New website: 9th Echo
9th Echo is a website I designed and built for artist BB Nielsen to showcase her art and poetry.
It features 2 image galleries powered by SimpleViewer, which feeds from her Flickr photos, which makes it easy for her to update. The poetry section of the site is a custom theme for the popular blogging system Tumblr, which ties it in seamlessly to the rest of the site. Again, that makes the section easy to update.
The idea behind the design of the site was to keep the site very simple, yet stylish and clean allowing the artwork to stand out against an unfussy, plain dark background.
My Flickr tutorial on Nettuts
I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate your photos from Flickr into your website, which was published on the popular tutorial site Nettuts.
The technique explained is one I often use in sites I build, see the Royksopp photos page for an example. In fact the entire Urban Dirty gallery runs off the same technique, being powered by one single set on my Flickr account.
My tutorial takes the reader through the basics of getting to grips with the Flickr API, a service offered by Flickr that lets you use their system on your own site, for your own projects.
Flickr also recently launched the App Garden on their site which is a showcase of applications built using the API.
Firefox Add-on for weheartit.com
I have built a Firefox Add-on (sometimes known as an ‘extension’) for the popular website We Heart It.
We Heart It is a popular visual bookmarking site, a place where people can save images they find on the web for inspiration or simply to keep your favourite images.
Members add images to their account by using a ‘bookmarklet’ which is a button they drag to their bookmarks bar on their browser, which when clicked highlights all images on a webpage that you can submit.
Whilst this works, the conceopt of bookmarketlets is often tricky for users to grasp, and highlighting most images on a page can prove quite disruptive to your browsing.
I thought that this would be the perfect scenario for a Firefox add-on, that would let you right click an image and submit it to We Heart It. So I entered the mysterious world of building Firefox add-ons. A task which lacks any real documentation and, for me anyway, relies a lot on trial and error.
There are 3 conditions to submitting an image to We Heart It, the image has to be over a certain size, it has to be on a webpage and cannot already be on weheartit.com. After a lot of fiddling about, I managed to create an add-on which complies with these rules and seems to work just right.
The add-on is currently being downloaded and tested by We Heart It users, and was announced on Twitter yesterday. I hope that it will become an ‘official’ part of the site in the future. UPDATE (March 16th 2010) A link to this blog post has now been added to the footer on weheartit.com
You can download and install the addon on the Firefox Add-ons website.
Website and social media hub for the 1indienation podcast
I was asked by LA podcaster and princess of social media, Rachael Depp, to design and build a website for her, after she saw one of my personal projects, delarge.co.uk
Initially she wanted a custom design for somewhere to host her podcast, 1indienation. We also used the site as a one-stop shop for all her social media accounts (such as 12seconds, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook).
Taking this route meant the site acts as an overview of all of her online activity using RSS feeds. It brings all the seperate accounts into one place and updates automatically as she add photos, videos and tweets. It also serves as a place to download and listen to her music podcast.
I was given the logo as a starting point and designed the overall site to reflect her lively and colourful attitude.
