Facebook and I don’t get along. I’m not a tin-foil-hat, but I consider Facebook to be a privacy catastrophe, so I have so far managed to avoid it at all costs.
Hospital have, on several occasions now, attempted to railroad me into signing up, with varying degrees of failure – one of my least successful attempts involved Facebook deleting my account as they wouldn’t let me use the alias Creamy Horse. What a hate parade.
Despite my concerns, I have since managed to come to a compromise with the platform: I now have a page. This seems like a reasonable compromise to me – it means you (that’s right, you!) can like me now, and I have a presence there instead of an uncomfortable void.
So what do you get for liking me? Well, that’s not something I can answer, being as inexperienced as I am with the day-to-day workings of the platform. I will be posting links to stuff I post here, which might be of interest to you if you don’t want to have to deliberately visit this site to see if anything is new. I may also start linking to daily creativities if I can wire it up too, but I had a spot of bother attempting to do so earlier today. Oh well. One day at a time!
Hospital realised that WordPress isn’t the be-all and end-all of creating functional websites, which was great news for me as hacking up themes take a surprisingly long time! Instead, I’ve been getting to be a little more freeform with the websites I’ve been creating for them lately, resulting in these three little websites:
The idea for this site was borne out of a conversation with Matt Riley, the man in charge of web promo at Hospital. He suggested that as our tracks end up on YouTube anyway and we had such a striking cover photo, that we could make the page a big version of the album cover made up of YouTube videos.
Hello Internet types, and welcome to the latest incarnation of my website/portfolio! I find myself doing this once every couple of years, which makes sense being a designer and all.
The old site was getting out of control!
The new site now has bigger images, a less sprawling portfolio and some nice slidey interfaces, which I am surprised I even got to work! There is also a new iPhone-friendly version of the site too, which to be honest needs a bit more work, and I shall hopefully do over the next couple of days.
This blog has seen a tiny slice of updatery too, but nothing too drastic- I have upped the size of the text by one point, as I thought it was a bit difficult to read before, and increased the grid it is designed to alongwith it. The new site also adheres to the same grid too, to try and finally give my site and blog a bit of coherence again. Hooray for grids!
Shock Horror, I’ve joined another social network recently! This one is called Central Station- it appears to be a network for creative people. I guess it’s similar to Behance, but I never really understood that, and this appears to be a bit more British (well, Scottish, to be precise) and a bit more personal.
Anyway, I don’t really understand this either, but it’s probably because I’m not very good at being social, and to me a network is something you make with CAT5 cables and Wi-Fi. Regardless, it seems pleasant and I approve of the post-it-note yellow, so I’ve put up a bit of work for other members to look at!
Putting stuff up seemed to be the right thing to do too, as people are looking at it! CenSta first added my Post-it book to their blog of things they like in February, which was very kind of them. It’s nice to be nice to the nice!
Not only that, but they then went on to feature my stopmotion experiment from 2008 ‘Full Mouse’ (embedded above or here on Central Station) in a prominent position on their site, which went on to get more views in the space of a week than it ever did anywhere else on the internet combined. Amazing!
So if you’re creative too, or if you just want to be a member of another social network, you should check Central Station out! It doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish – I’m pretty sure I’m not a Scot, and they’ve been very welcoming to me, as I think they are trying to grow beyond Scotchland.
Update: They’ve put the video on their front page now too! cool!
This week I helped Photographer Extraordinaire Andrew Attah spruce up his website. Now it’s finished, I don’t feel like I did much at all to contribute, but I guess my, er, expertise made a difference. I am pleased with it regardless!
Andrew had the right idea from the start, by moving away from Flash for his online portfolio. He found the nice little open-source CMS Indexhibit to base his new site on, which I then offered to help tidy up. I tinkered a little with the plugins and layout and flexed some CSS to make what we have here – a lot more balanced and user-friendly, but still minimal enough to let the photography do the talking, which is the idea of a photographer’s portfolio!
Check out AndrewAttah.com for a better view of the site and his photos, and keep your eyes peeled for the snaps from his recent Danny Byrd and Netsky photoshoots. Yeah!
I found myself wondering last night if my social-network-avoiding actually works against me and my work, so I have decided today to dip my toes into the social waters in the form of signing up to Twitter! I’ll spare you the pain of a diatribe as to why I’m not planning on using it for normal tweeting, but rather its function will be to tweet about the posts I make here (like this post, which is doubling up as a test of the new system!).
So, if you like reading about my world, and are cooler than me as you like to use Twitter, you can follow Trickartt, to be tweeted at whenever I write something else stupid here!
Somebody on one of the forums rediscovered this today, which also led me to rediscover it- I had completely forgotten I made it! Apparently it dates back to last June. It’s the Trickartt DJ Bio Generator- a piece of PHP junk designed to generate your very own low-budget self-gratifying D&B DJ biography.
If you’re not familiar with the world of Drum and Bass, or any other DJ-centric music, it might be easy to miss the point. Similarly, it might not be so funny if you had already put the effort into writing yourself one of these manually (I bet you’re kicking yourself now- you could’ve just done it by filling out a few simple boxes!), but here it is anyway.
Hooray for basic PHP!
This is pretty much the highlight of my Holiday holiday this year – today Lilly and I got to meet an internet celebrity – Caplin Rous, the giant coconut capybara!
He is pretty much the coolest creature in the world. He is so gentle, so smart, and so charming! He makes the coolest little noise too, which you should be able to hear in the below video.
He also really likes blueberries! We were feeding him frozen ones. We didn’t get to feed him a popsicle, but it was probably a bit cold out today.
So if you didn’t know what a Capybara was, you do now! They are the world’s biggest rodents – just like giant guinea pigs! I like guinea pigs. Capybaras come from South America natively, but Caplin was born in Texas. Apparently there are a handful of people who keep them as pets, but none as well trained as Caplin – he could stand up, shake hands and twirl around when pried with the right treats. If you want to know more information about Caplin, or capybaras in general, you can find a lot more interesting and fun related stuff on Caplin’s website, GiantHamster.com.
Thanks to Melanie, Caplin’s owner, for being kind enough to let us come to meet him.
I had forgotten about this until this morning, when I woke up and found an email from Tony telling me it was alive- the first loosely-Trickartt-related iPhone application!
Hospital have been wanting an iPhone application for a long time- it got to the point where Tony was trying to convince me to make an app myself (I wish I could, but I am still wrestling with PHP as it is). He was trying to tell me to remake the Grooverider Soundboard then cut them in on the profits (I think he’s been reading too many App Store gravy train reports), so I suggested as a joke that we should make a Tony Colman soundboard from his podcast.
(Un?)fortunately, after a day or two, he decided he liked the idea- so that much he enlisted Phil of Code Army to make it happen. Riley went through the archive and got some clips together, then I did some graphics for the interface, which Phil then tied together and (I assume) sent into the black hole of iPhone app submission. And here it is!
It’s pretty simple, and pretty crass, but Phil was kind enough to put my name in the credit on the app store (pictured above) without me even asking, which was nice of him! So there we are. I am now in iPhone Territory!
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403
Wow, two months since I last wrote here. I’ll make an effort to write something proper soon, I’m sure.
anyway, just a quick apology to anyone that tried to get to my site to find a 403 error instead- I was hacked! we had to shut down my site until I repaired the code, which I have done now. Blessing in disguise really- now my URLs are a lot tidier!