For those who don’t know (or can’t be bothered to click on the link), Ghostly are an eclectic independent record label based in Ann Arbor. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me raving about the fantastic music they put out on many an occasion. Artists like Kiln and School of Seven Bells are a huge influence on my own music, and most of you will probably be aware of Tycho, the musical alter-ego of designer Scott Hansen / ISO50 (and if you’re not, then shame on you — click that link!).

Anyway, the iPhone app… Ghostly Discovery is essentially a way of unearthing the many gems in Ghostly’s catalogue. You don’t search for songs or browse artists and albums — as per the usual song-finding paradigm — but instead discover music based on your mood and the style of the music you’re after. While setting the mood is pretty innovative (sliding a colour wheel where colours represent moods like ‘frenetic’, ‘laid back’, ‘introspective’, and ‘aggressive’), it’s the styles selector I really love; you have two sliders (think mixing desk faders): one to slide between ‘digital’ and ‘organic’, and another to slide between ‘faster’ and ’slower’. With everything all set, you hit ‘discover’ and a playlist is generated to suit your input. Hooray — new music!

Once you’re into the playlist screen you’re given a few details about the track and some decent-sized album art. Clicking on the ‘menu’ button beneath the artwork then presents some extra options, like being able to buy the track directly from iTunes or read the artist’s bio. You can save tracks to your favourites and the previous / next controls shoot you to completely different artists and albums, so there’s a nice sense of random discovery maintained throughout the entire experience.

Finding new music can be a distracting task during the day so I’ve found myself firing up the app while cleaning my teeth or getting ready in the morning, walking around with some interesting sounds coming out of my pocket before settling down for a day’s work. And by adding tracks to my favourites, it’s a nice reminder to visit the Ghostly Store later in the day and make a purchase (I’m not really a per-track kind of guy — it’s either the whole album or nothing).

Ghostly’s catalogue covers a relatively wide range of genres to appease most eclectic tastes, but even if you’re not a fan of the music, the UI on this app should appeal. It looks good, it keeps things very simple, and hats off to them for ditching the usual way of finding music. If you want to search for something specific, this app will frustrate you, because it’s not about that: it’s about finding something you would never have known to search for.

This video demonstrates things quite nicely:

Of course, I won’t pretend to be blind to the fact that this is an exercise in intelligent marketing: from a commercial point of view, this has huge potential to drive sales for Ghostly, especially from those who might not usually go out of their way to find new music. But hey, I can live with that. Ghostly is a label with a lot of integrity and a lot of great music, and if they can make some money and turn on some new fans, then good for them. Personally I think we live in an age where discovering genuinely interesting new music can be hard when so much crap is shoved into our ears, so it’s nice to see a company trying to counteract that with a fun tool like this.

Has anyone else used the app? What do you think? Do you have any other eclectic app suggestions?

(By the way, although this post is full of praise for Ghostly and their app, I promise I wasn’t paid to write it. I’ve decided to start writing more about apps than I previously have done so far.)

How do you create your navigation when you’re using WordPress? How do you control the order of the items when you have to use functions like wp_list_pages and wp_list_categories?

The answer is simple: hard-code your nav!

You see, when using WordPress, we seem to get caught up in a particular mindset: one that says, “I must make everything updatable through the back-end.” And sure, when you’re creating a theme for public use or a for site that’s going to be changed constantly by a client, that’s a sensible approach to take. But what about your personal site, where you’ll be maintaining everything and writing all of the templating code anyway? What about your clients’ site where you’ll be the webmaster, and where updating the nav structure will be a simple HTML edit every six months?

Hard-code it.

I touched on this subject very briefly in response to an audience question when I spoke at the FOWD Tour in Bristol the other week and I’ll be expanding upon it again when I return to the subject for FOWD New York in November. There are times when it’s simply not practical to jump through all those CMS templating hoops just to achieve something that would take seconds to hard-code. So seriously, go out there and hard-code your nav. Stop worrying and get on with it.

