A great friggin show. The performance was mind-blowing and the crowd was awesome with a strong Texas contingent. I loved it. Before I get back to work on my dance moves, here is an attempt at a setlist. I think it’s complete but probably a little off on the order:
Piano Man
All You Rock & Rollers
Stranger Lovers
Vibrate
Sad Sad City
Edge of Town
No Place For Me
Midnight Voyage
Move With Your Lover
Shoot ‘Em Down
Dancin’ On My Grave
Heavy Heart
Robotique Majestique
The Band Marches On
Silver City
Rich Man
HFM
Also, an impressive set of photos of the show by “Madeas” is live on Flickr. I recognize these from the photographer who was standing right in front of us. I can’t say enough how much I appreciate people hauling their gear into these shows and putting their stuff up on Flickr for everyone to enjoy. It’s rock photography at its finest.
There will be a test on all of this after you finish the video:
I am always fascinated by mating rituals in the animal kingdom. The leopard slugs do not disappoint: (Kottke)
Also looking at for the first time this week…
I was just listening to The Strokes - You Only Live Once
We launched it tonight to a relative few number of quirks and bugs. This had been in progress well before I joined the team but I was fortunate enough to contribute to the last few weeks of development. The website has grown rich with web-specific content and a new homepage was needed to prevent from burying that content beneath the homepage. The comments coming back have complaints that the homepage is busy, which yes, is busier than the previous iteration.
The real test will be if it becomes less-busy to the familiar eye or stays consistent. I can attest that the design team is listening to feedback and paying close attention to metrics. If unforeseen problems arise, they will be dealt with. Only so much best-practice can be practiced before you start experimenting to solve design problems and it’s important to find out if those choices are successful, or not.
One of those experiments involved the navigation which was re-designed and re-engineered from the ground, up. The menu items are magnified based on NYMag’s bread-and-butter content visitors coming to the site are looking for. At the same time, the navigation offers access to more content than ever before. The content-rich drop-down menus add no weight to the page as they are loaded behind the scenes (AJAX) after a menu item has been mouse-over’ed. This also ensures better SEO as search engines will be able to index more of the page content without getting caught up in redundant links in the navigation. More subtle refinements, like the slight delay on the drop-down menus, prevent accidental drop-down behavior which can be frustrating to clear if your mouse cursor travels across the masthead for any reason.
Most of my efforts were focused on the masthead/navigation performance across the two platforms and web browsers. Aside from the normal issues, it’s no secret that DHTML doesn’t play well with Internet Explorer 6 or some types of Flash rich-media banner ads. We’ve come up with a solution to deal with both and we’re hoping to get documentation published somewhere appropriate as soon as possible.
There are still some performance issues related to the homepage and masthead navigation that are being worked on and resolved. But I am very pleased with this starting point. It has been a great introduction to the now predictable excellence on the behalf of the entire NYMag.com team.
I was just listening to Gorillaz - Kids With Guns (Hot Chip Remix)