Delivering Sorrow

September 27th, 2010

Hot on the heels of the work for St. Paul’s School, I’ve been tweaking the media queries for the Salter Cane website. I was switching the site over to using HTML5 structural elements anyway, so I figured I’d meddle with the CSS while I was at it.

Once again, the fact that the site was already using percentages made the process very straightforward. Depending on the viewport width, the layout changes from three columns to two columns to one column.

And once again, I didn’t remove any content for small screen devices. The natural language navigation at the top of the page—now correctly ensconced in a nav element—really comes into its own in the linearised layout, allowing for quick access to different sections of the document.

The timing of all this optimisation is fortuitous. The second Salter Cane album has just been released: it’s called Sorrow.

It already has some fans. Shaun said:

The Truth Is Nothing sounds like Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Arcade Fire had a musical transporter accident. can’t stop listening to it.

Lachlan is equally enthusiastic. If you like what you hear, you can buy the physical album from CD Baby or buy the digital album from iTunes. It will be available on Spotify and Amazon soon.

All the songs are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license which means that they are podsafe. I’m looking forward to seeing where they end up.

You can listen to the whole album on the Salter Cane site using a Flash MP3 player. The documentation for Audio Player reads:

To insert a player on the page, place an HTML element and give it a unique ID. This element will be replaced with a player. If the browser doesn’t support Audio Player, the element will not be replaced so use it to show alternative content (maybe a message telling the user to download Flash).

The example code looks like this:

<p id="audioplayer_1">Alternative content</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
AudioPlayer.embed("audioplayer_1", {soundFile: "file.mp3"});
</script>

But rather than using a P element, I used the HTML5 audio element:

<audio id="audioplayer_1" src="file.mp3" controls="controls" preload="none">
</audio>  
<script>  
AudioPlayer.embed("audioplayer_1", {soundFile: "file.mp3"});  
</script>

That way, browsers with Flash installed get the plugin while other devices—like, say, the iPhone, iPod and iPad—get the native audio player.