But if you insist

For those of you who do want to create your navigation with WordPress’ built-in functions and therefore keep things as dynamic as possible — but want to control the ordering to some degree — here’s a solution you might be interested in, as suggested to me via email by David Smith:


<?php wp_list_pages('include=7&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
<?php wp_list_categories( $catargs ); ?>
<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=7&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>


Although there’s some debate about whether making two database calls with wp_list_pages is a good idea, it’s certainly a solution, and demonstrates that WordPress can be relatively flexible when using include and exclude arguments.

Not so.

Typekit, like Fontdeck and the other font delivery services emerging online, is a very exciting development and I think my criticisms may have been given a little too much emphasis, so my apologies for that. Importantly, one of my major peeves — the way that Typekit handles the font stack — is actually now changing thanks to the API, so thanks to Jason and Jeffrey for clarifying that in the comments.

However, as well as setting the record straight about my feelings towards Typekit, the real reason I’m returning to the subject so quickly is because today has seen the first indication of its pricing structure, thanks to a screengrab doing the rounds on Twitter. At $49.99 a year for the ‘Portfolio’ plan, I’m pretty happy with the price and will be glad to pay that once my free beta testing period is over.

One question I do have, though, is about the number of sites I’m then able to use it on. Don’t get me wrong: I think $49.99 a year for five sites is extremely good value. But what happens when I want to add a sixth site? Do I have to jump up to the ‘Corporate’ plan and pay $49.99 a month? I’m assuming not, but would anyone from Typekit like to clarify that point?

(I’m guessing the answer is on typekit.com/plans — the URL given on Get Satisfaction — but at the time of writing it no longer appears to be active.)

However, I’ve decided at long last to vent about it on my blog, even if it only changes the way a handful of people use our language.

So, on with lesson #1

Without any shadow of a doubt, the biggest number of mistakes I see online centre around the use of “its” and “it’s” (with most people opting for “it’s” — with the apostrophe — almost all of the time). I’m seeing these glaring mistakes crop up in blog posts by respected designers, online magazine articles, and even in official product press releases. I don’t expect to turn anyone into a pedant, but with so many people writing online today and with everyone having the potential to become an internet journalist, it’s important to get the basics right. So here’s how it works:

• It’s = a contraction of “it is” or “it has.”
• Its = possessive, used when talking about something that belongs to the “it” (the subject); e.g: “WordPress has its quirks,” or, “the oven had its main fan replaced,” or, “Apple has come to its senses and released a matte screen for its MacBook Pro line.”

It’s completely understandable where the confusion arises: we’re taught at school to use an apostrophe if something belongs to something else. However, “its” is one of those strange exceptions to the rule (just like “yours” / “hers” / “theirs”).

Apostrophe users of the world, unite!

If you’ve found this useful (and I hope you have), spread the word. If you see someone stabbing an innocent “its” with a blunt apostrophe, send them a link to this entry (or chop their hands off so that they may never write again — your choice).

Parting thought: using the possessive “its” correctly will save you a precious character in Twitter. :p

In the article, I talk about the web’s upcoming font delivery services like Typekit and Fontdeck and what they mean for the way in which we web designers will be buying and using type. I’ve tried to take a slightly different approach to the other sites writing about these technologies, in that I’m looking at the paradigm shift from the font-as-finite product to the font-as-service rather than focusing too much on the technical specifics.

I’d like to thank Johno for asking me write an article. iLT is one of my all-time favourite sites and a constant source of inspiration. I think he’s contributed massively to the popularity of typography among web designers over the past few years and it’s an honour to be on board.

Comments are open below and over on iLT.

Most importantly, it now has its own dedicated site (resize the browser window for the fun stuff, and view in Safari for the most CSS3 enhancements) rather than living in the occasional blog post. I’ll be investing a lot more time into the project from now on, so expect to see some big news on where Starkers is heading fairly soon. For now, though, hopefully you’ll be satisfied with the new version (it’s been re-written from the ground up, using the Default theme that ships with WordPress 2.8.1 as a starting point) and the more extensive information offered on the new site.

If you’d like to contribute to the Starkers project in any way, please do get in touch. Specifically, I’m looking for people who have some time to add support for threaded comments, increased accessibility (Al Stevens, I’m looking at you!), code indentation improvements, and any suggestions that will help make the theme better without becoming bloated. And of course I’m always happy to hear about any bugs you find.

