One Planet, One Station: Music One

After one year off-air, they’re back just in time for Summer!

When Music One held last show before going off-air last year many people felt sad. The best dance radio station on the Internet was going offline for who knew how much time. This spring the website started announcing a 2008 come-back, and near the end of May I know many fans were getting the chills. “Will it be back after exactly one year? Will it be back now?”

A year of silence

I’m very happy Music One is back online. This used to be the only radio I’d listen to while working.

The past year’s been a mess! Sure, Kiss FM has good music and cool shows, if you can cope with all the lame and ever repeating ads… And at some point you just get bored of your own playlist too!

DI’s Euro Dance station would also be a good choice, but alas, it does not have that twist of Hi-NRG and least of all, it doesn’t have that crown cherry gingle!

Today’s Dance: Music One

Now that’s a gingle I love to hear! Welcome back, M1! Let’s tune in for some m1live classics as well as hours and hours of fresh dance music.

"Hacking" Basecamp: Useful markup tricks

Project badges, quicklinks and notes

The Overview section of a project is usually the first page you’d visit when visiting a project. Of all the uses for the “announcement” field a project manager can fill in the Project Settings page, I best like the status banner:

p{margin:-20px -28px 0pt -23px;padding:5px 10px;background:#FF8;color:black;}. *Project status:* Testing

Of course, other useful direct information could be served, like the link to the test server with test username and password.

To-Do links and labels

Ever wanted to paste a link into a To-Do item? Ever bloated your Basecamp layout by doing that? Well, unfortunatelly Basecamp doesn’t support textile with it’s To-Do lists… (It works almost everywhere else, though…) What does work, is vanilla HTML: just do <a href="#...">Short Link Label</a> and you’re good to go.

Except for just links I also like labels here and there, where appropriate. I use <span style="background:#069;color:white;padding:2px 3px;">Label</span>. Colors vary by label type. Sure, you need to write HTML and CSS, but whatever does the trick, right?

Writeboard sections

The common tricks I use with writeboards are the black heading separator:

h1{background-color:#000;color:#fff;margin:0 -62px 0 -20px;padding:.3em}. Phase 1

h2{background-color:#dadada;padding:.3em;margin:1em -62px 1em -20px;}. Overview

...and the section highlighter:

<div style="background:#FFFABC;padding:5px 62px 5px 20px;margin:0 -62px 0 -20px">
</div>

In writeboards I also usually like to remove margins from my h2s.

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These are all cheap but sometimes useful tricks. In a next article about Basecamp Hacks I will show you how to print branded Writeboards.

More Changes

Get new toys

I have tons of thing to write about, but I just feel that this isn’t the right place to put them. I don’t want to just throw content in, without any way of filtering it. More than that, I have very little control over this blogging system.

So what’s most likely to happen, I’ll get a hosting service up and running and start writing code for my own blog. I’ll probably start building over Mephisto. They’ve recently moved to Git, which means I can fork it really easily.

Be a better waiter

I want to serve my content nicely, so what I’m going to do is start differentiating the content. Not only serve selective RSS feeds, but also have different presentations according to what a user is seeking on my website. I mean, not everyone wants to hear my rants about society, but that doesn’t mean I should publish somewhere else, does it? Instead they’ll have the option to just filter it out and never hear from it again. Well, unless some freak deletes their cookies, or they don’t use their own computer, in which case I’d recommend an RSS reader or… no, wait… that’s it.

Cookies for preferences might seem like a cheap trick, but it would be effective and usable. After all, that’s what cookies were designed for, right? There’s always a thought bothering me about whether it’s actually usable, considering factors like… people who don’t use their personal computer, or don’t have profiles setup for themselves on the computer they use…

Pay more attention to old toys

Khrome hasn’t been getting much attention lately, with this job change and everything… Lots of failures, lots of downtime, lots of people unhappy, yet still a lot of them loyal. I’m planning to revive that project in the next month, especially since we have a new sponsor on our back. (We’re moving away from the old one, by the way.)

Some probably wonder why Khrome is worth it… How about I tell you that when my new blog launches? :)