh is like until they move away, then they miss it; I say that as some people might read this going “Why do you want to move back” but those who have moved away will understand what I mean.

Work-wise I’m going to be focusing now on developing my user experience knowledge, understanding the human-psyche when it comes to viewing a web page. It’s something that has always interest me and now I’m able to start doing research on it and focus more on it for work. I’ll also be developing more plugins this year for WordPress and hopefully attending a few more conferences on web development.

I’m planning on taking a photography course this year that will hopefully help with learning more on photography and developing skills. I did seriously forgot about my camera last year, but that’s going to change now!

Fitness might not be such an issue this year and I do plan on making use of the gym at my work, I normally got some free time once I’ve finished work so I haven’t got an excuse not to go other than “I just need to get this form perfectly lined up to this circular image”.

So with games I’ve decided to take a step back and somewhat ignore the AAA titles and focus more on the lesser ones and also spend less time on multiplayer stuff, which is why I haven’t got Modern Warfare 3 yet. I’ve already lined myself some JRPGs to play such as Xenoblade Chronicles, Star Ocean games, Final Fantasy’s I’ve not yet completed and also The Last Story when it comes out later this year. I’m also going to take a lot more notice of the Wii as a console due to the number of pretty cool games that get lost in the hype of the more powerful consoles; I still got No More Heroes 2 to play that I got in 2010.

I think that pretty much sums it all up!

This video is really impressive, I must say! These guys have seriously worked hard on making some that could be a viable full blow project. I’ve not read anything into it, but it looks like it’s just a mod project rather than something built ground up using the Unreal Engine (say games like Gears of War and the Batman Arkham games), which makes it something even more special that they pulled this one out of the hat.

Unfortunately, I doubt it could ever be released due to that thing called copyright. But it’s amazing that a little fan perseverance that they have gone and done this. Would love to see them make it into a working title.

That line “this is how I want this styled” alarmed me somewhat, which followed my response of:

I stand by that but feel it needs to be elaborated a bit more and especially explain the “in a perfect world” comment.

“I want this element to”

The way I see things like .clearfix in the same way that people used <font> in the old days. It’s telling the element what it is and how to act. Granted that with CSS you don’t have to add such inline-styles to that element, but you are adding something that’s not semantic to the markup and thus bloating your code but also restricting the markup to a particular style somewhat. It doesn’t tell a human anything useful nor does it tell a machine reader anything useful, it’s only good for the specific CSS that uses .clearfix. It’s the same as <font> in some respect in that you are defining what something is doing without any real context; <font> tells the text to look a particular way and .clearfix tells it to look a particular way. I see very little differences in these two naming conventions except that at least .clearfix doesn’t force the content to do something unless defined in the CSS where <font> clearly does; but it’s still treating them the same.

The way to see CSS and HTML is simple; CSS is your style and design, HTML is your content and document. We want to separate that style as much as possible from our document hence why <b> and <i> tags became redundant; as much as they where apart from the documents formatting like <p>, they had very little meaning where <strong> and <em> had that meaning that we could also add a separate style too (though the HTML5 spec does try to bring a some semantics to them).

What About HTML Frameworks?

You may ask what I think about frameworks that use less semantic element for more design-based names such as the excellent 960.gs?

It does in fact break that rule of separating content and style by adding classes such as .grid_4 to define the how the document should look. I cannot see any semantic value in giving a <div> such a class so it’s broken for me.

Though I should say that it should stray people away from using such frameworks as if you aren’t worried about semantics then they are perfect and do the job really well; just that I feel they are semantically broken.

“this element is a”

Keeping in with my belief of content and style separation I believe that markup shouldn’t have unnecessary classes or IDs; they should have purpose and meaning so that a user can understand what it is, and that’s the key term here. When I write markup I want to say what items are if I need to such as <div id="main">, straight away somebody can look at that and say “Ah that’s the main part of the site”. There’s a number of these that often have to be commonly used such as;

• comment(s)
• post(s)
• gallery
• email

Just a few possible examples but all these are explaining what an element is. I can refer to these easily in the CSS to add a style suited to their needs. It’s a general name to a specific element; I’m telling the CSS what an element is and not telling the element what to do. As with any good markup, it should allow the person to write a new CSS file that will work with the markup without any changes to that markup (in a perfect world).

It Has a Flow

There’s an idea on a work flow appearing here that I know many front-end developers (who are all about the semantics at least) follow; content first, style later.

So what we will do here is develop our HTML first and put in all the content we want and then assign that content a value of what it is (if you’ve ever worked with XML, JSON or arrays and objects then you’ll understand what we are achieving here). So once you made your HTML doc with all the classes and/or IDs that define what certain tags are containing, you’ll then freeze that file and start working purely on the CSS; no changes to the HTML should be made once CSS work has started. I believe there are some companies that have people who are only allowed to work on CSS and not the HTML thus making a strong need of semantics in a doc.

Is it a Perfect World Though?

Unfortunately not; there are times when we need to add those none-semantic classes to make certain markup usable. The most popular culprits are .pad and/or .wrapper.

These little classes are typically used add a respective padding or a wrapper to get elements to act so. They do have a certain amount of semantics in that there name doesn’t suggest any strict styling elements, but at the end of the day they are used purely for style reasons (I wouldn’t have it if I could). It’s a nessary evil at times that I’ve not seen any push for a fix within CSS, but would be nice if there was one that didn’t involve some horrible workarounds; I’ve tried developing some and I still rather have none-semantic markup as they are messy and aren’t really bullet-proof.

Basically, it can all be summed up like so: tell your CSS what something is and not what you want something todo.

Update – 14/11/11 @ 1730
It appears that shortly after writing this blog post an opinion article was written on Smashing Magazine about the pointless pursuit of semantics. Now while I do talk more about the use of classes and IDs in this post rather than the document as a whole, I stand by the point that any semantics isn’t a pointless pursuit and thus wrote a comment in response to the Smashing Magazine article that can be found here.