Progressive Metal – And, oh yeah, Silverlight
Do you have fits of interest?
I go through bursts of reading fiction and I’ll find myself reading everything I can get by suddenly favorite authors (lately it has been Ian McEwan, and Cormac McCarthy)
From time to time I discover a genre of music that has been there a long time but I just wasn’t hip to it. In the 1990s it was jazz and then blues. That lasted a good long while and took me a long time to work my way through and figure out what I liked (as my friend who has been supporting himself as an artist for 50 years says “I don’t know what I like, but that’s art!”).
Starting about a year ago I discovered whatever the generic is for Alternative Rock and Metal, and lately that has focused more on Progressive Metal. I started out with Red Hot Chili Peppers, all of Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, took a big excursion into Smashing Pumpkins, all of Rage Against the Machine, and then spent a lot of time re-discovering Zep. Oh my.
But that is not what I’m writing about.
If I’m going to write about something that appears to have nothing to do with Silverlight when I should be busy recording a video, I’m going to write about how my metalMania (which also includes a hopeless devotion to Black Sabbath) has suddenly morphed into a powerful interest in Progressive Metal.
Prog Metal
This is not your mama’s rock and roll. So far, and I’ve only just begun, the most interesting music I’ve heard has come from Pain of Salvation and Symphony X
but what is best about this is I’ve only scratched the surface; there is so much more to find out.
Oh yes, Silverlight
The norm in a blog like this is to lay out a project and then show you the code. Instead, I’m going to lay out a project, and then…. well I’ll write the code, but not yet.
I’m describing it now, though, because I’m listening to Remedy Lane by Pain of Salvation and the idea and the music are too good together not to write down, and writing it down will commit me to doing it and hey! it’s Sunday and this is more productive than laying on the couch reading the Book Review section of the Times (especially given that my Kindle has three pages of books already).
So here’s the idea:
Start with the button I’ve written already,
but square it up to the right proportions to show an “album” cover.
- Get the cover image from a web service (Amazon?) and line up the albums you like or recommend.
- Mouse over behavior includes
- swells the album to see a significantly larger, more detailed image,
- brings up additional information about the album (artist? price? format?)
- adds a prominent musical note to the image (in the corner?)
- Click on the note to fetch and listen to a short sample
- Click on the button to go to the album’s page
Now you have a Templated Silverlight user control that is much more dynamic (its contents come from a web service based on a list of identifiers held in an XML file) that can be used to generate revenue on your blog, and that is wicked cool.
There, I brought this posting in for a safe landing after all. Now all I have to do is go record my videos and then build the control I just described and incorporate it into…. well probably into all sorts of things.
Hope you are having a good Sunday.