David Emery OnlineGoing Deaf
13 December 2009
Last week – after several stolen weekends beavering away hunched over my laptop – I launched a site that’s one of the favourite ones I’ve worked on for a while; the new Steve Lamacq site ‘Going Deaf For A Living’:
Unlike in the US, oddly on this side of the pond we seem to be a little lacking in decent music blogs. Sure, there are a few but none that really elevate themselves above the pack and even fewer that focus on writing as opposed to the traditional “cool photo, paragraph of text, MP3 download link” style that seems to be prevalent.
Hopefully GDFAL can counter some of that, even in a small way – more opinions and less ‘just listen to it, yeah?’. Journalism. That kind of thing.
From a technical point of view there’s a couple of things I’d like to highlight. First up is the liberal usage of the lovely League Gothic, which is a great free alternative to Trade Gothic and can be used in all current browsers via the excellent @font-face kits that Font Squirrel provide.
While we’re on type, I also had a go at using the currently WebKit only -webkit-background-clip: text; CSS rules, which let you use a background image within text and can be seen in the header tag line and also the navigation links. I hit 2 problems with it though – firstly, in browsers that don’t support it you see the background image over the whole element, which is almost certainly exactly what you don’t want (and solved by using a bit of Modernizr-style feature detection). Secondly, in the shipping version of Safari at least, it seems to have a bunch of bugs in where in some cases it only renders background in the first line of text (sometimes), which is why it’s not used for post headings. Ho hum.
Other then the now customary use of -webkit-transitions, -webkit-transformss, -webkit-box-shadows and the like, the other thing of interest may be the BBC iPlayer integration. Steve has two shows on the radio – one on Radio 2 once a week and one on weekdays on 6 Music, and using ‘magic’ the latest episode of each is automatically brought onto the website (just click the ‘Listen Again’ links in the sidebar).
Of course, when I say ‘magic’ I really mean ‘BBC APIs and a bit of PHP’ but that’s similar, right? Handily the BBC publish XML feeds of all the programmes that they do (here’s an example), so then it’s a relatively straight forward process to grab that every 5 minutes and feed that into an embeded iPlayer widget. Magic.
Anyway, hope you like it – don’t forget to add the RSS to your feed reader…