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Last year, I was proud to be part of the inaugural Indie Music Cancer Drive. Along with a whole lot of very talented artists, I contributed music to a compilation album, “Songs for the Cure”. All the proceeds from the sales of this album went to the American Cancer Society.

This year, I am once again contributing. I just finished work on the track I will be contributing, so I thought it high time I let everyone know about this. Josh Whelchel, the organiser of the drive (and a fantastic musician to boot), has set a target of $10,000 for this year. If you donate $25 or more, you receive a physical copy of the (two disc!) album; otherwise, you receive the album digitally.

Here’s the official media release:

Indie Music Cancer Drive to Release Songs for the Cure ’10 Album

Twenty-eight artists join together to raise money for the American Cancer Society and aim to raise $10,000.

Cincinnati, OH, January 24th, 2010. – The Indie Music Cancer Society will release it’s 2010 compilation, Songs for the Cure ’10 on March 1st, 2010 and forward 100% of all donations and profits to the American Cancer Society through its Relay for Life event held on April 23rd, 2010 at the University of Cincinnati. The album will feature music from over twenty-eight (28) diverse artists, including Select Start, big giant circles, Alec Holowka, Two Seconds Away, Jay Tholen, Josh Whelchel, Renee Winter, and others. The organization is currently accepting donations, and all donors of $25 or more before MARCH 1, 2010 will receive a free physical copy of the album. Supporters with $10 or more will receive a free digital copy. Genres represented include Pop, Rock, Alternative, Chiptunes, Instrumental, Opera, Classical, Avant-Garde, Jazz, Fusion, and many others. The organization raised over $6,000 for the event last year and is still forwarding profits from last year’s album, available on iTunes, Amazon, and others. A full list of artists can be found at the Songs for the Cure ’10 website at http://www.cancerdrive.org. The fundraiser aims to raise $10,000 by April 23rd, 2010, preceding a digital release of the album to iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, and other retailers. Donations are accepted through http://www.cancerdrive.org.

For more information please contact:

JOSH WHELCHEL
(513) 549-2336
http://www.cancerdrive.org

So there you have it. And for good measure, here’s the promotional video:

I was never really happy with my previous 2010 theme, so I’ve gone and done a completely new one.

This new one makes extensive use of CSS3 properties, such as gradients and shadows. It looks best in Firefox >= 3.6,followed by Safari >= 4, then Chrome >= 4, Opera >= 10, and IE >= 8. Theoretically, Firefox and Safari/Chrome support the same level of features, but the webkit gradient syntax is absolutely awful. It’s confusing, needlessly complex, and poorly thought-out, in my opinion. Contrast the following two lines:
[sourcecode language=css]background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #111, #333);
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#222), to(#333));[/sourcecode]
See what I mean?

Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Safari), and Trident (IE) rendering.

When writing a web-app that accepts formatted input from users, you’ll often find that they will copy and paste text from Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, Word fills the markup with lots of unnecessary and unwanted muck. To clean this all up, I wrote the following function (directly implemented on the String prototype below):

[sourcecode language=javascript]String.implement({
sanitiseWord: function() {
var s = this.replace(/\r/g, ‘\n’).replace(/\n/g, ‘ ‘);
var rs = [];
rs.push(//g); // Comments
rs.push(/