It’s in chronological order. Enjoy!

1995 | Faith no more – King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime

May 1995 – My 11th birthday. I got this record along with R.E.M – Monster and a ghetto blaster. I’d heard ‘Digging the Grave’ on Top of the Pops a couple of months before, and I guess since I was 10 years old I was already getting a birthday list ready and this went straight on it. I still love this record!

1996 + | Nirvana – In Utero

My Nirvana phase. Everyone had one didn’t they? I collected so much crap. Singles boxsets, posters, books – and that terrible outcesticide collection. Of all their records, In Utero was and is my favourite. (The only record in this list where the release date was prior to it getting my attention…I was about 8 when it came out.)

1997 | Foo Fighters – The Colour and the Shape

This is one of my all time favourite records. I learnt to play guitar thanks to this album. I was hunting for a while for a video to post for this album. So much good stuff. I think I found the perfect one :].

1999 | Incubus – Make Yourself

Incubus are my favourite band. I love them. ACLOTM is their best record in my opinion. This is the album I got into them on. I saw drive on MTV and was really into it. I got a friend of mine from Canada to send me some more of their stuff (2 songs in about an hour!) and I was so into it. I bought S.C.I.E.N.C.E and Make Yourself that weekend.

2000 | Elliot Smith – Figure 8

I was introduced to Elliot while I was in Canada. I snubbed him at first to be honest cause I was an idiotic wee teenager who only liked Rocks and Rolls. This song isn’t off this record. It’s on ‘From a Basement on the hill’ which was released after he passed on. It’s amazing.

2000 | Deftones – White Pony

I was introduced to Deftones with Bored. I kinda liked it but it wasn’t really my thing at the time. Bit heavy for me :]. Back to School was the song that got me into Deftones and I’m not ashamed to say it. It was all over MTV. I’m cheating again here cause this song isn’t off White Pony, but if you haven’t seen this you’ll love it.

2000 | Glassjaw – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence

This band scared me the first time I listened to them. Never heard anything so mental! It changed my own perception of what music I thought I liked.

2002 | Hundred Reasons – Ideas Above our Station

The first time I heard the term ‘emo’ was in reference to this band. I didn’t get it. To me it was a British band writing an awesome rock record amongst so many other bands doing contrived crap.

2003 | Lamb of God – As the Palaces Burn

Somebody leant me New American Gospel and it was too much for me. By the time this record came around I’d been getting into heavier stuff. I decided to stick this on in HMV. First song is Ruin. My God. Loved it. This record is a lot more melodic than NAG was which is probably why I coped with it a little better.

2007 & 2008 | Thrice – Alchemy Index

Big gap between ‘03 and ‘07. There are tons of records that came out in that time which I love but none of them really changed my outlook on music the way these did. Incedible collection of records. There are moments in these songs which are breath taking. Listen to Water or Air in the dark with a great set of headphones. Fire / Earth very loud in the car.

The image depicts the fall of a heavenly city over earth, but amongst the chaos, God looks after the young girl in the image.

Hosting
I’ve tried countless hosts over the last few years. I’d always known about media temple but I’d been slightly put off by the intital set up cost for my own work. The more sites that H&A were hosting, the more I could see the value in investing in their Grid Service Package. Once I’d experienced their awesome control panel and their super quick call centre service, I decided to use them for my personal projects. It sounds like I’m writing a press release for them but I can’t recommend them enough. They offer a ‘lite’ version of their GS-Package which you can find here.

FTP
I used to use a dedicated FTP client to upload my sites. While this is useful for certain tasks, I’ve taken to using Dreamweaver’s FTP facility. Massively improved my workflow.

Inspiration Gathering
This is something I’ve always struggled with. How best to bookmark the great pieces of work I find every day on the web. Littlesnapper is a piece of software built entirely for this purpose, and it does it’s job incredibly well.

Smooth photo animation in Flash.
If you’re animating images in flash, particularly if you’re adjusting their dimensions, you’ll get a horrible choppy effect when you export your movie.

To get yourself some nice slick and smooth animations, all you have to do iiiis – Open your library, right click the image you are animating, click on properties and tick ‘allow smoothing’. Simples ;]

Using the Pen Tool.
I didn’t bother learning how to use the pen tool for quite a while cause I couldn’t get my head around it. The only advice I can offer when starting to learn how to use it is don’t have big gaps in between your anchor points, and to make anchor points adjustable you need to click, hold and move your mouse. There are plenty of in depth tutorials out there describing how to use the pen tool. All I can say is, if you don’t use it, spend an hour trying to get your head around it. You’ll be glad you did.

