Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Sharing is nice. I've uploaded the play buttons I use for my video entries. Get them while they're hot.

• Photoshop file with both buttons
• White button, PNG
• Black button, PNG

I'm a student, and they make students write papers. This semester I wrote a semiotic analysis of weblogs and videoblogs. It's an attempt at defining the two media — mostly because I couldn't get my head around them. My paper was due before Christmas, but I've been holding out putting it up for download becuase I haven't been graded for it yet. Of course now I realize that my paper will be available in the university project database regardless so I might as well host it here also.

• Download “Videoblogging Is... en tekstanalyse af weblogs og videoblogs” (705KB; 28 pages)

The paper is in Danish and it is a school paper, not a paper for a journal (so some boredom is to be expected). The version linked above is the same I turned in, missing words and grammatical mistakes included. I know they're there and you don't have to tell me about them (it's too late to fix anyway). If you quote this, let me know. I like reading about weblogs and videoblogs.

As the trend has been lately this is inspired by Adrian Miles. It is actually six movies playing simultaneously. Three large movies and three identical, but smaller movies. Only one of the large movies is in view at the time. You can click on each of the smaller movies to bring that one to the front. Network congestion means that the smaller movies will not be in synch with their larger counterparts. No big deal.

The movies are not looping. At first this was a choice on my behalf — I like the idea that the viewer becomes the editor and makes the cuts. And once the movie is done playing it's done playing. You will never be able to ‘see it all’. After watching my own movie I don't know if this is too frustrating. Unfortunately my demo version of LiveStage Pro has expired so I am unable to open the project and change the movie to loop.

Without further introduction here is my first interactive Quicktime experiment that I built from scratch. It is a tour of my hometown Aalborg one Danish winter day (yes, the idea for this movie is that old).

You can use this movie as a template!

Like Adrian's Rhizome 1.2 and Rhizome 2 you can download a copy of my template and create your own versions of this movie! First download a copy of the template:

• Download Quicktime Template (solQT.mov)

The next step is to create your three movies. Shoot some footage and compress the hell out of them — remember the viewer has to play six movies at the same time. Bandwidth is a concern here. You should save a large and a small version of each movie. The large version should be 320x240 pixels, the small version should be 80x60 pixels. The small movies should not contain any sound! Otherwise all three soundtracks will play at the same time, confusion will be the result. You should now have six movies (three different movies in two versions each).

Upload these six movies to the web. While you're at it upload the Quicktime template (solQT.mov) as well. The next step is to tell the Quicktime template where to find your six movies. Go to the Totally Amazing XML Generator. There you should create a track list which contains three movie tracks and three video tracks. The movie tracks should be the URLs to your large movies, the video tracks the URLs to your small movies. Do the movies in the same order in both lists. In the end your track list should look something like this:

Click the ‘Create XML Document’ and save the resulting file as solQT.xml. This is important! Make sure that the ‘QT’ is uppercase. Upload this solQT.xml in the same folder as the one you uploaded the template file (solQT.mov) to. And you're all done. All there's left is to call up the template file in your browser (or directly in the Quicktime player) to see if everything worked.

One site I have been returning to daily is Widgetopia. It is a “Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities.” It is always interesting to see what kind of widgets Christina and her cronies are digging up. Browse through the archives as well. It's all good and you'll find everything from baby monitoring to stupid placeholders.

To celebrate the joys of user interface design here are three icons I made to de-stress. There are more where they come from (the others are just as bad).

• 
• 
• 

Note to Internet Explorer users: Internet Explorer does not support cascading stylesheets sufficiently to display generated content such as XFN men. Other browsers from this century do.

On one of the XFN pages it is suggested to insert an asterisk after a link to a person you've met. I don't like the look of an asterisk after a link so on these pages I have a little XFN man after links to people I've met.

I figured that maybe other people would like to use these men as well so I quickly made a handful in different colours. My family of coloured XFN men are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Feel free to modify these for your own website:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I have also uploaded a photoshop document (7.81 KB) with all five men included if you prefer to get that.

Now I'm considering whether these men are more suited to describe a “friend” than the “met” relation. I would like to hear any opinions.

Update the day after

It seems I totally forgot to include the CSS necessary to display the XFN men. Here we go:

a[rel~="met"]:after { content:url("path/to/image/xfn-met.png"); padding-left:3px; vertical-align:baseline; }

Update April 14th

As you may have noticed I'm using a small heart to designate the “sweetheart” relation. You can also use this for the other romantic relations (crush, date, spouse).

•