David Emery OnlineWorking
18 April 2009
Today, as you may have noticed if you’ve spent time on any music related site recently, is Record Store Day. Now, unlike seemingly most people I’m not quite so gung-ho positive about the concept – I rarely buy music from a bricks-and-mortar shop, and I’ve never even used a record player for crying out loud, so I guess I’m part of the problem that RSD is rallying against. It all seems strangely anachronistic, but then I’ve never seen the appeal of spending an extended amount of time in any shop so maybe I’m a lost cause…
However, one of the nice things to come out of it is all the interesting RSD exclusive releases that have sprung up, including some interesting looking Sonic Youth spit 7“s and a fun cassette put out by Rough Trade Records featuring Micachu, British Sea Power, SFA, Mystery Jets and many more. Also on that cassette is a brand new song by Jarvis Cocker, which we’ve also put online on the first phase of his new website:
We’ve also got a fun little widget you can embed as well:
Now, at the moment the site isn’t doing a huge amount but it does tease a little of what is to come when we launch the full site in a few weeks. A month or so ago we spent a day – in what was a first for us – doing a load of filming with Jarvis for his website – this first clip is just one of many that we’re going to be using. It’s all rather fun, really!
That wasn’t the only site we’ve just launched either – we also just put up the site for The Big Pink:
Now, this is much bigger and more complex site then the Jarvis one. It’s using a boat load of layered, transparent PNGs and a nice and fluid layout (although in almost the opposite to most sites it’s the images that stretch, not the text). It also features a fun little drag-able image strip that dynamically pulls its images from flickr (including one from a fan-contributable flickr group) which I thought might be difficult to implement but wasn’t, really (considering the as-ever mildly ridiculous 2 day build time).
I was actually hoping to do some fun parallax stuff (using this) in the background when you moved the mouse (as the background is made of 4 semi-transparent layers) but the performance was too low – on my MacBook Pro it was only managing a few frames a second which wasn’t really good enough. If anyone has any ideas on how to improve performance on that let me know (I’m wondering if it’s the % sized images slowing it down maybe…).
On a slightly different (but I guess related) note, we’re hiring at the moment. If you’re a web coder, well versed in PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS/JS, have exposure to a decent MVC orientated framework and want to work for a group of records labels based in London representing people like Radiohead, Sonic Youth, TV On The Radio, The White Stripes, Super Furry Animals and many many more, drop me a line.