After giving it some thought, I’ve decided to start retiring some sections of the site, sections that don’t really serve any purpose or seem a little out of place as the site morphs and evolves. Not only does this help keep Opus nice and streamlined, but it also helps pave the way for some new, more radical changes that are on the proverbial horizon.
For starters, I’ve decided to do away with the Newsfeed. It seemed a bit redundant, especially seeing as how the Cool Sites section (which really needs to be renamed) was essentially serving the same purpose. Initially, the Newsfeed was just a way for me to post quick links to intriguing news articles, with nothing more than a headline and a URL. However, I recently started adding comments, which made them look an awful lot like the Cool Sites area.
They both began serving the exact same purposes, with only relatively minor differences. I don’t really care too much for redundancy, and so I’m just getting rid of one of them altogether.
I’m not deleting the page anytime soon, and I may try to merge both sections’ content into something altogether new. But the Newsfeed is officially deprecated as of today.
Lately, Aaron over at AlmostCool has taken to reviewing some of his favorite releases, in addition to the genres that he regularly reviews. This week, he reviews Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), giving it a perfect 10. And if you’ve heard Górecki’s work (or have seen the end credits of Fearless) you’ll understand why. It’s an absolutely beautiful album, almost devastatingly so, and one that has reduced me to a sobbing wreck on many an occasion.
While trying to dig up some more info on David Bazan’s new band, The Headphones (see this Pitchfork article), I found this little tidbit on the Suicide Squeeze website—Crystal Skulls debut album will be coming out March 22. And just who or what is Crystal Skulls? It’s Christian Wargo’s new band. And just who is Christian Wargo? Well, he used to be the frontman for the woefully underappreciated Scientific.
The new Crystal Skulls album will be titled Blocked Numbers. You can find out more information on the band’s official website, including a couple of MP3s in the “Album” section. Not surprisingly, there are some similarities to Scientific, though the Crystal Skulls material does feel a bit smoother and more polished, with less analog synth-noodling and more of a focus on the guitars.
Are MP3 blogs the new mixtape? It certainly seems to be that way, as blogs all over the Web are quickly becoming one of the best ways to find new music. Not only do you find new songs and artists, but you also get people’s thoughts and comments, as well as further recommendations.
Case in point: 3Hive. I just stumbled across this site from MeFi, and I’m digging it in a big way. Tons of links to a lot of really cool artists, some of whom I’ve been wanting to check out for awhile, plus a couple of “golden oldies” (like that David Sylvian bootleg).
As of right now, I’ve really enjoyed checking out the tracks from Juez (a so-called “breakbeat-klezmer-jazz”), the aforelinked Daydream Nation, and Epic45.
And speaking of MP3s, be sure to drop by Opus’ HiFi for a few more.
I realize that bashing Pitchfork is a bit of an “in thing” amongst indie-music types, and for good reason I suppose. The site is well-known for some pretty pretentious, if not downright silly writing, writing that oftentimes seems far more concerned with proving how witty and pithy the writer is than actually saying something about the music being written about (though I still chuckle over those Jimmy Eat World and Desaparecidos reviews).
But all ridicule aside, Pitchfork has undoubtedly struck a chord amongst many folks with their style of writing, becoming a very influential website. Chances are, those same folks who bash Pitchfork’s reviews still visit the site regularly, and probably come away with a good recommendation or two. I know that my discovery of Pitchfork in ‘98 or ‘99 was a big deal, for several reasons. Without them, I don’t know if/when I would’ve discovered many of the bands that I listen to now, and they were definitely an influence on me as I started posting music (and movie) reviews on the Web.
I say all this so that this little blog entry o’ mine doesn’t come across as yet another case of one pissy little music listener bashing Pitchfork simply because they’re Pitchfork.
Pitchfork has almost always been rather subpar when it comes to being a well-designed site, something that founder Ryan Schreiber has admitted as such. Much of that is simply due to the fact that Pitchfork is a very sizable site (they’ve got to be pushing several thousand reviews by now). Opus is barely a medium-sized site, and even that can be rather difficult to manage on my own.
But the fact remains that Pitchfork always seems to be in need of an overhaul design-wise, and now they were getting one by a real design firm. Obviously, as both a designer and a music fan, I was pretty excited about what would happen when Pitchfork recently launched their brand new design, courtesy of Someoddpilot. However, I have to say, I find the new design rather “meh” overall.
