“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
-Leonardo DaVinci

The past few days I have spent some time trying to see what changes I will be making to the site. Decided that before I did anything I should read up a bit on HTML (A code which websites are built upon of, including CSS, PHP and JavaScript). It was a bit difficult seeing that the last time I had read about HTML was in an HTML class in high school. At the time people were still using HTML 3.1 and CSS 1. A lot has changed since then. Most of it good. The next gen, HTML 5, brings a lot of great changes, mainly in the area of multimedia. HTML 5 is still in the draft stage but that hasn’t stop people and developers from using it.

HTML 5 has this great < video > and < audio > tags that can imbed video and audio, respectably, fairly easily without the use of a flash player or extra codecs for your browser. The bad thing is that only three browsers currently support HTML 5 extensions. Safari 4 was the first, with Opera 10 beta following and most recently Firefox 3.5. At this point, Microsoft has kept quiet if Internet Explorer 8 will support HTML 5 or CSS3. I advice you to move to Firefox, Safari 4 or even Opera, instead.

But there is a problem with the < video > tag. Apple and Google are pushing for the H.264 codec while Mozilla (maker of Firefox) and Opera want Ogg Theora to be the standard.

Apple is highly invested in H.264 since Quicktime 6 which was released in mid 2005 and since then has become a major investor in the format. Google is highly invested as all of youtube has a subset in H.264 for Apple’s iPhone and it’s own Android platform. Apple and Google hope that by using by using H.264 iPhones and Andriod phones will also be able to see video on mobile web fairly simple because of the h.264 decoder chip already in those phones. Google even has a proof a of concept of Youtube running HTML 5 instead of flash

With that out of the way. I brought that up because I want to start implementing some of the HTML 5 tags and CSS 2.1/CSS 3. I will also use the @font-face tag to give my blog a bit more of a personal flair and not use “web friendly” fonts. I have also revamped the mobile version, so it can accommodate other mobile platforms such as the Palm Pre, any device running Android and S60 but have yet to be able resize photos on the fly. I’ve also added the option of login-in to comment via Facebook connect, OpenID and even twitter. Not only have I done a complete redesign I have also done a lot of back-end, changes the new site should load faster even if it is more media centric. I moved most of my online services of the site to Google Apps and going to be using the server to convert h.264 video to Ogg Theora, if you are using Firefox 3.5 or Opera, on the fly.

I want to start sharing side music projects, rough mixes, even behind the scenes of the recording/mixing process which is not always mixing but planning and discussing. These new technologies will help me do it more efficiently and streamlined.

I will not be releasing it at this time due to a bug in Facebook Connect that drives up the latency in a script that is use to create the thumbnail on the fly in Safari. Until I am able to find a fix to a point where I am satisfied, it will stay in development/sandbox. But I doubt it will more than a few days, two weeks at most. I am not the author or anyway developed the theme. That credit goes to Derek Punsalan. I don’t know that much PHP or HTML. I’m just using it with different plugins and scripts.

You can see and use a working preview here Remember it’s still not completely functional.