David Emery OnlineNew site #1
7 June 2008
One of the things that has been keeping me busy over the last few weeks is the new Adele site, which we’ve just launched:
This is the second phase of the Adele site, which up until now consisted solely of large video. We’ve kept that, and extended it with all sorts of extra content – news, tour dates, discography info, photos, links and more. Although it looks relatively straight forward, it’s actually got all sorts of interesting bits dotted about.
For a start, it’s got microformats all over the place. The gigs use vcalendars, the main news feed is in hAtom (as is the blog) and the music page marks up the releases using hAudio (which I used here for the first time – not sure I really see the point of it as yet but it took no time to implement so why not!). In the same spirit it’s also got a .ics feed of tour dates so you can easily add them into iCal or another .ics compatible calendar app.
It’s also got all sorts of vaguely ‘social’ aspects – for want of a better term. Comments are enabled all over the place, the photos section pulls in photos from a Flickr group and in place of a traditional forum we’ve set up a Ning page instead. I’m interested to see how this does as we’ve had mixed success with mini-social networks – they seem to be a bit superfluous as they’re never going to replace Facebook et al, but do seem to contain more potential value then a normal bulletin board.
It is – of course! – all based on Textpattern, with a modification of the code we use on the XL site pulling in the blog from the MySpace site. It’s also all nicely fluid width as well, and there’s a nice surprise if you’re running Safari 3.1 and you select a different video on any page other then the home page…