A video clip from the archives…

This clip (from way back in 2012) may be short but I think it captures something of what a Quextal set is about…

Categories: Misc //

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Beatport Dark Theme
alternative colour scheme for new Beatport

You may have seen that Beatport has had a facelift recently. The old creakily slow Flash interface that you needed to peer at with binoculars to read the text has finally been swept into the bin, to be replaced by a swanky new HTML5-based site. “New Beatport” has a nice clean design, and seems more responsive, and a lot more intuitive.

So congrats to Beatport, and indeed, yay… but I have a problem with it. It’s all gone a bit… well… white…

Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years programming on greenscreen monitors, but I’ve never found black text on a white background very pleasant to look at on a screen, and I dispute the rationale behind it which is leading to it becoming a de facto standard on the web. Black-on-white is certainly good for printed text on paper, but on a backlit computer screen, it means you’re staring at bright unfiltered fluorescent tubes (or LED equivalents) all day. I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone, but it’s a more serious problem for me personally: my eyes are unusually sensitive to light and I really can’t be spending hours tune shopping on Beatport with the glare of a thousand suns boring into my retinas.

So I fixed it. One of the great things about increasing web standards compliance, is that it grants us, as individuals users, a great deal of flexibility to adjust aspects of a site to better fit our individual requirements and preferences, which can range from a small style tweak to full-scale dynamic page rewriting by the likes of Greasemonkey. But in this case, all I want to do is change the colour of various elements on the page, so a User Stylesheet is just the ticket.

Here’s my User Stylesheet to modify Beatport’s colour scheme. I wrote it mainly for my benefit, but I suspect there will be others of you who prefer the old Beatport colours of light text on a dark background, so I’ve made it available to everyone in the public domain. You may use and copy it without restriction.

This is exactly the same Beatport page as the picture above, but with my stylesheet applied:

If you want it to look like that for you, here’s what you have to do:
(more…)

Categories: Misc // Tags: argh my eyes, Beatport, blinded, color, colour, CSS, dark, Firefox, Safari, stylesheet, sunglasses, theme

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alternative colour scheme for new Beatport

My work here is done…

If you’ll permit me a slightly smushy aside. Here’s an email that arrived this morning and made my day/week/year, quoted verbatim:

Heya Quextal, not sure were to start on this, so ill go from the begining!

raving about in the perth doof scene, mixing here and there, i was slowly going off good ol psy-trance, and my CDJ’s were slowly gaining dust as they sat on my desk, un-used… untill at around the beggining of 2010, i stumbled upon one of your earlier mixes on psymusic.uk and had a listen.

well, i was blown away, and quickly downloaded and smashed out mix after mix from your site, (particularly love your NSB shows), and better yet, got onto the tracklists and has a look around on beatport.

and in September, i played my very first psy-breaks set at Earthdance WA and another at a new-years party out in the country. playing the likes of luqas, kiwa, far to loud and loads of other goodies from lables i discovered from your little website! the crowd loves it, and many people referred to the sets as “the best of the party”, and 3 more gigs are lined up in the next couple months!

i use my decks daily again, and my breaks tunes now totally fill up the CD wallet, and its all thanks to you! im writing this basicly to tell you, that your tunes are tops, and you’ve inspired a small, but growing wave of psy-breaks love in Western Australia, the most isolated city in the world! keep it up!

As you’ll know from my biography, I had a similar moment of epiphany in 2007, when I was inspired to get back into DJing after a long absence by encountering the sound of psybreaks, courtesy of a DJ called Giani. I’m so chuffed to be able to pay that forward, and I’m sure the author of this email will pay it forward again.

This is what it’s all about. Be inspired, inspire others, feel the passion, spread the love.

Thankyou to everyone who has given me feedback over the past 3 years. You kept me going, helped me to know that I was on the right path. I dedicate it all to you.

Right, that’s enough smush for now. I’ve finally got broadband back after my house move, so radio shows will resume shortly. I’m not going to wait until my normal slots (and in any case I’m changing the Psymusic slot) so watch out for announcements. As usual, the Facebook Page is the most reliable way to keep in the loop.

Categories: Misc // Tags: fans, feedback, inspiration

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