It has obviously been a huge privilege to get to work on something for Radiohead, and I’m really happy with the way the site has turned out. From a technical perspective there isn’t really anything too clever going on; it uses sIFR all over the place for text, which wasn’t quite as hard as it normally is to get running.

The code to power the remixes is all custom PHP (luckily not written by me, but adapted from another project) so there isn’t anything I can point you towards on that front – hopefully it will hold up ok with the battering it will probably get today! I couldn’t see many opportunities for Microformats – I guess it could have used some hCards for remix authors and maybe hAtom for the remixes but they seemed slightly superfluous considering we only publish peoples names and no other contact details. It does, however, have an RSS feed so you can keep track of new mixes as they get uploaded.

Obviously you should all go out and have a go at making a mix yourself, but if you can’t be bothered it’s well worth checking out the Holy Fuck mix, embedded here using the natty widget we got made for the site (for that authentic viral feel):

radioheadremix.com

XL is possibly the most important independent record label today, and has an awesome roster including such acts as Radiohead, The White Stripes, Adele, The Raconteurs, M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal, Vampire Weekend and many more. When we sat down and tried to figure out what to do with their website we had a long hard think about what a label with such an extensive and diverse set of artists really needs with a website, and why someone would go there versus visiting an artist website or myspace.

It quickly became apparent that there was almost no way we could keep up with the amount of news and information that sprung up on a daily basis for all these artists without employing people whose sole responsibility it was to keep the site up-to-date, and that didn’t seem like it really made sense. After all, all this info was going onto the internet somewhere, so why do we need to duplicate it?

Hence the concept of a ‘tumblestream’ – halfway between a tumblelog and a lifestream; an aggregator for news from artist sites, myspaces and news sites, photos from Flickr groups and users and videos from YouTube.

Gone are the always out of date news sections you always see on label sites. Gone are things like tour dates, which you can always find somewhere else (more accurately). Gone are artist biographies that are cribbed from press releases that don’t really ‘mean’ anything.

In their place is a single stream of information, updated once every 10 minutes. If you don’t care about all of the artists, you can filter it to only show one (complete with an RSS feed).

I hope you like it – I’m very pleased with the way we’ve been able to go from high concept to reality without loosing anything in the transition.

From a technical perspective, the site is split into two chunks. The front-end is – surprise, surprise! – powered by Textpattern. It’s very good at managing content and pages, so is perfectly suited to a very content heavy site (it’s been running hidden for about 3 months and already has amassed over 2500 posts). However, obviously it doesn’t have any built in way of aggregating content from outside sources so we built a custom back-end for the site in CakePHP.

The CakePHP back-end is basically a RSS reader – based on SimplePie – that keeps track of a list of feeds for each artist; one from their website, one from their myspace, one from their Flickr account or a Flickr group and one from their YouTube account. It also keeps track of a couple of artist specific things – like their website address, and their colour on the site (I’m totally into colour coding at the moment…) – that we couldn’t really hack into Textpattern.

This back-end then checks its feeds every 10 minutes, and if it finds items that haven’t been saved already it injects them into the Textpattern database. We also made a couple of Textpattern plugins to make the artist list at the top of the page (which shows the 15 artist that have the most recent content) and to show the correct artist website link on the right pages. All in all, it was pretty easy to use Textpattern as the front-end page server which was powered by a more complicated content server.

xlrecordings.com

This was actually a fairly simple re-skin – we moved Tapes ‘n Tapes over to Textpattern about 2 years ago so they could update the site more easily, but we decided not to update the look at the same time; the first Tapes site had a lot of history, as it was made by Josh (the singer and guitarist) and was one of the focal points for the band in their early days.

However, further down the road and nearing album number 2 (‘Walk It Off’ – which is very, very good I must add) it seemed appropriate to polish it a little and get it in sync with the new album artwork. Build time: 6 hours, from a blank Photoshop document to pissing about trying to get sIFR to work to having something done. Nice to know that I’ve still got the skills…

tapesntapes.com

This time the design isn’t really mine – I guess I art directed to a point, but all the pixels were pushed by James (who I’d link to but he still doesn’t have a site); and lovely pixels they are too. Instead, it fell to me to do the html and back-end work, so I had a bit of fun.

The key bit that is probably the most fun and also the bit that lead to the slightly late nights working on it is the fluidness. The wonderful design that James turned in on first glance didn’t look like it wanted to be fluid, but – quite frankly – that wasn’t going to stop me. I’m particularly proud of the footer section – have a go play around with the window width; all the elements down there are positioned independently based on percentages, so they all move at slightly different speeds.

The other key thing I wanted to highlight was the use of microformats. Normally I either end up doing the design, or both the design and the code but this time as I was only really doing the html I wanted to make sure it was pretty good html. To this end, we’re using the hAtom microformat for both news items and blog posts, and the hCalendar microformat for gig listings. Both of these were really pretty easy to implement, as they only required a little more code then I would have written anyway.

Other fun things are that you can subscribe to the live dates page as an iCal calendar (very easy to put together if you’re using Textpattern, which we are (of course) for the Foals site); we pull in the contents of the Foals flickr group into the site all over the place, which is a simple way of doing easy fan interaction – we also have comments turned on for almost everything, which achieves the same thing (woo for comments!).

wearefoals.com

Nominated for ‘Best Blog’ in the 2008 NME Awards

Update: For reasons beyond my control, the Foals site has been redone by someone else behind the scenes so none of the code is mine anymore. All of fun features above have been removed sadly, and it’s now fixed width (and looks a bit rubbish). Ah well…

I’m really quite happy with the way this one has turned out – it’s a real privilege being able to work on a band of BSPs stature. I’m much more used to working on people right at the start of things, which comes with its own benefits – seeing Jack Peñate rise from a virtual unknown a year ago to having a top 10 album in October has been a lot of fun (and very rewarding) – but it’s nice to be able to have such involvement with someone that a lot of people hold so dear.

As ever it’s all based on Textpattern, which is still just about serving all the needs nicely (although it could do with an admin interface overhaul). It’s nice that by using Textpattern we can get features like having commenting open on tour dates without having to do any work; my mindset is currently that the full on “social network within your own site” thing is far too much work for the reward you get (which is very little), but encouraging a community and adding simple levels of interaction can be very useful.

I’m also pretty happy the way the look and CSS have come together. It’s a fluid width, grid based site and I think it may be the first time I’ve done 3 equal width fluid columns. I particularly like the way it handles different content spanning different column widths – with the news at the top needing 2 columns, but the photos spanning all of them, for example. At one point all the baselines lined up as well, but that seems to have got slightly broken in the run up to launching it – ah well.

Incidentally, for anyone that has been following the comments on this old post about fluid width sites – which was very kindly linked to by Jeremy which sparked a bit of debate – this is exactly the kind of thing I’m aiming for when I design a site; designs that truly adapt to almost any reasonable window width without too many compromises.

Hopefully I’ve achieved that this time round.

www.britishseapower.co.uk