Being the geek that I am, I quickly started looking under the hood once I’d gotten my fill of the design (more on that later). Viewing the source code, I was immediately hit by several things that just didn’t seem right.
I know this is really geeky of me, but it bothers me when I see a site that doesn’t contain a valid DOCTYPE, regardless of whether it’s “HTML 4.01 Transitional” or “XHTML 1.0 Strict”. And that’s doubly so for a site that is of Pitchfork’s magnitude (and no, the DOCTYPE that it does have is not the real deal). Invalid DOCTYPEs mean no code validation, and in this day and age, that’s becoming an increasingly big “no-no”.
Thankfully, I couldn’t find any
As my co-workers will attest, I’ve become something a CSS nazi, but only because I’ve completely fallen in love with benefits of taking a CSS/semantic HTML view of the Web. The fact is that Pitchfork’s usage of CSS is lackluster at best. The CSS that is there is poorly-structured and incredibly redundant (there’s no reason why all of those font sizes, line heights, and color specifications need to be repeated again and again), but what’s more perplexing is the CSS that isn’t there.
There’s no reason why the new Pitchfork design couldn’t have been done using CSS and semantically-rich, structurally-sound XHTML. A quick perusal of the homepage’s source code reveals nested tables, many of them with convoluted layouts, as well as a number of extraneous graphics - most, if not all of which could be replaced by CSS and XHTML. Which would result in a site that’s far more flexible for future modifications, not to mention quicker on the download and easier on the bandwidth (both very good things).
(Now, I realize that criticizing another site’s CSS might be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, as I realize that Opus’ CSS is pretty obtuse itself. But I’m working on it.)
Yes, I realize that Flash is the shiz-nit, but come on! There’s absolutely no reason why the main navigation for the new Pitchfork design had to be done in Flash, and not a CSS-styled list. Sure, you’d lose some rather gimmicky eye candy, but you’d also gain a whole lot more usability and flexibility. Which is a pretty decent trade-off in my book.
No Trailing Slashes On URLs
Admittedly, this one is more for Pitchfork’s benefit, because most people won’t even notice. However, if you click on one of those links in the main navigation, such as “Record Reviews”, you’re taken to a URL that it looks something like
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews
No big deal, right? It quickly changes to
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/
(note the slash at the end of the URL) and all is good.
True, you end up where you were wanting to go, but at the expense of another server request. May not sound like a big deal, but on a site as big as Pitchfork, with literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of people hitting it everyday, they’re going to add up in terms of server resources. (Yes, I realize this one is probably the geekiest of the bunch, but you were warned.)
In his welcome message, Schreiber admits that there are still some kinks to be worked out, so a lot of the stuff I’ve listed might be non-issues in a few days. Which wouldn’t surprise me, because a lot of these things are relatively minor. However, I’m kind of surprised this stuff wasn’t dealt with at the get-go, while the site was getting put back together.
I have no idea what kind of content management system Pitchfork uses, or even if they use one at all (part of me thinks “No”). And let’s face it, overhauling a site with thousands of pages is a pretty daunting task. However, they had to go into all of those pages anyway to get the new design working, so it would’ve been easy enough to take out some of the deprecated code, clean up some of the tables, and whatnot.
Okay, enough about the site’s code. What about the design? Again, I have to go with “meh”. It’s certainly not bad - the new logo is decent, if not a little cutesy, and the spray paint-y stuff is kind of cool - but it’s also not the best thing in Someoddpilot’s portfolio. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the “1024x768 or greater” approach, though I’d also probably be one of the last ones to complain about that. And the new design is still cluttered with too many damned banners (“Ooh look, another ad for Suicide Girls!”).
Whew… this post became much longer than I had planned. Again, I want to stress that is not another “Pitchfork is so stupid” screed, and I hope that it doesn’t come off as such. Flaws aside, I quite enjoy reading Pitchfork, will still head their way on a pretty daily basis, and will still find some reviews quite useful and others quite infuriating - which is to be expected. But speaking as a developer, I have to confess I find the new look rather underwhelming, both inside and out.
Before they rose to fame with a little known game called Halo, and it’s equally unknown sequel Halo 2, Bungie was best known for the Marathon trilogy of games. Essentially a precursor to Halo in many ways, you played a cybernetically-enhanced soldier thrust into an intergalactic battle between ancient alien civilizations, insane AIs, and a little something called the W’rkncacnter.
I never played the first Marathon game too much, but I loved Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity, spending many hours hunched over my PowerBase trying to figure out what Durandal was up to. And it looks like I’ll have a chance to do it all over again - the entire Marathon trilogy is now available as freeware.