Comments are open and I’d love to hear your feedback. Personally, I’m really excited about where Starkers is going to go, as I have some more cool developments on the way. Enjoy!

So, if you’d like to see me rambling on and looking rather red-faced indeed (I blame a combination of a crappy iSight camera, an unbearably hot week, and my wild-man beard), head over to Think Vitamin to check it out:

• Part 1
• Part 2

By the way, if there’s anything particular you’d like to ask about the new site (why i did certain things, how I did certain things, etc.) that isn’t covered in the screencasts, please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll answer as much as I can, either in a reply or a separate blog post.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, the new Think Vitamin is now incorporated into the main Carsonified site, which was beautifully redesigned by Mike Kus. Mike, as well as being a lovely chap, is one of my favourite web designers and — in my opinion — one of only a few people brave enough to challenge the current web design norms. Although it brought a little tear to my eye to see the old Carsonified site go (designed by me when I worked at the company), I think it’s definitely a change for the better. Nice one, Mike!

Take, for example, the category archives template, category.php. To have a different template for each category, all you have to do is add the category ID to the end of the filename; i.e: category-XX.php (where ‘XX’ is the ID of your category). That’s exactly how I achieved completely different-looking pages on the new elliotjaystocks.com: the Blog page uses a template called category-21.php, the Portfolio page uses a template called category-29.php, and the Speaking page uses a template called category-37.php.* Simple, but extremely effective.**

So, with this in place, I started tackling the single.php template and assumed that you could do pretty much the same thing. I was wrong! WordPress has no built-in support for multiple single.php templates and so I had to find a way of doing this. I asked the Twitter community and got several responses,*** and my final solution works as follows:

1. Delete everything in single.php
2. Insert the ’switching’ code (see below)
3. Create two new templates with unique names
4. On the server, the magical fairy dust in your modified single.php will automatically load the correct template when the page is requested

The ’switching’ code

<?php
if (in_category('21')) {include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/single-21.php');
}
else { include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/single-29.php');
}
?>

Not much to it, is there? But that’s all you need. You’ll notice that I’ve followed the same naming structure as the category template variations, but you can actually call the files whatever you like. (I’d recommend this naming convention because it correlates to your category templates and it also makes things future-proof if WordPress ever decides to add native support for template-switching.)

And that’s it! Expect to see similar posts over the coming weeks, since there are a fair few WordPress hacks I’ve employed to get this site working the way it does.

* The posts in the ’speaking’ category don’t need a single.php template since they’re never ‘clicked through to’; they appear on the speaking page in their entirety.

** If you want me to elaborate on this technique some more, please let me know in the comments.

*** I’m afraid I can’t remember who exactly came up with the final code I used; it may have been one person or several of you. I’m happy to give credit — my memory’s just crap. Give me a nudge if you think you deserve a mention.

So, hello world (again)

Before you read any further, please note: my focus right now is on getting the site out of the door and making essential tweaks as it gets on its feet, so – for now – I’m not going to waffle on for too long; instead, I’ll be writing several follow-up posts that talk specifically about the redesign, so, expect to see separate posts about the thoughts behind it, the portfolio, the content in general, and the WordPress implementation. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please leave a comment.

You should also know this: I’m well aware that some — perhaps many — people will hate this redesign. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It’s a statistical inevitability and one I’ve not attempted to avoid. If you’re pining for the old site, you can find it archived on v4.elliotjaystocks.com (or at least you will be able to when I fix whatever’s gone wrong with it).

Like I said, I’m not going to go into too much detail today and you can read about my reasons for redesigning in my last post, but I’ll quickly draw your attention to a few of the key things that have changed. OK, everything’s changed, but here are the important bits:

