Weeknotes - w/c 27th May 2019

/ About 3 min reading time

I never blog these days, but I do find a lot on the web, so I’m going to try this out as a new format - part blog, part link list. Once a week max.

It’ll be unfocussed, comprised of anything that’s interesting me or on my mind at the moment: the web, guitars, bikes, life, etc. It is what it is.

Here we go.

Bishopthorpe Open Mic Night

This year, on the last Thursday of the month every month, I’ve been going down to Bishopthorpe Sports and Social Club and playing at their open mic night. I play guitar and sing - at the moment it’s covers of songs that I’m into at the moment. I keep trying to write some originals but I’m not making the time for it.

This month I played:

I also played a duet with my good friend and long time musical cohort, Dave. We played ‘Dink’s Song’ - an old folk song featured in the film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) - IMDb. That was fun. We weren’t as tight as I’d have liked but that’s something we’ll work on.

It wasn’t my first time at this gig so I’m a familiar face (they’d shuffled me and Dave into the last two slots as they knew we’re a safe (two) pair of hands. I was preceded, however, by newcomers to the Bish scene, Haxby Swango - SoundCloud. Talk about a hard act to follow. Jack (piano/guitar) and James (vocals/guitar) are two parts of the three piece electronic act who came down to try out some acoustic versions of their songs. I’m not sure Bishopthorpe Sports and Social Club was ready for their sound but I thought they were amazing, and James had the kind of stage presence that I definitely aspire to.

As they came off stage and I walked on to do my set, any swagger that I’d previously had drained out of me and nerves took hold, leading me to do the whole set hunched awkwardly over a microphone set too low.

Regardless, it was a good night and both mine and Dave’s performances went down well.

The Download Attribute:

This is something I didn’t previously know existed but I can think of many times in my career when I’d wished something like it existed. Turns out it does (but not in IE11 - natch).

From the https://frontendfoc.us/ newsletter:

Making use of the download attribute

The download attribute, when used on an anchor tag, will tell a browser to directly download the linked resource, rather than navigate to it. Here's how to put it into practice:

<a href="data_2019.csv" download="2019 Data (CSV)">Download data</a>
As highlighted above, the download attribute can also be used to change what name is displayed upon downloading — a handy way to display something more readable over possible 'ugly' filenames.

This is just a simple way to handle download links when server-side configuration isn't available for certain file extensions, say. It's worth noting however that you can only use this for same-origin URLs for security reasons.

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