Click here for more info on Marathon than you ever wanted to know.
One of the things I always loved about being a web developer was the sense of community that pervaded the profession. If you didn’t know how to do something, were stumped by a particular problem or issue, or saw something really cool and were curious as to how they did it, it was easy enough to find a tutorial or three that would usually answer your question. And if that wasn’t enough, you could always ask. People were more than willing to share their knowledge and expertise with eachother, if only for the good karma - help someone out of a tight spot today because you never knew when you might need a little tip or trick.
Sadly, those days seem to have passed. There are still plenty of wonderful resources out there, be they semi-regular publications or blogs, but more and more resources seem to be deliberately making it difficult for someone to find the info they need. That seem to place far more importance on pleasing their advertisers than supporting the community.
Take, for instance, DevShed. Back in the day, I found this site nearly indispensible when I was making my first forays into PHP/MySQL development. It’s tutorials were always well-done, written in a manner that was very clear and easy to understand, and their code examples almost always worked without a hitch. Now, it’s next to impossible to tell where the tutorials end and the advertising begins. The articles are next to impossible to read, thanks to the flashing banner ads that take up far too much of the browser window.
Okay… now that I’m done bitching, it’s time to get back to work. Does anyone know of any good PHP/XML resources/tutorials?!?
Christianity Today just published a fairly alarming article by Ronald J. Sider entitled “The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience”, which very pointedly reveals that Christians may “talk the talk”, but we rarely “walk the walk” (pardon the cliché). Despite claiming to adhere to the loftiest of moral and spiritual ideals, we are still human - sometimes even moreso than our “pagan” neighbors.
“...evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.” Divorce is more common among “born-again” Christians than in the general American population. Only 6 percent of evangelicals tithe. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Josh McDowell has pointed out that the sexual promiscuity of evangelical youth is only a little less outrageous than that of their nonevangelical peers.
No wonder Christians are a joke in this country. No wonder people look at us strange when we protest gay marriage, abortion, or any other hot-button issue that has us all in a huff today. No wonder people don’t take our claims of moral authority seriously. It doesn’t look like we have any!
Early on, Sider refers to some interesting insights from scholar Alan Wolfe as a possible explanation for why this is.
Today’s evangelicalism, Wolfe says, exhibits “so strong a desire to copy the culture of hotel chains and popular music that it loses what religious distinctiveness it once had.” Wolfe argues, “The truth is there is increasingly little difference between an essentially secular activity like the popular entertainment industry and the bring-‘em-in-at-any-cost efforts of evangelical megachurches.”
When I first read this, I was fully prepared to make some pretty sarcastic remarks about the hypocrisy of modern American evangelicalism, hypocrisy that I’d seen firsthand, having come from an evangelical background myself. I was fully prepared to say “That’s a great article, Mr. Snider, by DUH! Anyone with half a brain knows that modern Christians are poor examples of Christ in today’s society.” And then I remembered that I am one of those modern Christians, and chances are, I’m a pretty poor example of Christ myself.
I can pride myself on not being as racist or ignorant of the poor as other Christians, that I’m not as liable to get caught up in the fervor of the typical American Christian who votes Republican, watches Fox News, and generally forgets about the rest of the world outside their little bubble.
But just thinking that reveals me as the falsely humble individual that I am. I may not be (as) racist and prejudiced as most, but I still have my own struggles. I’m nowhere near concerned with the poor and downtrodden as I should be, despite concern for the fatherless and widow being described as the essence of Christian religion by no less an authority than James. I rarely tithe, and I certainly don’t give until it hurts (unless there’s a sweet special on DVDs somewhere, that is). And I’m certainly as prone to immorality, lust, and whatnot as the next red-blooded male.
So, I guess I’m saying that I’ve got just as far to go as the next guy. Thankfully, I’m not going at it alone. None of us are. And hopefully, maybe we’ll learn to think a bit before decrying someone else’s sin, and make sure we deal with our own first.
The fine lads in Mr. 1986 have just posted several demo tracks to their website, or you can download the MP3s directly from here, here, and here. The tracks should sound pretty familiar if you’ve seen the band perform within the past few months, though parts of them have been reworked since I heard them last. They’re all pretty lengthy—the fellas do love their epic songs—so you might want to be using a high-speed connection.
