David Emery Online

I don't really do web design so much any more - I firmly have a marketing hat on these days (and it's a pretty snazzy hat, let me tell you...).

Below is an archive of previous sites I've worked on.

XL is possibly the most important independent record label today, and has an awesome roster including such acts as Radiohead, The White Stripes, Adele, The Raconteurs, M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal, Vampire Weekend and many more. When we sat down and tried to figure out what to do with their website we had a long hard think about what a label with such an extensive and diverse set of artists really needs with a website, and why someone would go there versus visiting an artist website or myspace.

It quickly became apparent that there was almost no way we could keep up with the amount of news and information that sprung up on a daily basis for all these artists without employing people whose sole responsibility it was to keep the site up-to-date, and that didn’t seem like it really made sense. After all, all this info was going onto the internet somewhere, so why do we need to duplicate it?

Hence the concept of a ‘tumblestream’ – halfway between a tumblelog and a lifestream; an aggregator for news from artist sites, myspaces and news sites, photos from Flickr groups and users and videos from YouTube.

Gone are the always out of date news sections you always see on label sites. Gone are things like tour dates, which you can always find somewhere else (more accurately). Gone are artist biographies that are cribbed from press releases that don’t really ‘mean’ anything.

In their place is a single stream of information, updated once every 10 minutes. If you don’t care about all of the artists, you can filter it to only show one (complete with an RSS feed).

I hope you like it – I’m very pleased with the way we’ve been able to go from high concept to reality without loosing anything in the transition.

From a technical perspective, the site is split into two chunks. The front-end is – surprise, surprise! – powered by Textpattern. It’s very good at managing content and pages, so is perfectly suited to a very content heavy site (it’s been running hidden for about 3 months and already has amassed over 2500 posts). However, obviously it doesn’t have any built in way of aggregating content from outside sources so we built a custom back-end for the site in CakePHP.

The CakePHP back-end is basically a RSS reader – based on SimplePie – that keeps track of a list of feeds for each artist; one from their website, one from their myspace, one from their Flickr account or a Flickr group and one from their YouTube account. It also keeps track of a couple of artist specific things – like their website address, and their colour on the site (I’m totally into colour coding at the moment…) – that we couldn’t really hack into Textpattern.

This back-end then checks its feeds every 10 minutes, and if it finds items that haven’t been saved already it injects them into the Textpattern database. We also made a couple of Textpattern plugins to make the artist list at the top of the page (which shows the 15 artist that have the most recent content) and to show the correct artist website link on the right pages. All in all, it was pretty easy to use Textpattern as the front-end page server which was powered by a more complicated content server.