Montreal, NYC, San Fran & Stuttgart. Adventures in design with Modularlab

Enjoy!

Setting up a live music event for charity

Here’s an excerpt…

A lot of fundraisers find it natural to jump straight into big sporting events like the London Marathon, Great North Run, Great Swim, or Race for Life. These are major events and they raise massive amounts for charity. But if you’re anything like me, running a cool 26 miles sounds pretty tough going  - and frankly, not so fun.   But if you’re like me, you’d love to rip it up, or dance it up, and live it up to help support your good cause.  Whether you’re a fundraiser looking to raise money for a good cause, or a charity looking to engage non-sporty fundraisers, music can be a great way to expand your fundraising.  Read on.

Music for a charity

It’s easy to dismiss live music events as hard to organise or expensive to start up. In reality, you don’t need to be Live Aid (or Bob Geldof) to start something that attracts the attention of hundreds or thousands of donors  in your local area. Because music events are a really great way of getting like-minded people together. This is something really special, because people can be as passionate about music as they are about a cause. And when you ignite someone’s passion, they tell their friends, and that means a message can spread.

Building an online profile

I just published a very inspiring interview with Mark at Blush – Bespoke and custom letterpress printing in the UK.

Letterpress in the 21st century and career beginnings – Blush

Here’s an excerpt:

CCCCAREER: I get a lot of intense happiness by getting involved in any physical print process. What’s your personal history in printing and what keeps you in the industry today?

MARK: My interest in printing goes way back to a John Bull printing set my parents kept on top of the kitchen cupboard. Small rubber type placed in a small red plastic holder. Press the assembled type on the ink pad then stamp it onto the paper and hey presto! Business cards for the whole family.

I became interested in other printing techniques at art college, lino and woodcut prints, mono prints and etching. My first letterpress experience was at a jobbing letterpress printers. I remember it all so clearly, walking in through the door to the front desk the first to hit was the smell of ink and machinery. Looking beyond into the press room, Heidelberg and Thompson Auto Platens were the letterpress work horses, guillotine and paper racks at the back wall and Multilith 1250WL and Rotoprint to the right. The composing room was upstairs, filled with cabinets of wood and metal type some of which we still use now. I remember the Linotype near the window in a small room, one of the most impressive contraptions ever invented.

Now I spend my time surrounded by letterpress. Working with antique machinery to create tactile prints on beautiful papers that never fail to impress. I’m a lucky chap!

I love  WordPress’ simple, functional, well thought-out and elegantly styled interface. I love it’s simple structure of pages and posts. I love its infinite extensibility and massive plug-in repository. I love it’s recently added features like featured images just as much as I love it’s old ones like being able to organise a collection of Links. I love that it’s nearly ideal for SEO right off the shelf, and I love that it’s got powerful built in commenting features and user registration. I love the dedicated team of geniuses (is that the right plural?) that constantly deliver above-expectation improvements in every iteration. And I love the dedicated community of geniuses that put together impressive free and premium themes in every layout configuration that you could possibly consider. I also really love the other dedicated community of geniuses that build powerful extensions like MU and BuddyPress.

I love using WordPress as a core or a component of more complicated projects like simple e-commerce sites, digital download sites, and online magazines. I love that it’s too advanced to be a straight up blogging tool, but neatly understated and lightweight enough to be dismissed as a full blown CMS.

But more than anything I love that I took the time to learn how to use it way back, and that the big investment in understanding how to get the most out of it is, for the most part, over and done with. Ultimately I’m glad that I didn’t go down another route like deploying Joomla or Drupal for clients regularly, both of which are respectively good solutions for different styles of project but at the same time frankly cumbersome, poorly designed and shameful in comparison to WP’s finesse.

I’m about to embark upon a project involving a deployment of Umbraco as a CMS on an asp.net platform. It’s not ideal from a personal point of view but I’m not involved in the development or site integration and using it seems pretty standard so I’m sure it wont be hard to learn. It seems that running a big Microsoft enterprise stack might well be a really solid solution, but it sure does limit your access to open source software. Write off PHP/MySQL integration sitting alongside a transactional site for security, and that limits you to very few low-cost solutions. Still, I’m looking forward to learning some more about Umbraco.

