I use Spotify a lot, I mean a lot. Between it and Last.fm I’m fairly sure I need never buy another album again. Sure, I miss the old days of listening to a freshly-purchased album whilst flicking through the artwork and sleeve notes, reading every last word (even the ‘thanks to…’ bit!) and absorbing the lyrics, but increasingly I don’t have time to do this – I listen to music on the fly, whilst I work or travelling, and I loathe the process of converting all my CDs to mp3 and transferring them to my phone.

Take two albums into the shower? not me, I just listen, and go!

So I’ve crafted a colossal Last.fm library and I’ve plumbed the depths of the Spotify catalogue to find ever tasty morsel of alternative-post-rock-lo-fi-minimal-dub-tech-ambient-space-jazz I can find. I was well chuffed when I found out that Spotify could scrobble to Last.fm, it meant I could keep track of things I’d listened to, and the two work hand-in-hand to offer me more music than I thought possible (for free, anyway).

One of the main down sides was having to flick between the two if I found something I liked on Spotify, and wanted to ‘love’ on Last.fm. And here’s where Mr. George Brockelhurst steps in! he’s created a SIMBL plugin called Lastify which solves this dilemma exactly. You just install SIMBL, download the Lastify code, copy the relevant plugin into your Lastify plugins directory, authorise it to access your Last.fm account and you’re laughing. Or singing. Or listening, whatever.

http://blog.georgebrock.com/projects/lastify-more-lastfm-and-spotify-hacking

“River Path is an organisational pathfinder. We challenge perceptions, build evidence for change, and map the future.”

The refreshed design for a long-standing client, River Path, is now live. The site uses a custom-built Wordpress theme and a minimal amount of plugins to ensure a speedy delivery of content. It’s a simple layout with a large, fixed photographic background, and a transparent header that allows the background to show through.

The contact page includes a Google map to show the client’s location and I also added some vcard downloads that can be added directly into address book programs like the Mac Address Book and Microsoft Outlook. There’s also a Yahoo Pipes feed pulled onto the homepage from one of River Path’s other sites over at Global Dashboard.

www.riverpath.com

“Global Dashboard explores global risks and international affairs, bringing together authors who work on foreign policy in think tanks, government, academia and the media. It was set up in 2007 and is edited from the UK by Alex Evans and David Steven.”

The refreshed design for the Global Dashbaord website has now gone live. It’s a bespoke Wordpress theme, following the previous three-column ‘Mimbo’ layout. The site already had a number of unique custom functions operating in the background, so I had to make sure the new theme was up to the job, and thoroughly tested on an external environment, then previewed using the Theme Preview plugin.

The homepage pulls in YouTube clips that the authors have listed as favourites, using the Viper’s Video QuickTags plugin. There are also a number of external feeds that are pulled in and displayed on the homepage using the fantastic Yahoo Pipes system, which I’ve used for other projects since then. I love learning on the job like this, it feels like you really benefit from what you do, and if you’re up for a challenge, a good day can yeild great results.

www.globaldashboard.org

If you’re a regular last.fm listener and you have a penchant for stats then take a look at the beautiful Last.fm spiral by Sha Hwang.

Output of my last 52 weeks listening on Last.fm

Entering your Last.fm username causes it to look back through your last years’ listening and produces something like the image shown here. Not only that, but you can interact with the spiral – the coloured peaks represent different artists, and moving your mouse over each one shows the artist name, how long you’ve listened to them and how many plays they’ve had. Nice.

I’ve just completed an interesting project for Vodafone, creating a series of data graphs and infographics for their latest audit report.

In an effort to cut down on unnecessary printed materials, Vodafone decided to create this years’ audit report in a digital format so that their employees could read it on the move at their leisure. The brief was a new one on me as the priority was on getting the facts and figures across clearly and quickly. Most of my work is about how the final product looks, but aesthetics took a back seat while I researched a suitable method of creating really nice-looking graphs to present the data.

I ended up going with SmartDraw, a very versatile programme that can create a huge number of graphs, visualisations, data flows and network diagrams. The only downside was that it only runs on Windows so my MacBook Pro was shelved while I worked on the project!

I can’t show any detailed screenshots here as the data is sensitive, but the image above gives an idea of one of the infographics – a combination of graphs and text-based statistics. There’s another audit due January 2010 so I hope there’s a Mac version available by then!

A new client website has gone live for James Moore who runs the Travel Health Consultancy. The business is “Exeter’s foremost Travel Health specialist, providing tailor-made advice, vaccinations and support to anyone travelling abroad. Travel and adventure is only one part of your journey. Coming home to tell the story is just as important.”