Use Starkers as a basis for your wordpress theme
Elliot Jay Stocks has done a lot of hard work for you here. His starkers theme is totally stripped back containing just the bare bones of what you need. A great starting place for any project.

The Firebug plugin for Firefox
If you regularly work with HTML & CSS, and you don’t use firebug, I can’t explain how much easier it’s gonna make your life if you do.

Basically, it allows you to inspect elements on your page, and shows you what css properties (amongst other things) are affecting those elements. You can even adjust them in firebug if you want to and it will affect the page.

Optimising for IE6
I have never read any helpful blog posts about optimising for IE6 because everyone hates it so much. I’m no different, but it’s often a necessary evil. For the record, my opinion on IE6 optimisation is that the users who browse using IE6 often don’t have a choice, and it’s not fair that they are punished for having to use a crappy browser. Having said that, I don’t optimise for IE6 as part of my basic cross browser optimisation anymore – I offer it as an additional service as it is a heritage browser.
Anyway, on to the helpful tip.
You ready?
Any margins you have – half em.
So, if you have <div class=”logo”></div> and in the css you’re applying margin-right:20px to it in your stylesheet. Change it to 10px in your IE6 stylesheet. Apply that rule to all of your elements that have margins on them and you’ll go a long way towards getting your layout sorted in IE6.

Wordpress

Since I joined H&A a year ago, I have started using wordpress a lot. The following two techniques for customising it as a blogging platform are the probably the coolest adjustments I’ve applied to it to date.

Wordpress Categories
The home page and the portfolio page of my blog are both dynamic pages, updated through the posts section of wordpress. I dictate what appears on each page and how by doing the following:

- I have installed the ‘Advanced Category Excluder’ plugin. It allows you to mark certain categories as hidden in specific sections. So on this blog, I have chosen to hide any posts marked as ‘portfolio’ from the home page.
- You upload a php file into your theme folder for the category that you want to display differently. In the case of my blog, my portfolio is category-4. So I upload a file called category-4.php into my theme and it modifies the layout of those posts accordingly. A full explanation of how this works can be found in the wordpress documentation. To find out how to get the ID of your category, read on.

Wordpress – Different templates, for different categories.
This is a technique I’ve used in a few projects now. Put this bit of code into your ’single.php’ file:
<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
if (in_category(’1′)) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/news.php’);
} elseif (in_category(’11′)) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/portfolio.php’);
} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/news.php’);
}
?>

What it does, is says, if the post is in category 1, then use news.php to layout the post. If it’s in category 11, use portfolio.php
Pretty straight forward? One thing wordpress makes really difficult is figuring out the ID’s of your categories. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to Posts
- Click on Categories
- Hover over the category that you want to know the ID for.
- It’ll show you in the status bar at the bottom of your browser.

An example of where this would be useful would be if I had an ‘inner’ page to my portfolio. All I would do is mark a post as a portfolio post in the categories section in wordpress and it would lay it out as per the portfolio.php layout dictated. To really make this work for you, you’ll need to use custom fields which can be called in your templates.

Both Together
Use the two techniques explained above together and you could go really far with it. Your client could have a news page, an events page and a courses page. They could update them all from the posts section in wordpress, dictating which section they ended up in using the category selector. Each of these post types could be laid out differently with different types of content (thanks to the custom fields) and their parent pages can also be laid out individually.

That’s all for now
I’ve decided to I’m going to do a few posts on this subject. The next one should be up within the month. Hopefully this helps someone out there learn a little something, or adapt their workflow for the better. Make sure you follow me on twitter if you wanna stay up to date with the blog. Super. x

First up is the release of Twin Atlantic’s mini album Vivarium and specifically, the way it’s been packaged. It has to be one of the most uniquely packaged records ever produced. Completely impractical (one of those cases you can’t shut), but I don’t think that matters anymore. Hardly anyone carries their CD’s with them anymore, and if they do, it’s in a CD carry case. The packaging is just gonna sit on a shelf as part of a collection.
Most people will get the record home, stick the CD in their computer, rip it, and stick it on the shelf to gain dust.

In an attempt to persuade people to pick up the record, they are also offering bonus content through their website if you purchase the record. This, in conjunction with the unique packaging makes purchasing the record all that more attractive. AND, with my webby head on, they are driving traffic to their website and collecting customer data. In short, I think it’s a really well thought out release campaign for their physical product. Check out a video showcasing the record.

