Busy in a good way

17 May 2009

I keep catching myself recently. After the perennial “How’s things?” question I keep answering “Really busy!” and, quite frankly, it’s a lousy answer to the question. By it’s rather troublesome expediency to come out – like it’s been under starters orders in my mouth waiting for the question to be asked – it makes it sound like a bad thing.

On the contrary; busy is good.

Wo betide anyone who doesn’t have stuff to do, and lots of it. I’ve certainly had a lot of stuff to do recently but it’s all been good stuff. A brief roundup of things is in order I think.

I’ll start – going in a roughly chronological order – with the new site for God Help The Girl which we launched a couple of weeks ago now. I’m fairly sure I’ve mentioned the GHTG project before – in short, it’s Stuart from Belle & Sebastian’s new project, and it’s really rather lovely. The new site features a cornucopia of interesting content – diary’s, Q&A’s with Stuart, videos and all that jazz.

It also features a bit of a novel subscription feature, where you can pay £35 and get everything that’s released for the rest of the year (including the album, several 7“s and an EP) and a load of extras. I’ve been going on about this sort of thing for quite a while now (that’s from March 2006, by the way) so it’s good to see it actually happen.

From a web-dev point of view, the site has a few tricks up its sleeve; for a start it uses CSS 3 column-count liberally to easily wrap text into two columns, which works in all major browsers other then IE which gets one column instead (which works nicely anyway). column-count is a great tool in your arsenal you can use right now, although watch that you don’t use it on long bits of text as if you have to scroll to read both columns of text it’s a right pain.

In a similar fashion it also uses -webkit-transitions coupled with some -webkit-translations as well for little touches of animation. I couldn’t justify spending the time on implementing them in javascript, but one line of CSS that works for 20% of visitors to the site (which is the Safari % share for godhelpthegirl.com) seems worthwhile.

Similarly, the new Jarvis Cocker website has an abundance of -webkit-transitions but they’re hardly the most interesting thing about it. No – and fairly obviously – pride of place has to go the header at the top of the page, which features assorted different scenes of Jarvis larking about that we filmed especially for the site a few months back. A couple of the sections have special ones specially suited to them as well, which are worth looking out for.

Also, to join in with the ongoing web typography discussion it uses a bit of a hybrid method for advanced typography. It utilises Rockwell for headings, which is included with recent versions of Microsoft Office so quite a few people have it. However, plenty don’t so it checks if it’s available (using fontAvailable) and if not you get it via sIFR instead. It seems to work very well, and was very easy to implement – just put all the sIFR code in a if(!$.fontAvailable('font_name')) block and bob’s your uncle.

One other little thing – for the music player in the sidebar we use the nifty new 360 UI for the wonderful Soundmanager JS audio library which rocks quite frankly.

That’s pretty much it on the web front, other then to quickly link to the new Future of the Left site where you can pre-order the fuckingawesome new album and get MP3s immediately. Interestingly, Ian from Topspin tweeted about why we hadn’t got an MP3 only option. The short answer is that because in all of our previous goes at this model (including Super Furry Animals) surprisingly the % that went for the MP3 only option was tiny, so it just isn’t worth the effort for something on a smaller scale like this. I imagine that this might be different in the US, where digital percentages are a lot higher on album sales, but over here – for now – that’s certainly the way things are. People like physical product, especially when it’s only a few pounds more to get a CD as well as your MP3s.

Talking of Future of the Left, I saw them just a couple of days ago at the Great Escape. They – despite some technical gremlins – were great as ever, although I think the Great Escape this year left me a little cold (literally in the case of one rain and wind-swept queue I stood in) – there were some great bands playing (including British Sea Power and Micachu of which there are photos below) but they were few and far between, and in a multi-venue festival with the queueing that comes with it you really need a good run of bands to make it all work, and there weren’t that many ‘runs’ this year. Ah well…

Pulled Apart By Horses at the Great Escape