The project was a straightforward requirement for a website with cms functionality, including the ability to upload images to a selection of galleries, editable price lists and downloadable information documents in pdf format. Wordpress was the obvious solution, providing James with the ability to edit the site content and upload photos of his travels using the versatile NextGen Gallery plugin.

The custom wordpress theme doens’t use anything too fancy, but integrates a separate template to include the green panel at the top, and a randomly rotating image in the header.

www.travelhealthconsultancy.co.uk

I have fairly specific auditory requirements to accompany my design time. I’ve never been able to work with lyrical music, so I constrain myself to acoustic music. To further narrow it down I swing between the alt-instrumental post-rock noodlings of artists such as Tristeza, Tortoise, Japancakes, The Letter E, Saxon Shore and Lanterna, and the more ambient end of the spectrum offered by Labradford, Pan*American, Aix Em Klemm, Hammock, Harold Budd, and Robin Guthrie.

I’m just discovering a new sub-genre of both these which I can only describe as post-dance folk-electro, represented by the likes of the excellent Lymbyc Systym.

Click here to check out my extensive library on Last.fm, or here for my Pandora profile.

Do you design? What do you listen to?

I came across this conundrum a couple of weeks ago when I suggested to a client that it might be more productive to show them how to update their website, rather than keep asking me to do it for free.

I would have liked to have based their site on Wordpress in the first instance but budgetary constraints prevented them from affording hosting with a MySQL database (maybe one day such databases won’t be necessary to run blogs or content mangaged sites!). So when I’d completed one site update too many I suggested that I could train a staff member to update the website themselves. “What a good idea” they replied and so I set about putting together a suite of freeware/open source website editing, development and ftp tools. Here are my thoughts.

website editing

There are a few website editing tools out there, but I settled on Kompozer due to its simplicity and ability to upload the edited html file direct to the server.
I was tempted by SeaMonkey, but it offers a little too many other functions for what my client needed.

ftp access

In order to upload images and new media onto the site, I opted for FileZilla which I’d been using myself for a while. I normally work on a Macbook pro and use the excellent Transmit ftp software, but when I need access on a PC I always opt for FileZilla. It’s dual window view is familiar and intuitive, and although the GUI isn’t the prettiest, I does what I need quickly and without fuss.

image editing

The client also had the need for editing photos for use on the site, and after some searching I showed them how to make the most of the wonderful web-based Picnik, a web app that puts a little smile on my face every time I use it. It’s super easy to upload photos and add effects to them, including a cool little polaroid camera effect.

So there you have it – free website editing and updating for the masses. Is this the beginning of the end for more expensive applications?

…it’d be a pretty strange place to live! If we start by imagining that websites are buildings, then to start with only a percentage of people would create buildings properly. Some places you visit would look fluid and beautiful no matter what angle you saw them from, like a stunning piece of architecture. Other buildings would be less flexible, and could even look different depending on what kind of glasses (browser) you were looking through.

There’d be waves of engineers and builders constructing buildings for the first time with only the rudimentary basics, having speed-read a couple of tutorials. Some of these buildings would look ok, but they’d be structurally unsound, their disability access would be non-existent and nothing would be signposted correctly.

There’d be countless buildings made from the same generic templates, all looking the same but with slightly different paint work. Building templates aren’t bad as a concept, but overused they can stifle creativity, and no one wants to live in a house that looks like a million others if they can help it.

If you didn’t get your Divs, Floats and Clears sorted then whole rooms would disappear and appear behind other doors. Pictures hung on walls would shift around and vanish behind the furniture.

In short it’d all be a bit strange. I suppose people don’t stick to web standards because they’re not enforced, whereas building regulations rightly are. If you don’t build a wall properly it’ll fall down and kill you, but if your floats aren’t clean then you’ll only loose your navigation menu. Sure, nobody gets killed but you might lose some valuable custom.

What would your house/shop/office look like?

I *think* that my new Wordpress theme is ready to be unleashed kicking and thrashing into the world. It’s called Bluebubbl and it’s a clean, two-column layout with a little jiggery-pokery in the footer to display recent comments and the like. I thought I’d make it available after using a similar design for my work on the Cranleigh Community Church website.

I think it may well constitute a work in progress, but nevertheless I’ll soon be submitting it to the Wordpress theme viewer site and OSSkins, two top class Wordpress theme repositories.

Download Blububbl, my first free Wordpress theme here and let me know your thoughts. You never know, there may be a Redbubbl one day…