Next up, is Flood of Record’s new record, leave everything behind. They are selling it digitally through their website for $1! That’s about 70p. You get bonus tracks, videos, liner notes, the lot. They are selling physical copies for pretty standard prices. What this (hopefully) does, is stops people bothering to hunt out a torrent of the record, and instead, buy it direct from the band. Granted, 70p per record isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing, and again, they are collecting information from their fans (email address etc) which they can use to communicate future releases and tour dates.

These were the only two releases I’d planned to write about in this blog until I found out about a press campaign that Swound! have embarked upon. Visit www.challengeswound.com, and download their record for free (or, what you want to pay for it, but you know 99% of people will take it for free) in exchnage for the submission of a challenge. Dizzy penalty kicks was one of my favorites of the ones I watched. Interestingly, the record you get to download is their previous release. But it maintains interest in the band and again, they are collecting information about their fans.

I think it’s really interesting the different approaches artists are taking to their releases. Half of me thinks it’s a shame that bands have to go to such lengths and can’t just concentrate on what they’re good at anymore. But the other half of me thinks that it’s great that bands are really starting to adapt to the shift that consumers have made in their approach to getting hold of music, and in turn the way these bands are gonna survive. The music is acting more than ever as a catalyst rather than the end product.

————–

As a final thought / note, Brand New’s new record ‘Daisy’ is out this Monday. I’ve heard mixed reports which I’m not suprised about. I’m fully expecting it to be awesome. I’ve avoided listening to anything from it and I’m gonna be following my own advice and picking it up when it’s out on Monday. Can’t wait!

From then (2003) until I got my first industry position (2006), I developed pretty much all of my sites in flash. Over the last three years, I’ve grown increasingly impatient with flash websites. I find them laggy, irritating to use, and difficult to access the information you visited the site for.

There are exceptions to the rule of course.

Checkland Kindleysides have one of the nicest websites I’ve ever visited, flash or otherwise.

I think the key to this websites success is it’s familiar layout. People don’t like change (just ask Stewie Griffin), and this website’s conventional layout immediately puts the user at ease. The animation is slick, clever, and most importantly, it doesn’t serve to massage the designers ego.

Daniel Mall’s website is a great example of how the subtle use of flash can be really effective. I can’t get enough of how smooth the transition is as you move between different pieces of work. Again, I think the key to his sites success is that the layout is simple and easy to use.

Many sites that are built solely using flash are unpredictable and difficult to use. Which as a visitor, puts me off. The worst offenders are those sites that load a different external swf each time you change page. Each swf is heavier than that guy <<< (is that burger a joke btw?) and when it loads, it doesn’t contain the information you were looking for anyway.

The more sites I develop / use / admire, the more I lean towards well thought out, innovative layouts, which function just as well as they flirt with my eyes. I’ll post a blog at somepoint with some of my favorite websites which fit this criteria.

What do you think? Is there a flash site that you can’t stop clicking because the user experience is so damn good?

In contrast, when Lamb of God’s latest record (Wrath – 2009) came out, they put the whole thing up to stream on myspace a couple of weeks before it came out. I logged on after work a day or 2 after they had done it and gave it a quick listen (while browsing the web), got about 4 tracks through before I went to make my dinner. I came back to it later on and had another wee listen to a few tracks on it.
I was left significantly underwhelmed. I have since grown to love that record, and I put my lack of initial enthusiasm down to the disposable nature in which I first listened to the record. You lose the sense of anticipation and excitement that you have when you go and buy a record on the day it’s released which you have never laid ears on. It’s not a moment that should fall into your lap as you go about your daily business, it’s a moment most enjoyed when you build towards it for days / weeks / months.

This post could go on to talk about the negative impact I feel myspace and the like has had upon music (not as an industry, but as an art) and I could also talk about the decline of the physical product and where I think the future of music as a product lies, but I’m not going to. Instead, I am going to implore you to start putting some value back into the music you listen to in whatever way you feel works for you.

Get excited about the release date of your favourite band’s new record. Don’t listen to anything from it before it comes out no matter how tempting, and when you’ve bought the record, sit down with it, crank it, and give it your full attention. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it so much more than you would do if you downloaded / streamed it.

Lately, I’ve been banging on about building a vinyl collection. It’s something I desperately want to do. The feeling of bringing home a new record, tenderly removing it from it’s sleeve, and spinning it on my natural wood turntable (much like the one over there <<<) is one I dream of realising. Until I have a spare 13k however, I’m going to make more effort to pay attention to when records are coming out, and then pay them the attention they deserve when they do.