11/12/03
10Darkest Night of the Year
At this time of year, I don’t actually mind the fact that its dark at 4 o’clock – it makes Christmas feel close. I can hear carolers outside in the street, but they’re teenagers that can’t hold a tune or remember more than 3 lines. So to get into the right mood, I’m listening to ‘The Darkest Night of the Year’ by Over the Rhine. Without doubt, the best Christmas album, a mixture of rearranged traditional carols, and new songs. No Slade, Bing Crosby or Wham, just decent, atmospheric music that creates a yuletide vibe.
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Jamie said 1821 days ago:
Jon, you may have just made my girlfriend's Christmas. She's been wanting a festive album and all I could think of was the aforementioned trash.BTW, on IE6 (at least) the "post a comment" box isn't clearing the right menu. Screenshot...
http://www.lifeofsmallbeer.co.uk/tests/hicks.gif
Jon Hicks said 1821 days ago:
Yeah, my floats are a bit screwed with the new layout. Must overcome laziness and sort it out.Good luck finding the album though. In the UK its a hard one to find. Might be an ebay job!
Jon Hicks said 1821 days ago:
Should all be sorted now...David House said 1820 days ago:
Loving that typography on the Christmas header image, Jon! Oh, and a live preview is genious!Jon Hicks said 1820 days ago:
David,That font is a freebie believe it or not! Its called Sushimix and comes from Pavlov Design:
http://www.pavlovdesign.com/
I'm glad you like the live preview! It gets around a problem in Movable Type, where the comment preview page doesn't allow php includes.
If anyone wants to do this on their site, first check the code from Scriptygoddess:
http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/001253.php
And then add this enhancement, which enables line breaks to show up in the preview:
http://www.glimpseofagrrl.com/archives/000829.php
David House said 1820 days ago:
Nice fonts, shame it's Mac only.Shaun Inman said 1820 days ago:
Hey Jon, should I be able to see this live preview on Safari 1.1? Unfortunately it's not doing anything for me...Jon Hicks said 1820 days ago:
Shaun,Works fine in 1.1 (thats what I use), but you may need to refresh - even if you have the cache deactivated.
One thing that doesn't work is if its saved your details, your name won't show up. The javascript relies on 'onkeyup' to refresh the preview, so if the info is already there, it won't show until you key something in the name field. Not a huge problem.
Shaun Inman said 1819 days ago:
Weird, it's working fine now. Must have been a cache issue, I should have thought of that. This script is a really nice find. I'm working on converting my custom CMS over to MT this weekend and was planning on coding a similar feature for my comments section. Think you just saved me the trouble, cheers!Jon Hicks said 1819 days ago:
Shaun,Glad its all working now. I guess this might be the 'aggressive caching' issue that Dave Hyatt was blogging about recently.
Good luck with the chnage over to MT. You're not changing your site design though are you? Just take off the IE logo - thats all it needs!