• Content. There’s bloody loads of the stuff. The previous version of the site was essentially just a blog, with two very simple pages (about and portfolio) tacked onto it. Not only was this a problem, but all of the other content I wanted to shout about – speaking gigs, publication, interviews, etc. – was either having to be crammed into the blog or not publicised at all. So this new version of the site makes good on all those accounts: there are dedicated pages about speaking and publication, the portfolio has been expanded massively to flesh out each project, and the blog is now a part of the site rather than the primary focus.
• WordPressed properly. On the old site, the only WordPress-powered part was the blog; everything else was just static files. That’s all changed on this version, and the site is now content-managed up to its eyeballs. Virtually everything you see is controlled by WordPress, and I’ve only left ’static’ content in the template files if it was easier to update them by hand than create a complex WordPress function.
• A shift of focus. I mentioned moving the blog ‘back’ a bit in terms of its prominence on the site, but really this whole redesign was about shifting the focus entirely. My design services are now pretty much at the forefront, with elements of the portfolio spilling onto the home page, and calls-to-action for the contact page spread liberally throughout the site. I also wanted to give a lot of weight to the writing and speaking side of things, as well as create a kind of ‘archive’ of all the magazine articles, interviews, and gigs.
• Aesthetics. How can we talk about a redesign without touching on aesthetics? Well, I’m going to save it for another post, and I’ll also be talking about why I decided to jump on the ‘giant footer’ bandwagon (heavily influenced by Mr. Santa Maria’s in particular).

It’s not finished yet

Although the site’s live, my work’s far from done. There are numerous things that need tweaking and it hasn’t been tested at all in any version of IE. But apart from all that usual post-launch stuff, there are some specific things that I have planned:

• Books. You may notice that my recent reads have disappeared from the sidebar. Don’t worry – not only will they be appearing here sometime soon, but there’ll actually be more of a feature and there will be a dedicated books page.
• Music. I’ve made virtually no mention of my music, and this is intentional, because I don’t want to be sending out too many mixed messages with a new site. I’m working out the best way to incorporate my musical side and will update the site accordingly in a month or two.
• Improved comment display. I haven’t created an author style yet.
• Sidebar. Once I’ve sorted out some issues with a couple of plugins, there should be some more useful stuff back in the (now relatively empty) sidebar.
• Code improvement. Right now, it’s pretty messy and I’ve got a fair bit of cleaning-up to do. Please don’t expect it to validate at the moment.

Have at it

Right, that’s enough rambling for now. I’d love to know what you think, so please leave a comment!

In a couple of weeks from now, I’ll be closing my doors to the world and taking some time away from client work to simply get it done. The aim is to have a brand new site live by around the middle of May.

When I first said I’d be redesigning, a lot of people seemed to be quite upset at such a prospect. This site has proved to be strangely popular over time and still continues to receive a lot of link love on the inspiration galleries. But this is the thing: the redesign isn’t really about the visuals; it’s about the content. Well, ok, that’s only partly true – because the site will look completely different – but the overriding reason for the redesign is my desire to drastically change the way the site works, reads, and conveys information. Because of this, I’ve dropped all ‘visual’ design work and have instead been focusing exclusively on the actual content itself. Only when this is sorted will I start to look at aesthetics. And why not, eh? After all, that’s what we’re always trying to convince our clients to do, isn’t it?

My focus has shifted dramatically since I launched this version of elliotjaystocks.com two years ago. At the time (April 2007) I was a designer working in-house at a record label. I did bits of freelance work on the side but that was about it. Now, I’m still primarily a designer, but I work for myself, plus I spend a large portion of my time speaking and teaching at events around the world, and I write more than just a blog these days: my first book has just been published, and I’m writing for various different publications, both online and off. As such, the current website is no longer able to fulfill all of the functions I need, and the emphasis needs to change.

Also, there are other things; things I’ve been meaning to change for a long time. The site needs to be easier to update, rely much less (in fact not at all) on image replacement for frequently-updated text, allow me to prominently promote things from time to time (like the book, my music, a speaking gig, etc.), and above all, it needs to be tied in much tighter to the CMS. My knowledge of WordPress has improved greatly since building this site, so the whole thing will be WP-powered (instead of just the blog section, as is the case with the current version). Essentially the time for redesign has become essential; it’s happening because I’m frustrated. This is a good thing, I guess, since it means I’m redesiging out of necessity and not just for the sake of it.

If you have any suggestions or feature requests for the new site, now’s the time to let me know. Comments are open! (And I should also say that this will be my last blog post until the redesign is live.)

Watch this space!