I play bass guitar, and in my quest to improve my bass sound, I started researching various bass guitar effects pedals and came to the conclusion that they are, for the most part, expensive. Sadly, I do not have room in the budget for all the effects I would like to try. I remembered hearing or reading somewhere that a lot of original guitar effects were DIY type things. I did some googling and discovered the Guitar FX Layouts blog and thus began my introduction to building guitar effects pedals. Thanks to Ivlark, Mirosol and all the other cool folks at Guitar FX Layouts blog, without these guys I would never have been able to start this hobby.
The Blueberry
The first guitar effect pedal I built is a clone of the Mad Professor Blueberry Bass Overdrive (here is the layout). This should not have been my first build, I should have started with something simpler, probably a kit. I ordered all of the parts from Tayda Electronics or so I thought. Once I had received the parts and started getting things together to start soldering I noticed I had missed a few things and ordered some more parts. I had ordered the wrong type of 3pdt footswitch (momentary, not latching), I missed a couple of capacitors, and did not order any knobs for the potentiometers.
What better way to rock a retro internet community page then to build it with a vintage web technology?
<!-- This is my complete index.shtml -->
<!--#include virtual="../include/html5start.shtml"-->
<!--#include virtual="../include/headcontent.shtml" -->
<!--#include virtual="../include/analytics.shtml" -->
<!--#include virtual="../include/header.shtml" -->
<!-- Insert Content Here -->
<!--#include virtual="../include/footer.shtml" -->
Some folks in the #tildeclub IRC channel mentioned that SSI is available on the tilde.club user homepages and had to check it out.
From what I can gather after a quick google search, and reading this apacheweek article I discovered that SSI (Server Side Includes) have been available at least as early as 1996.
Thus began an EPIC journey of discovery and configuration that stretched me to my very limits! I banged out some quick templates on tilde.club editing LIVE FILES in the public_html folder, just like my web forefathers of epochs gone by.
It can be difficult to build accessible web sites and web applications. If you don't design and build with accessibility in mind your site or app can be difficult or impossible for some people to read or use. There are some tools and resources that will help make your stuff accessible.
Start here! Do these!
Validate Your HTML: W3 Validator this is the official web validator
Validate More Deeply: Wave Toolbar helps find accessibility issues in your html
Test Keyboard Navigation: Run through your whole site / app using only the keyboard.
Get a screen reader and test: JAWS and NVDA are 2 popular ones
Read: WebAIM has resources and articles about web accessibility
Internet Explorer 8 Comparison
I spotted this tweet a few days ago:
There.s more users with disabilities than people using IE8.
Still, we tend to drop accessibility in favour of IE8 support.
#fronteers14
After reading some of the replies on twitter, I realized that this is a topic I care deeply about. I want to build web sites and web apps that are more accessible and I want to see other developers do the same. I want the software and pages that I build to be usable and readable by everyone. I will not through laziness ignore tools and techniques that can make the web a more usable and accessible place.
