Elliot Swan

With the redesign on its way and actually in the browser testing stage now, I’ve had the fortune to spend a few quality hours debugging IE as of late. Generally I don’t have too many un-fixable issues with the browser and any PNG issues can be easily solved with a filter or some JavaScript, but today’s pushed me over the edge.

Why it’s usually no biggie.

As I’m sure you are aware, IE 6 doesn’t fully support transparent PNGs and generally display them with ugly gray backgrounds. Generally this can be solved by using a filter that IE does support as follows:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="theimage.png", sizingMethod="crop");

There’s also a brilliant solution that avoids the filter and can be used through the DD_belatedPNG script.

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, lately there’s been a lot of talk about abandoning IE6.

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Decisions can be difficult, and sometimes you might be arguing with somebody over the internets and wish you could just flip a coin. Cheating is always a possibility, however, since they could always lie about it.

Not anymore. I bring you FlipFor.Us, the sweetest virtual coin toss on the internets: 
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Earlier I linked to Muxtape, the cool new “simple way to create and share mixtapes.” The idea is extremely simple: Create an account, upload some mp3s, then anybody can go to your page and hear your mixtape (or playlist, basically). Sure there’s ways to do the same thing on services like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, etc., but this is focused and simple.

Is it legal? Probably not, considering what’s happened with everything from Napster to the recent YouTube lawsuits. Will it last? Again, probably not considering the RIAA. Does it matter? If the creators of it are smart, no. Currently, I can’t find who they (I’m guessing there’s more than one of them…) are, but they’ve just created a brilliant marketing scheme (for lack of a better word).

Their launch post was written yesterday. Since then, it’s been all over Twitter, on 37signals, and yes, it got its own post on Wired.

At this point, it doesn’t matter whether or not it gets shut down. Because in 2 days, it’s managed made a name for itself, and if the creators can keep the buzz until they need to shut it down then they’re set. Actually going to court is probably not extremely likely–companies would likely be fine with it simply shutting down when asked since actually going to court would be far too much work/expensive for something like this, and Muxtape really has no need to fight it. The site itself isn’t even making any money.

But after a hit like this, they now have an opportunity to launch something that will last–they’ve essentially created a platform for themselves. “From the creators of Muxtape” will cause just about anything to fly (at least for a while) at this point, and VCs are going to be more than happy to listen to a pitch.

While it could definitely be cool if Muxtape stuck around, it really doesn’t have to in order for the geniuses behind it to last.

After almost 2 years I believe it’s been, I finally got around to putting up a new design. While it’s still a major work in progress, I felt it was good enough to share. And while it may not seem like a ton’s going on yet, there’s a few things I’d like to touch on and share with you all–at least one of which I’m quite excited about.

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There’s another problem with valuing ideas so much–they’re easy to steal. Er, excuse me, “borrow.”

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As a recent Twitter convert, the rapid adoption of the application has me intrigued. Unlike what basic marketing principles tell you to do, Twitter does not seem to market towards any need whatsoever and targets no one in particular. It’s just there.

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While it’s been almost two months since I’ve written a solid full-length post here, I’m not dead, and I haven’t been completely idle on the web, either. As my old portfolio has been extremely outdated for far too long now, I am finally launching my new portfolio. Check it out, tell me what you think, hire me, send me hate mail…whatever you guys like to do.

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Becoming a web developer is like finally learning to ride a bike then realizing that real bikes only have two wheels. So, you take off the training wheels and try again, and again, and again. You can finally ride, but now all your friends are buying dirt bikes.

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This morning I woke up to around 40 emails, over half of which was spam. I almost deleted a message with the subject, “Your Site Has Been Pre-Approved at Reviewme.com,” until I realized that ReviewMe is a new project by the great folks over at Text-Link-Ads.

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