If this link hasn’t made it to your computer yet you need to check it out. There are 7 tracks for download from a mysterious “Dylan Hears a Who” album. Is it really Dylan’s lost record? No, but it might as well be. This is probably the best parody site you will ever see. Whoever they got to do the vocals has his Bob Dylan impersonation down to a science. The seven mash-up tracks take some obscure dylan songs (I can’t pin it down) over which the Dylan imposter sings Dr. Seuss lyrics. The production is seamless and I bet you could fool 99% of the people who hear this that they are actually listening to the actual Dylan. Whoever did this went all out with two tracks that last well over ten minutes! The amazing thing is that this music actually works! Dr. Suess has never sounded more profound. It almost makes you wish that this were real, and maybe, just maybe Dylan could have actually pulled this off.

If the music itself isn’t convincing enough there is cover art, an insert, and a cd label to go with it. The attention to detail on the design is as amazing as the music. This is as authentic as you could get without it being real. Simply amazing.

I launched this site once I knew everything was working. It seems like that is how I have been designing websites lately. Get it working first, then clean it up later. Is that lazy? Anyway, I installed the first of many upgrades today. Most of them probably won’t get announced because they will be minor tweaks, but I wanted to talk a little bit about this one.

I added the hiding/revealing navigation on the top and bottom of the page. To make this work I slightly modified a javascript that was written by Shaun Inman. Thank you Shaun for being so willing to let people learn from your skills! Shaun is the father of sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. sIFR is an amazing tool for anyone interested in expanding the typography on your website beyond the generic. If your browser has a Flash Player installed, sIFR will replace the text you specify with a different font. Since swf files have the ability to have fonts embedded in them, sIFR allows you to create headlines using any font that you own. It really is a smart way to bring rich typography to the web. So why am I not using sIFR if it is so great? Believe me, I want to. Unfortunately, sIFR still has a couple shortcomings that are keeping me from fully endorsing it.

1. sIFR doesn’t support transparent backgrounds.
Actually it can support transparent backgrounds on some browsers, but it isn’t recommended. I would be replacing the text on the wood textures, so it is a shame that the transparent background doesn’t work better. My workaround was to use the wood texture in the Flash file. I would have been satisfied with that solution if it weren’t for the other problem…

2. It doesn’t support letter spacing
I like to give Trajan a wide letter spacing in my headlines, and this just isn’t possible using sIFR. I tried setting it in Flash, since Flash 8 allows letter spacing to be set for dynamic text. Unfortunately, that variable gets lost by the time it is generated in the swf on the fly. Even if that would have worked, I wasn’t happy with requiring Flash Player 8 just to read my headlines.

So overall, sIFR was a series of compromises that I just wasn’t willing to make for this site. I am looking forward to using it in less demanding scenarios and I am hoping the bugs get worked out in the next release.