Websiting

This morning I vacuumed my room, then tried to do some more work on my custom XMP File Info panel. Michael Steidl gave me a nice explanation of how the "LocationCreated" and "LocationShown" properties are meant to work in XMP, so I thought I would fix my code to get them working correctly.

First I found I didn't have the Programmers Guide of the XMP Toolkit 4.4.2, so I found this, which comes as part of the XMP Toolkit SDK rather than the XMP FileInfo SDK. The XMP Toolkit SDK seems to be for implementing XMP reading and writing in applications you're writing yourself.

I looked at the XMP FileInfo SDK API documentation, and found what looked like the equivalent function, but it was using xmpAccess.setProperty() with a third parameter. I tested it, and sure enough it didn't work, so I posted a question on Adobe's forums about it. I'm not convinced I'll get an answer there though as there seemed to be quite a few unanswered threads.

Since I'm stuck on adding metadata to my images I decided to do a bit of work on the design of the site. In my photoshop mock-up, I had used Cordia New as the font-face for my menu items. So I checked what systems this font was available with. It seems that Cordia New is included with Windows XP and Windows Vista, but not with Mac OSX, and my copy of Linux distro Ubuntu didn't have Cordia New installed either.

I decided to see if I could use Cufón to style the text with the Cordia New font, but before doing this I needed to check the license for Cordia New. Doing some googling on it, it seemed that you needed to purchase a license if you want to use it on a website. Note the page for Cordia New on the Microsoft Typography website says

License Cordia New font for enterprises, web developers, for hardware & software redistribution or server installations

So with Cordia New out of the picture due to licensing restrictions, I had to try and find another font with a similar style. Now according to Cufón, Adobe fonts are okay to embed. So I found a list of Adobe fonts and tried going through my fonts in Illustrator to see what the different fonts look like. Unfortunately most of the fonts I have don't seem to be Adobe ones, and it took a long time to go through them. After getting as far as Charlemagne, with none of the 8 Adobe fonts I had found up to that point looking anything like Cordia New (although I liked the look of Bickham Script Pro).

So I decided to just try using Cordia New for the font, since most people are on windows and so should have the font installed, and see what sans-serif looked like for users without Cordia New.

As you can see below (mouseover the image to see Cordia New), there isn't much difference between Cordia New and the default font my PC chose when the font was set to sans-serif.

Sans-Serif 9pt

Cordia New Bold 14pt

As Cordia New needs a different size and weight to sans-serif to appear nearly the same, I decided to just use sans-serif (at least for the moment), rather than detecting if Cordia New is installed with javascript and then changing the font if it is.

The rest of the day I was working on my photo website.

In the evening I also went on Animal Crossing for a bit.

The weather was cloudy all day today and rained most of the day.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; clementine; packet of smokey bacon crisps; Fox's triple; cup o' tea; about ⅓ of an easter egg.
Dinner: Ham & mushroom thin & crispy pizza; peas; chips; salt. Pudding was a scone that lil' lad made at school today. Coffee.
Supper: Nice; Dark chocolate digestive; cup o' tea.