In case you missed the memo, Apple recently released the next generation of their iPod lineup. One of the big annoucements was the release of their iPod Touch. The touch incorporates coverflow and touch navigation pretty much identical to the iPhone. It also has wireless baked right in so you can take it with you and use Safari to navigate your way around the web. Did I pick one up? C'mon, that's a given, but the better question is how long did I hold out before ordering? Amazingly about 6 hours. Yeah, I'm slacking.

On the day of the annoucement, I really wasn't paying much attention and had forgotten Apple was holding a special event. Once I got back home and realized they had put out the new iPod line, I decided to investigate. I must say, the iPod Touch is pretty much what I expected, it's an iPhone without the "phone" piece. One thing I was somewhat disappointed with was the storage capacity. Maximum is 16GB. While that won't come close to holding all my music, I decided it was worth it anyway to have a device that incorporated touch functionality with wireless built-in. They also refreshed all their other iPods with a fresh new look and incorporated some new user interface functionality into the video iPod, now called "iPod Classic".

Anyway, with my new iPod set to arrive towards the end of September, I now have an 80GB video iPod to sell. Get ahold of me if you are interested.

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.

Whew, it's been a tough week and a half. Earlier in the month I began coding up the section of this website dedicated to music. The functionality itself is something similar to what I've tried to accomplish in the past, however, rather than manually entering music track information, this time it needed to be automatic. Like I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to Brandon Fuller's Now Playing plugin for iTunes on OS X, I can now use iTunes as the agent that makes the POST requests to this web site. The rest is handled by some Ruby on Rails magic.