Projects

Those close to me and my I’m With The Band project know the frustrations I’ve had with re-instituting the gig guide when we moved cms platforms from Joomla to Wordpress.

I’ve tried about 5 different calendars, none of which would embed in a page without some form of pain be it in the form of database corruption, javascript conflicts, and a myriad of other dramas. I was all set to give up when I stumbled upon Google Calendar.

My .mac subscription recently expired and I was about to renew it as I find it very useful for syncing iCal across my 4 macs but I wasn’t really keen on coughing up the cash to re-subscribe so I started looking for other services that could just provide a calendar syncing service. Enter Google Calendar!

Basically Google Calendar is your typical online calendar that can be shared amongst other users and what not, with one difference….it gives you the ability to make a calendar public and then provides you with the code to embed that into ANY webpage.

And Bingo was his name-o!

After spending an hour this morning putting all the dates in the calendar for April I grabbed the code and created a new page on I’m With The Band, paste the code into the html editor and voila! It really couldn’t have been any easier.

Also, as part of the calendar setup you can share the administration of it with other people so I’ve setup the guys at Reverb Street Press with access so that they too can help update and maintain the calendar. And because I’ve setup the calendar as a public calendar it also appears in Google’s search for public calendars, so people who are searching for a Newcastle or Central Coast gig guide our calendar becomes available….hrmm, I better make sure I put a link back to the website in it though..

So if you’re looking for a calendar solution in Wordpress then give Google Calendar a go because it works and is dead simple to setup!

Over the weekend, between scanning film, I also managed to get a load of updates done on my Mathew Packer Photography website.

About a month or so ago I scrapped the Wordpress installation in favour of Pixel Post which I found a lot easier to use just as a photography website, I didn’t want to blog with it or anything else like that. So finally after just using one of the default themes for the past month I finally pulled my finger out and customised it to display what I wanted.

As you can see from the above screen capture I wanted to display a single photo on the front page, and I didn’t want to stuff around with fancy graphics and logos, I wanted the photos to speak for themselves. I think I’ve achieved that.

While you can click on the photo on the front page and begin to move backwards through my archive, based on date uploaded, you can also ‘Browse By Genre’ which gives you the following display with a drop down menu.

And last but not least is the Biography page, there’s not a lot of information on there at the moment but I’ll have it completed tonight or tomorrow, and if time allows I’ll even throw up a mug shot of myself on there.

So as you can see, it’s a very simple setup with a really simple interface, but I feel like it represents my photography in a much better light than previously.

If you want to go check it all out you can do so at either www.mathewpackerphotography.com or www.mpimagery.com

Cheers, Matt

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was working on the logo / header for the new I’m With The Band website, well it’s finally completed (till I decide to tweak it again) and the only thing left to do now is to actually sort out the colour scheme.

The other thing I managed to finalise is the ability to subscribe to Reverb Street Press via email. Basically we setup a category on the IWTB website where each month we publish a downloadable PDF of that month’s Reverb and just by clicking on the cover you can download it. To make things even easier we published that particular category as an RSS feed and through the help of Feedburner we’ve now added a form on the front page of the IWTB website where all you need to do is enter your email address and voila, you get an email each month as soon as the new Reverb is published with a prompt to download it. It was tempting to setup an ‘auto-send’ email subscription however seeing as Reverb is around about 15mb it would break most people’s mail servers.

For now here’s what I came up with, along with the help of one of Reverb’s designer’s mates, for the header of the website.

I’m also finishing up a disco version, a dance club version, and more of a rock music version so that we can change them around every couple of months or so.

Time to finish up the rest of the colour scheme, I think I might also make the text larger and also customise each category header as well, oh and the Reverb signup form needs to look a bit different to the standard IWTB one so that people understand what they’re doing. Oh and I’ve also gotta lock in the advertising spaces so we can sell them off each month.

So yeh, almost complete!

