Doctor Karaoke #1

I've spruced up the Doctor in Spite of Himself homepage a bit - there's no new karaoke yet (coming Monday!), but I decided to switch the singalong lyrics to the ubiquitous YouTube format, figuring that would be less likely to cause compatibility problems than the old Quicktime captions, even though I liked the flexibility and clarity of the latter.

I like to talk about being creative within constraints - well, in building this webpage, the basic constraint is that my web-publishing skills are still stranded in 1999, which is kind of like saying I'm driving to work in a goat-cart. However, I'll always have affection for the good 'ol days of simple HTML, and it's fun to see what can be accomplished just by using tables, moving images, and the like. As you'll see from the busy-ness of the new site, I've got a weakness for the underrated animated gif; I spent more time than I should have building a little scrolling image that races through the nonsense Latin that Sganarelle spouts off in the big diagnosis scene.

It's true that the site (at least as it now stands, before I completely change everything tomorrow) is starting to look like an ant colony, but I'm hoping that suggests something of the frenetic energy of the music and plot - the kind of energy found in this "big tune" from The Doctor in Spite of Himself.