Sound Recording (Phonogram) Copyright Symbol

A friend was looking for the circle-P character to include on the jacket design for a musical recording. I was surprised to discover a glyph/character that I wasn’t aware of. We weren’t even sure what this symbol meant in relation to the copyright symbol. Turns out this symbol, the Phonogram Copyright Symbol or Sound Recording Copyright Symbol, protects the copyright of the sound recording itself as something separate from the written music and lyrics. Good things to know!

Regardless, this character can now be found in my ever-growing HTML Character Code tool. Enjoy!

Needless to say, my character chart now includes decimal and hexadecimal/Unicode references for the characters in the Polish alphabet.

HTML CHARACTER CODES

If you haven’t already created your own custom Google Map, here are some resources that might be helpful. After figuring it out, it’s not too difficult and once in place it’s easy for others to update the locations.

How It Works

There are two components:

1. the code on your site that defines how and where the Google Map is displayed
2. a Google Doc spreadsheet containing a list of locations

In order for these two components to correctly produce a map similar to the one shown above you will need the following:

1. Google Account to create the necessary Google Doc spreadsheet
2. Google Maps API Key

Signing up for a Google Account is simple and you can get a Google Maps API Key at code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html. There is also an excellent resource for general info about everything Google Map API at code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/. However, there’s a lot of information there you don’t really need.

How It’s Done

1. Build a spreadsheet with the desired marker locations. It can have columns similar to this, but you can name them however: rank, title, address, city, state, zip, description
2. Geocode every location. Geocoding a location means providing a latitude and longitude, an exact global location, for each marker on the map. You can do this manually by finding the lat/long for a handful of locations with Google Earth. You can also use a free or paid service to automatically geocode your locations based on their street address. Here’s one of those free resources: www.batchgeocode.com. Just paste a tab-delimited version of your location list in, process, and then copy/paste their tab-delimited output back into your file.
3. Copy your geocoded location list into a Google Docs spreadsheet and save.
4. Share the location spreadsheet from Google Docs by having it open and clicking the ‘Share’ button and then ‘Publish’ the document. After the doc has been published Google will give you a URL where anybody can see this content. Toward the end of the URL it will say ‘key=’. Everything that follows that is your spreadsheet’s unique key. Save that key for later.
5. Request a Google Maps API Key for the URL under which your map will appear on your site. Save that key for later.
6. Go to the Create a Map from a Published Google Spreadsheet page. This page explains a lot on its own. It does a good job of bridging all of this technology and makes it apparent how simple it is to make this work. Everything I have helped you set up should fall into place as you follow the instructions on the Create a Map page.
7. Paste the output of the Create a Map page into your webpage. Be sure to replace the example Google Maps API Key with your own. Without it your map will appear but your locations will not.

Once you have it up and running you can tweak the default location and zoom of the map and add some other cool features.

Tweaking: Set Default Location and Zoom

By default the Create a Map page sets the default location so that it contains your defined markers. Sometimes you want to specifically define the default location. In the generated code look for the following cluster:

cm_map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("cm_map"));
cm_map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
cm_map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
cm_map.setCenter(new GLatLng( 43.907787,-79.359741), 2);

Update the cm_map.setCenter(); bit to look like this:

/* Set default map position and zoom here. */
cm_map.setCenter(new GLatLng(41.500000,-99.600000), 7);

This makes it easier to find for future changes. To adjust geocode center of your map, adjust the numbers. The three numbers listed there are:

1. Latitude
2. Longitude
3. Zoom

The zoom value seems to correspond to the ‘notches’ on the visual zoom tool that sits at the top-left corner of most Google Map implementations.

Tweaking: Enable Mouse Wheel Zoom Control

One of my favorite features of Google Maps is that you can zoom in and out of the map with your mouse scroll wheel. This isn’t enabled by default from the Create a Map page. It’s easy to add though. In the same cluster of code shown above add the following statement:

cm_map.enableScrollWheelZoom();

Summary

So that’s it in a nutshell. I hope this helps more people take advantage of the wealth of free tools that Google has made available by way of using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It’s very cool stuff!

My only gripe is his comment on GIMP’s image slicing capabilities. He sort of makes it sound like state-of-the-art web designers are still routinely slicing their raster image layouts into pieces to be reassembled in HTML <tables>.