And for those music fans out there, this month there’s interviews from Pete Townshend (The Who), Ian Brown (The Stone Roses), Coheed and Cambria, and not to mention Gnarls Barkley. Pretty damn tasty considering we’re a locally owned and produced press, and we’re not even based in Sydney!

Yesterday I jumped right into the design for the new product website for the Pain Gone pen, Targeted Pain Relief. The list of things to get done was quite large, and there’s still a few bits and pieces that need to be completed, but I think I managed to make a big dent in the project.

Here’s what I got through;

• installed and configured wordpress
• installed and setup new theme purchased from Brian Gardner
• chose the colour palette (this was a big debate)
• customised the CSS to fit the new colour palette
• customised the navbar, background, footer, arrow, search, etc. images to fit the new CSS
• setup Google Webmaster account for TPR, submitted sitemap
• setup Google Analytics account for TPR, installed tracking urchin
• bought advertising on Google Adwords
• started loading up the content

And here’s what’s left to do;

• finish loading content, testimonials and product information
• install shopping cart and link to merchant bank account
• sit back and relax

Actually there is probably more than that to do but you get the idea that most of the work was completed yesterday. Big thanks to my mate up in Queensland, Greg, who helped me out with a bunch of problems at 10pm last night!

This morning I ran into a small problem with the Targeted Pain Relief website, it took ages to load! After a bit of checking around it turns out that Servage, my domain hosts, seem to be having load issues. Seeing as this is a business website, and needs to be up all the time and speedy. I’m going to start looking around at other hosting services. So far I’ve had a few suggestions, from the guys at Twitter, but none of them have been really what I’m looking for so I spoke to a mate who knows all about business hosting and he’s suggested Media Temple so I’m going to give them a go. At this stage I wont be moving it all till the weekend as I’m pretty stuck with other projects but I’ll let you know how I get on.

Anyway, I’ve gotta try and catch up with the work needed on the I’m With The Band website that I was supposed to complete yesterday….eeeep

Head on over to the Targeted Pain Relief website and have a look, let me know what you think… Oh and dont be too critical of the content, remember I’ve still got that to complete.

Cheers, Matt

This website here is pretty well an ongoing project, I’m almost constantly tweaking the CSS or PHP so I can change the way something displays or add in a new feature.

One of the reasons this blog is almost in a constant state of change is because it allows me to learn a lot more on a live platform that’s not so critical compared to some of the other websites I run. I’d rather make a mistake here than over on I’m With The Band.

The latest things added to the website here are TwitterTools, Flickr RSS and the eMail Subscription form. Here’s why I added them;

1. TwitterTools - Twitter is a constantly growing community of people who post short messages with varying degrees of information in them, sometimes it’s just a shout out and other times it’s about their latest blog article or even news events as they happen. It’s another addition to the growing citizen journalism world.

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now so I figured it was about time I integrated it with my website so that people can see / read what I’m up to. I often ‘tweet’ when I’m at gigs, playing golf, shooting photos, stuck in traffic, etc.

2. Flickr RSS - Pretty well everyone who shoots photos uses Flickr, it’s easily the largest photographic community in the world and Google seems to have recognised this recently by giving Flickr a whopping Page Rank of 9!

Anyway I’ve been using Flickr for a good 18 months or so and I figured it was about time I integrate it with my website a little better than just linking the odd photo, cue Flickr RSS.

3. And the final thing added today was the Feedburner Subscribe by eMail code in the sidebar. Feedburner has to be the quickest and simplest way to manage your RSS feeds and with giving people the option to subscribe in a reader or subscribe with eMail you’ve got both bases covered.

Currently my active subscriber count is around the 65 - 75 readers per day, hopefully this will continue to increase and specially with the ease of subscribing via email now.

All three pieces of code were relatively easy to install and only required minor additions to the CSS. Maybe a little down the track I’ll fancy them up a little but for now they serve a purpose and installing and tweaking them has given me a bit more experience for my other websites..

Let me know if anyone out there would like some instruction on getting any of these going on your websites.

Cheers

Matt