For anyone that's recently visited the Apple website, you'll notice that they did a complete overhaul of the user interface. Apple must have some of the most talented design engineers on the face of the planet. I find their interface is sleek, well-organized, and actually somewhat fun to use. But this isn't a blog about them, it's a blog about the changes that I've made to the frontpage of the music section. Inspired by the new scrollbar widgetry that Apple has incorporated at the top of a variety of pages, I decided to embark on my own adventure to use this concept in a way that would make for a better user experience.

I've written a fair share of stories myself, most of which include a variety of photos that I wanted to make available to anyone interested. Even with the most recent feature, a custom slideshow, I felt that I had to make the photos accessible in a more convienent way. If you consider for a moment the fact that some stories have over 22 images, you can imagine that it would take quite some time to click through each one in the slideshow and download them individually. Now that's no fun.

This blog marks the first entry on the website created using the rich text editing controls, a feature that's just tonight been added to the list and is now available for those using a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser. Can I get a hoo rah!! Sorry Safari, you'll have to wait until your 3.0 release since tinyMCE only supports the latest builds of webkit. Although tinyMCE is fairly straightforward to get working, making it coexist with all the other functionality on this site was quite a daunting task. Now I can bold, italicize, underline, and strikethrough content with the ease of a few simple button clicks. Those aren't the only options available, but they certainly make my life easier.

It was an early morning here at the apartment and I was just getting ready to sneak in a few levels of Call of Duty 3 before the girlfriend awakened. Unfortunately for me, I checked my email before I picked up the XBox360 controller only to find that random comments were being added to various entries on the website. You guessed it, comment spam and the kind that points you towards those sites only adults should visit. I knew it was only a matter of time, but why the 4th of July? Oh well, I've been meaning to implement captchas for sometime now and courtesy of a variety of spam friendly ip addresses have finally gotten around to spending a few lovely minutes with Rails to do so.