The only time I use that technique now is for the backwards medium of HTML emails. Never mind the importance of meaningful, semantic markup, but with the prominent support of CSS in modern browsers (and even Internet Explorer 6), slicing images like this, though it is a nice feature, isn’t all that important. It wouldn’t hurt to have Photoshop’s functionality, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

BONUS

On the last page of the review I was delighted to see a link to my how-to “X11: Switch Control Key To Apple/Command Key” as a clever hack to switch the X11 modifier key from Control to Command for Mac OSX users. I’m pretty stoked!

I frequently defend the quality of services that you provide. You have a lot of enemies out there, but my experience has been positive. Your management tools are very simple and intuitive, especially when compared to GoDaddy (I don’t know WHAT is going on with their admin tools, but they’re getting better.).

Even your mail service is top notch. When using email clients, I rarely have problems receiving or sending emails. Good stuff.

However, I have recently been forced to use your Webmail service when away from home and it is a horrible experience. Why?

1. Webmail login page does not have a simple URL that is easy to remember
2. Interface is sluggish
3. The plain text writing tool: cursor falls behind/gets out of sync with typing
4. Webmail service is frequently unavailable

Otherwise, with the address book, other features and the overall design, your webmail could be a great product. These four issues (and I’m sure there could be more) diminish any other positives. If you could address the service availability at the very least it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Jason Simanek

Reading Design

and at the bottom of that article his short bio states that he is the creator of Textpattern, a website CMS that I’ve been learning to develop with recently.

I love discovering that two people I find interesting are actually one person.

So far, I feel like this isn’t a bad night’s work in adapting an existing style from a ground-up site to a WordPress template. I hope the site remains to be usable during this transition period.

I got involved with the developer group after struggling to make my genealogy site look great. The markup techniques were outdated or wrong and nothing had an ‘id’ or ‘class’. After recommending the change to the devs, they let me know that it wasn’t a top priority and recommended that if I wanted to improve the output, I would have to do it myself. This would involve working with Python and also looking stupid asking dumb questions about version control and compiling GRAMPS myself to check my work. With a little time and patience (as well as being unemployed for three months in Nashville with just my wife for company) I put myself to the task.

I have been updating the ‘Narrative Web’ plugin, written in Python, that exports your genealogical data into a web site. Mostly I just corrected and updated the XHTML markup that was present amidst the Python. I did hack up the code a little so that the navigation could be styled to indicate the active page or section.

My primary focus was to make the sites more accessible to CSS. In the process I created a few style themes to be distributed with the application. I am quite proud of them and excited to hear feedback from the user community once GRAMPS 3.0 is released. Following is a few screen shots of the site output as it was and the four primary styles that I developed so far.

GRAMPS 2.2 Narrative Web Plugin Output

‘Modern’

‘Tranquil’

GRAMPS 3.0 Narrative Web Plugin Output

‘Basic – Ash’

Basic comes in a variety of color schemes and is based on the original ‘Modern’ style. I hate using the word ‘modern’ outside of discussions of philosophy or fine art. The general public in the U.S. is convinced that it means ‘contemporary’. No doubt this is thanks to decades of marketing professionals trying to make their products sound impressive.

‘Nebraska’

I named this after my home state. It was my original stylesheet for the new markup. For that reason a lot of id and class solutions in the markup came out of challenges created by this design. I wanted this design to look fresh and inviting while being very easy to read.

‘Mainz’

Named so for Gutenberg’s birthplace, this design was created to show off the potential of the new markup. It’s a bit repetitious of me, but for some reason the vision of the website as a sheet of paper is very appealing. I started this one based on the name of one of the original GRAMPS styles: Certificate. The original style didn’t really look like a certificate, but this one does.

Default Print Style

This is probably the style that will be the most overlooked. With XHTML + CSS there is the potential for the browser to automatically switch stylesheets based on the media of representation. You can define one stylesheet as ‘screen’ and another as ‘print’ (there’s actually quite few different defined mediums according to the W3C, including ‘mobile’ and ‘projection’). GRAMPS is the first project where I could form a strong argument for using this feature to its full potential. Now anytime someone prints a page from a Narrative Web site, the output will be well designed for print with an emphasis on efficiency and legibility.

There’s still more work to do, but I wanted to get the word out on this great update to GRAMPS that’s just around the corner. Along with my relatively minor contributions, the other developers have been working very hard to make 3.0 an impressive and powerful update. If you are interested in trying it out, do keep in mind that in the open source world ‘.0′ means ‘submit final work to users and fix a lot of reported bugs’. So, if you are looking for a perfect application, I recommend waiting for GRAMPS 3.1.

HTML CHARACTER CODES

Let me know if there is a friendlier open source solution out there. This seems to work well enough.