Talk about sending so humor my way just at the right time. My friend Allen and I are heavy users of del.icio.us. He happened to use the 'from' feature to send me an image that not only made me start laughing out loud, but depicts exactly my struggle with web design. I'll share that in a moment, but let's focus for a second on the pains of being a web designer.

It just so happens that at least once, usually more frequently, per day I'm complaining about designing my website so that it's compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. I guess it's more than a complaint, it's a 10-minute violent rant on why I wish I could put a hole through my computer. Basically, I only design for these three browsers because that's about all I have time for.

As you know, I've been ahem working on the music section...as if you didn't know that already. Well, I wasn't satisfied with the interface to the albums and tracks. If you hadn't noticed, it was a little crowded, especially with long album or track names. After about 12 hours of IE, Photoshop, and CSS hell, I've managed to brute force my way into what I think is a better design. Of course, I'll let you be the judge and jury since I'm always up for new and interesting opinions! If you now navigate your way to view a track or an album, I've added some new features and a few yummy tabs (as svi would say). Introducing first, the 'Album' interface.

• Larger album art
• Less crowded design
• Track listing including popularity of the tracks on each album (read the fine print)

Up second, we have the nifty 'Track' interface.

• Larger album art, just like the album version
• Less crowded design, umm, just like the album version
• Recent play dates (Tab interface)
• By this artist (Tab interface, including album art thumbs)
• On this album (Tab interface)

That sums up what took me about 15 hours to complete. There may be a few bugs here and there, so if something doesn't look quite right, let me know.

Alright, so when I originally designed this site in Photoshop, I got a bit lazy towards a few of the sections, including the Music Billboards. Rather than think of something creative, I simply made a table and listed the most popular songs row by row. But hold on now, I did include alternating row colors in the original design.

Any whoizzle, I didn't like the look and feel it had, it was somewhat boring and really didn't stand out. I decided to take some time today to revamp the Billboards section.

Alright, so I already promised everyone that I would jam pack this site with content in any way you wanted it including web pages, atom feeds, rss feeds, heck, even xml documents for use on your own site. Well, another feature has been added prior to heading out to Elixir last night...music album feeds.

Not only can you subscribe to new albums that are played, but can now also narrow the focus to one or more specific genres. That way, if you don't want to get country music albums in your feed, you don't have to...not that I listen to country or anything!

Another day, another feature. Too bad this one took longer than expected for something so miniscule. Guess that answers the popular question, what is taking so long with this damn site of yours, c'mon already. Well, despite the demand for me to actually release something on the www hostname, I'm still remaining patient, so bear with me.

So what's new, well, take a look at the screenshot above. The other day I released a small tweak to the site that would update the 'Recent Tracks' list in real-time. This required some ajax calls and despite the coolness factor, I became frustrated because there was no way to specify whether you wanted it enabled or disabled. Heck, even I would like to have an opt-out policy that lets me turn that feature off. Wish granted!

Just click on the options link on the menu and it will fade some options that allow you to toggle the feature on and off. I almost forgot to mention that this feature is remembered across sessions via cookies. So once you set it, it will stay that way until you either 1) change it again or 2) clear your cookies. Man, that would of been annoying if I didn't include that, ey?

If you find any bugs, well, I guess post some comments here.