You know what? I’m pretty glad that I don’t have a stack of sites built using legacy platforms that require a lot of project history knowledge before jumping in to update them. Or having a stack of custom code built on a legacy platform that is just too massive to be brought up to date.

No, instead I have a pretty little WP auto-updater that makes sure my clients are well serviced at the core level, making their projects easy to work on when they need additional work completed or a template design freshened up.

I still sometimes work on sites built with static CSS/XHTML pages and some includes / dynamic content brought in with some simple PHP+MySQL, and it feels like I’m back in 1998. It’s like I should be making lozenge style buttons for navigation using Paintshop Pro while I’m at it.

Working with WP now feels like the default – it IS a website for me. When someone asks for a fairly standard site I immediately build it’s deployment into the project cost unless the client has a specific requirement that rules it out, and I discount that deployment pretty heavily because I’m now very accustomed to working with it.

Are you feeling the WordPress love? If so I’d like to hear about some of the projects that you’ve been working on using it, especially anything out of the ordinary. I also want to hear what you’d like Automattic to include in their next major release. I’d like better off the shelf mobile content delivery from WP, but I’m also interested in hearing what you think the future of the platform will be over the coming years.

Not feeling the vibe? Let’s hear why! Rip it to shreds if you like. Let’s get some facts on the table.

Plugin love

For those of you who work with the tool day to day, and for those just starting out, I thought I’d share a list of 6 plug-ins that I use regularly to extend a default WordPress install to bring a whole set of common features into action:

• StatPress – Almost always my first install, this is a simple visitor stats monitor. I use Google Analytics for the real work, but StatPress provides real-time reporting so it’s useful to watch the direct effect of your social media campaigns, etc, as you run them.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Visitor stat work horse. But now without having to add code to your header/footer, etc. Just pop your API key in and link it to your account.
• Contact Form 7 – Create multiple, easily customised + css styled forms to allow users to collect user submitted data. Incorperates Captcha and Akismet integration too for a solid layer of spam protection.
• Widget Logic – Use WordPress’ inbuilt Conditional Tags to set rules to determine when sidebar widgets are displayed. I’d like WordPress to include this off the shelf really, but until then this is a good solution.
• WP-Polls – A super-simple polling widget that lets you setup custom questions with multiple answers and run several polls simultaneously. Even pick which poll is displayed randomly.
• PHP-Code Widget – Similar to use as the Text widget, this plugin allows PHP code to execute from within sidebar widgets giving you some powerful functionality.

I should probably send Matt Mullenweg a box of chocolates or something because I have a lot to thank this guy for. I’d go so far as to say he’s really changed the face of the net thanks to WordPress’ impressive success. As a tool for users to deploy simple sites and blogs in a hasstle-free way, and that’s not even mentioning the hosted service, it really excels, and is kind of a good stepping stone marking the maturity of the web away from old school crap like Geocities and, (dare I even mention it) Angelfire. WP is obviously less prolific when compared to social networking Facebook and Twitter but it is definitely up there in importance with those guys. It totally shames stuff like Blogger. When you get high profile guys from Google like Matt Cutts actually deploying WordPress for his blog rather than using a proprietary Google service then that’s really saying something.

All the best of luck with your next WordPress project! Enjoy!

Drop a comment if you’d like to recommend a plugin and include a link to your blog, I’d love to check some new ones out.

I won’t write a long post about her career because there are plenty of better places to read all about that. Instead all I really wanted to say is that this incredible woman has been such a significant and influential character in my life. Vast chunks of my music collection I own purely through hearing tracks played on either the Breezeblock or Experimental Show over the years.

MAH I feel is one of the few Radio 1 DJs that really stepped up to the mark where John Peel left off. Few DJs dared to push boundaries as much as her and even fewer gave their heart and soul to fostering brand new genres in the UK. Leftfield electronica, dubstep, breakcore – to say that hundreds of artists owe MAH for considerable exposure over the years would be a gross understatement.

She is also one of the most personable DJs out there, always responding quickly and politely to every email, being super friendly at live shows, and taking the time to personally listen to every track submission – that’s really something.

