After a few months of sorting through my photographs — and a fair bit of editing — I have completed the slow migration from arcade.withoutnations.com to my account at Flickr. There are a few reasons I felt this was necessary:

1. Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
2. The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
3. The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
4. A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.

The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.

Churchyard, Covent Garden. 2008

Pigeon from Mark Mitchell on Vimeo.

Internet Explorer 6 is facing unprecedented, high-profile criticism. Could this be the start of a broad public movement to persuade users to finally abandon the browser? While the arguments presented by developers and designers over the last decade have largely gone unheeded, declarations from government institutions and media providers may carry more significance. Posing the browser as a security risk and an obstruction to new, feature rich web applications is a clever and completely justifiable argument.

July-August 2009: Digg considers dropping IE6 support, YouTube begins phasing it out

15 January 2010: Microsoft admits the attacks on Google’s system by Chinese hackers permitted by a flaw in Internet Explorer

16 January 2010: The German government issues a strong recommendation for users to upgrade or switch browsers

18 January 2010: A government agency in France responsible for cyber security restates Germany’s assertion

1 March 2010: Google will begin phasing out IE6 support for Docs and Sites

end of year 2010: Google will begin phasing out IE6 support for GMail and GCal

I have roughly 750 songs on my iPhone at the moment, selected at random from a pool of over seven thousand files in my library. As I listened to the music on my iPhone this evening, the playlist came to Gogol Bordello’s “Avenue B” — the earlier recording from East Infection. This was followed by the Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike version. Interesting, I thought — though not an uncommon occurrence.

Next, Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” from Highway 61 Revisited. What followed? The same, from Before the Flood. As I considered the odds of two repeating versions of two different songs, I’m hit with the live performance included on Bootleg Series Vol. 7.

Uninspired music library — highly intelligent algorithm — random chance?

Panasonic produced a line of road bicycles in the mid to late 1980s. The bike I used to commute to work over the last two years was, specifically, the Panasonic Sport 500. A cursory internet search will tell you that a 10 speed model was released in 1985, built on a steel frame with high tensile 1020 tubes and fork.

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A collection of polaroids taken in New York in 2006.

Attempting to style inline objects consistently across multiple browsers and platforms is difficult enough with unpredictable standards support — trying to maintain that exact style across form input elements as well has been near fantasy until recently. Thankfully, with the combined knowledge of the web development community and rapid adoption of reworked web standards by modern browsers, solutions are available.

For a recent project I had the task of applying one consistent button style to form inputs, anchor tags, and a handful of paragraph tags — with varying widths and background colors. Taking a cue from the brilliant work already posted on the Filament Group (which is derivative of the ALA sliding doors method and the work of Kevin Hale at Particletree), I developed a class that is applicable across a variety of elements. The examples given were generally applied to the button element; my project called for standard inputs with type ‘submit’. The class scope is left open to allow for easier application to non-form elements. A few instances:

<a href="#" class="input-btn-link"><span>Add to Favorites</span></a>
<a href="#" class="input-btn-link small"><span>Add to Favorites</span></a>
<input class="input-btn" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn small" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn medium" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<input class="input-btn large" type="submit" value="Add to Favorites" />
<p class="input-btn">Add to Favorites/p>
</p>

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A short clip of fireworks on the weekend following Guy Fawkes Day, filmed from the front window of my flat. Optical zoom on Panasonic DMC-TZ3. More clips soon

Guy Fawkes Day from Mark Mitchell on Vimeo.

An end to our unseasonably good weather this month

I started work as a Web Designer and Developer at Headshift two weeks ago. They provide tools and platforms for organizations and businesses looking to further explore social technology. Given that my usage of social media seems directly inverse to its general popularity, working in an environment that encourages said adoption should be inspiring. I’m excited to join the design team and eager to dig into an array of new projects.