Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.
I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.
This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.
None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!
Been doing a little testing and preset design for the FAW guys for their new synth, Circle.
I have to say it’s been a delight to use. Very intuitive and lovely sounding with some very unique features that make getting oddness out of this synth a breeze.
Came up with this track in a few evenings and it’s 100% Circle. The only other bits are a touch of Reverence (Audio Damage reverb plug in) and the built in Ableton Live compressors and EQs.
Amazing piece of HTML/CSS/jQuery hackery by Cameron Adams that just begs to be played with. It looks like my future will mainly involve creating nostalgic Q-Bert landscapes.
Cubescape
You may have seen it on the interweb news already (Techcrunch, Slashdot, The Register etc) so I’m late to the party, mainly due to the fact I’ve been hard at work restoring our lost servers. I say lost. I mean nicked.
Stolen.
So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.
We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.
Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn’t just a simple backup restore.
The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.
As ever having Peter’s name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.
Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register
Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.
A microsite (but a big one!) for the new release from Real World Records. Features custom flash audio and video players and pulls data from the custom Real World CMS.
bigblueball.realworldrecords.com