Nonsensor.

The more interesting your life is, the less likely you'll have time to document it...

Let's get something straight: I don't think that. That's actually the title of a blog post on an Opera Dev blog I wanted to link to.

There's always a lot of talk of accessible JavaScript, especially from designers. Usually they advocate complicated solutions involving appending event handlers onto HTML elements after load, to avoid inline onclicks and such. And to me, that's an audience thing. Yes, flashy scripts on blogs for no good reason are silly, but to say that the user experience is equivalent between the real Flickr and the example prototype he put together is... well, you know.

I go around in my head about this occasionally, and sometimes I feel like I've sold out accessibility in the name of great features and ease of use for customers who can see at the expense of people who can't. Because let's face it, when we talk about accessibility and Ajax, we're talking about the visually-impaired or blind (and that's largely because of the terrible technology those users are forced to deal with).

But then I think about what amazing products we've made with Ajax, and what advances we made in usability and user experience (yes, the two are different) because of it, I don't want to stop what we're doing.

Besides, there's a semi-universal truth here: no absolute statements are always true.

Except that one.

Ha! But really. That's extreme. And worse - while the designers adding event handlers may be cautiously and constructively conservative, this is plain reactionary. I don't have an answer for it, but like most things, the solution lies somewhere in the middle of a pure Ajax world and a purely plain hypertext world.

Hot on the heels of Muxtape, a new (I think?) service called Mixwit lets you create mixtapes that are a little different.

• The tapes are visually more fun
• They're sharable on a blog
• It's flash-based (so unlike Muxtape, no iPhone compatibility)
• You can have multiple tapes per user

But most fundamentally different, Mixwit's pretty well protected from a C&D order by the fact that they don't even host music. All they do is let you search using Skreemr and Seeqpod, two already cool services, and grab the audio from the results.

It's a little lacking in social features, but much like Muxtape, a lot of the fun comes from randomly discovering new mixes and seeing what people have done with it.

Here's a tape I made of old ska, rocksteady, and reggae from the 60s and early 70s.

Why? Because WordPress 2.5 came out, and I pine for Blogsmith every time I use it.

This was supposed to be the be-all, end-all, Mr. fixit version because it changed so much design-wise in the CMS/backend portion. Well, it did change. Let's look at some of the benefits:

• Improved image handling: I won't lie, this is an improvement, and something that we need to work on as well. The biggest improvement is a Flash multi-upload, but I think Blogsmith proves that you can't end there, we've had it for ages but still have work to do.
  Note to all WordPress users: "Full" size does in fact resize your images, to the width defined in wp-includes/media.php. I use the image caption easy plugin, so I need two "full" sizes - one for with captions, one for without. I have to change that setting in that file every time? I'll work on it and see what can be done.
• Better tagging: looks a lot like ours now. But that's ok, with the exception of the auto-complete (really the big thing and we finally got around to it only a short time ago ourselves), we got the interface style from Flickr.
• "Improved" dashboard: Wastes piles of space.The same information, except I can only see some of it without scrolling.
  
• "Improved" post editing screen: Approximately 480 pixels down from the top of your browser viewport lies the top line of content in your WYSIWYG editor. I thought our 300 was bad, and we have a logo and two rows of navigation showing at all times. On my Macbook, I have a hard time blogging because I can see about three lines of content. I could scroll down, sure, but hitting "enter" in your post will re-scroll the page back to the top. Just a frustrating bit of unneccessary nonsense. All of the options, except the publishing options, are underneath the post, which I suppose doesn't technically bother me but why not use all that empty space on the right? I'm not sure I get the reasoning behind that, 2.0's collapsible side boxes were great.
  

I don't mean to insult what are basically my people, and I certainly am not trying to be on a high horse, but WordPress 2.5's CMS was quite obviously designed by "designers" who seemed to be striving for aesthetics rather than useful software. White space is very pleasant to look at, but a calming effect is secondary in my writing environment to the ability to do my writing.

I hope someone out there does a reworking of the back end a la the "Tiger" version from a while back, but frankly a little CSS work isn't gonna hack it. Maybe we'll do it...