David Emery Online

Making Things Pink

As promised in my last post about the Damaged Goods site I'm going to do a quick run through of how the site turns images pink (or any other colour, if you're not so keen on pink).

First things first, this requires you to be running a server that has PHP with GD image installed on it. GD image is an image processing library that you can use from PHP, and that's what we're going to use for all the 'magic'. I'm going to assume that you're not a PHP whizz either, as if you are you can probably work this out for yourself! I'd also like to point out at this juncture that I'm not a PHP whizz either - I'm pretty much making it up as I go along, so if you spot anything that looks a bit dodgy let me know.

To start with, make a new text file called 'image.php' in the same folder you keep images in on your server. Instead of including images directly with the image tag in our html, we're going to route them through this PHP file - so your image tag will look a bit like this:

Firefox developers accelerate CSS implementation

Looks promising – the more browsers that implement CSS3 selectors and CSS Animations/Transforms the better.

A New Day

A lovely redesign by Jason Santa Maria – makes me want to do yet another redesign (of course!). I’m very interested in this whole concept of per-article styling – bringing art direction into web design is very important I think; I’m itching to find a site that I can have a go at really mixing things up on and making all the content ‘unique’ from a design perspective.

Down with page templates!

Introducing MagCloud and the Future of Magazine Publishing

I really like the idea of being able to self-publish a magazine – it’s a much more interesting concept to me then book self-publishing. Hopefully MagCloud will expand to the UK sooner rather then later as it looks like a very easy way of doing it.

New BuddyPress Theme

I’m not generally a WordPress fan (it gets far too much hype), but this is looking very, very interesting – I’ve long been searching for a decent mini-social network platform and this could well be it.

SAUSAGES

This is very silly in a wonderful way:

New Site #2

As well as the new Adele site I also launched the new site for Damaged Goods Records at the tail end of last week:

damagedgoods.co.uk

Damaged Goods Records are a proper little genuine independent record label, and have released records by people like Holly Golightly, Billy Childish, Pete Molinari and even the Manic Street Preachers (they put out their first single). Needless to say it’s been great fun working on their site, although it was a little bit of an exercise in biting off more then I can chew, and digging myself many, many holes of which I had to haul myself out of.

For a start, I decided that to properly try and achieve that ‘punk fanzine’ feel I was going for I would need to do a full page design comp, print it out, staple it together, photograph it and use that as the basis for the final design. From a ‘making it easy to edit, move things and generally make a website’ perspective this was maybe a bad idea…

To rub salt in this self-created wound I had also decided that diagonal lines would be a bit of a focus and – as is probably obvious by the amount...

OK Computer, Scanner, Dot Matrix Printer…

I assume that everyone reading this has probably seen the ‘Radiohead’s Nude played by old computer bits’ video already (although I’ve embedded it below just in case), but the ever-interesting Creative Review blog have just posted a nice little interview with its creator, James Houston.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Wi-Fi on the iPhone. Frequently asked questions.

“O2 has partnered with The Cloud to provide you with unlimited access to over 7500 public Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK on your iPhone. Excessive usage policy applies.
From 11 July, you will also get access to 2000 Wi-Fi hotspots from BT Openzone.“

Very nice – I’ve only managed to use ‘The Cloud’ once in the last 6 months of iPhone ownership, so having free BT Openzone access is a nice bonus.

iPhone is now free on selected Pay Monthly tariffs

…and a free/£99 upgrade to existing O2 iPhone customers, which is a pretty great deal all round. Didn’t really expect to get a free new 3G iPhone out of this keynote…