Thank you Mary Anne. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of you yet though. Can’t wait to catch you play live again!

Nature documentaries are great – I’m a huge fan especially of the Blue Planet series which has to contain some of the the finest pieces of motion picture in existence But more than anything I enjoy documentaries that expose important political or social events. ‘The Second World War in Colour’ is a must-see collection of footage that will make you reevaluate any preconceived images of wartime Europe. I must also have watched most of Louis Theroux’s shows, with particular highlights including his ‘Weird Weekends’ series, aired on BBC 2, especially ‘Thai Brides’ (Series 3, 2000) and ‘Born Again Christians’ (Series 1, 1998).

Three feature length documentaries really stick in my mind though, and they’re all great exposés of right wing groups or the effect of dirty politics in recent world history. If you get a few spare hours at some point, I really recommend checking them out – but just be warned that none of them are really meant for the feint of heart or easily shocked!

Waco – The Rules of Engagement

This is a 1997 documentary looking at the ‘Waco Seige’ – David Koresh’s Branch Davidian fatal conflict with ATF and FBI agents in 1993 in the small town of Waco, Texas. The production is particularly effective thanks to the FBI providing a hand held camera to members of the group during the seige, meaning that some really powerful footage was recorded including testimony from David Koresh himself – giving the viewer a really unique opportunity to assess the man’s character at first hand. This also includes a lot of film from the court proceedings after the event analysing the responsibility and catastrophic failure of the ATF and FBI in the event. I won’t reveal too much about the events of the incident because it really is an onslaught of shock after shock from start to finish.

His Big White Self

A documentary made in 2006 (follow up to ‘The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife’) presented by Nick Broomfield (absolute legend) focusing on the South African far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, led by recently murdered Eugene Terre’Blanche. It contains some truly fantastic interviews with Eugene himself and JP Meyer (former party member and ex-driver for Eugene), uncovering how much (and how little) for some life in South Africa has changed since the fall of Apartheid in 1994. The documentary also contains some very shocking footage of the Kempton Park World Trade Centre being stormed by far-right groups, and rioting in Ventersdorp in which AWB members open fire on police and civilians culminating in a much publicised execution of several injured AWB members by an army solider.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Filmed in 2003 by a group of Irish filmmakers who initially intended to document the state of post-revolution Venezuela and interview the new President Hugo Chavez, but instead became caught in the middle of, and captured first hand, the events of a savage coup d’état led by army generals sympathising with right-wing and middle class opposition parties and at least partly instigated by the CIA and White House under President Bush. I don’t think you could ask for more revealing footage of every key moment in the entire affair, interspersed with the distorted reality presented by private TV stations at the time.

Enjoy!

Ridekicks describes itself as “a place to share rides – with a twist.”

Social games like Foursquare and Gowalla have been pretty big on the uptake recently enjoying substantial growth and fueling the drive toward a more engaging and integrated social web. For me, their appeal is in how they manage to involve real life interaction with social media applications in a really quite addictive way, though I think they’re quite heavily limited to those of us lucky enough to use a top end mobile device like an iPhone – the charm is somewhat lost whilst sitting at a desk.

Ridekicks connects drivers with potential passengers for the very eco-friendly and economically advantageous purposes of journey sharing. It’s added twist is that you build up points by taking journeys or by giving rides which you build up as a competative game. High scorers are awarded titles including ‘king of the road’, and the site promises other eventual benefits.

For those thinking of attending festivals this year, it could be a really good opportunity to save some money on otherwise expensive train, bus or taxi fares. Or at a more everyday level, consider minimising your outgoings by car sharing the journey to work through Ridekicks. Britain is hideously bad at managing an effective public transport system, so making the most out of the existing road traffic seems like a really progressive move that we can all make as individuals.

I like the idea a lot, and I really like the name. Good luck Lee!

It inspired me to open up the Adobe Illustrator isometric template that I published back at the end of December and get something new drawn. This was the work of about twenty minutes using the guides and some good snapping adjustments. I’m pretty happy at how quickly it’s possible to get stuff made using the template. It’s a significant win if you’re used to trying to draw anything isometric manually.