Shortly after I had finished redesigning The Grand‘s blog, Todd over at Twitch asked if I’d like to take a stab at redesigning his site. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I had actually been thinking for awhile about asking Todd if I could redesign his site. I thought it would be a fun project to work on an media-oriented site other than my own. So needless to say, I took him up on the offer lickety-split.
I wasn’t given too many specs upfront. He just wanted something a little cleaner and more “professional” than the site’s previous design. However, when I started on the design, there were a couple of limitations that I placed on myself. The main one was that I wanted to keep the use of film and movie-related imagery to a bare minimum in the design, or if I did use it, do so in a more interesting manner.
You see, I’ve visited far too many movie sites that use film imagery in the exact same way. For example, they always seem to use film reels, directors’ chairs, megaphones, and whatnot as design elements. Sure, those things reinforce that you’re looking at a movie website, but they’re fairly cliched. And given that Twitch focuses on decidedly offbeat fare, the use of cliched imagery seemed like a major faux pas.
As far as technical limitations/requirements, the site would naturally be done using semantically-correct XHTML for structure and CSS for the layout. And I would be working with Movable Type again on the backend, albeit a newer version (getting to fiddle with a newer version of MT was another reason why I took the job).
I began by trying to figure out some sort of logo or dominant title, and work from there. I don’t know if that’s “good design process”, but it seemed to me to be the first thing to get out of the way. I didn’t want to go overboard, but I wanted something that would work within the context of the site’s focus - that being an obsession with offbeat film. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, until I discovered Cathode that is.
Now, I realize that grungier typefaces went out of fashion several years ago, but this one seemed to fit for several reasons. First of all, there was the typeface’s title, which was quite appropriate. And the glitchy, distorted shapes of the characters not only approximated the way your vision works after having spent hours watching movies, they also had a rather “twitchy” vibe to them. The original version of the logo was even “twitchier”, with the letters all jumbled about, but Todd et al. thought it was a little too unreadable.
And then it was on with the rest of the design. I tried a couple of different layouts, all of which were decidedly more abstract than what ended up being used, but nothing seemed to click. Finally, I decided on a fixed-width layout that was similar to the original design. Also, I kept the light-on-dark color scheme of the original design. Most of the designs I do use dark text on a light background, so this was an interesting break from the norm. Admittedly, it seems like a fairly trivial detail, but it’s funny how even the smallest of details can guide you during the process.
As I said before, I originally wanted to stay away from using obvious movie imagery in the design. But as the design took shape, it seemed to scream for some sort of dominant masthead image, something similar to John Whittet’s design for the CSS Zen Garden. Furthermore, the original design had used a rather abstract masthead image, and so I began to work off that.
As I thought about it, I realized this would be a perfect way to implement some film-related imagery, while sort of underscoring and enforcing Twitch’s “brand”. (See, I did learn something from all of those advertising classes I took in college.) And so I started scouring for stills and whatnot from the sort of films that Twitch covers; obscure cult classics, anime, martial arts, Asian arthouse titles, etc.
Essentially, I was looking for the sort of stuff that would make me think “Cool!” were I to see it appear on a site, something that I would expect to see from a site covering the sort of films that I like. (Luckily enough, Todd and I have very similar tastes in film.)
The one exception to this was the image used for “default” masthead, which was just so cool-looking that I couldn’t resist using it. Yes, I realize it’s “cliched” movie imagery - in this case, a reel of film - but it just looked so cool and bizarre and abstract that I couldn’t not use it. This image also ended up being used for the internal mastheads. (You can also see a bit of it in the image used for this blog entry.)
Originally, I had thought that people could use a style switcher to pick the masthead they wanted. However, in the end, we just went with a PHP script that picks a masthead at random everytime the homepage is loaded. This way, Todd can add as many mastheads as he likes and have a growing library from which to choose.
Although some might beg to differ, all blogs work essentially the same. There’s a reason why so many blogs use the two-column layout, and that’s because it works perfectly for what they do. And so Twitch stuck with the tried and true method. Left column for main content, right column for miscellaneous content (archive and affiliate links, recent comments, etc.). Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
At this point, it was just a matter of fiddling with the CSS until the text started playing nice with the design. For the body copy, I stuck with Lucida Grande, while Trebuchet MS was used for titles, nav elements, form labels, basically anything that needed a little more emphasis.
Todd launched a proof version of the site so people could send in feedback, most of which was quite positive. A few people raised concerns about the font size and the high contrast of white text on a black background. To deal with the font sizing issue, I implemented AListApart’s style switcher. Although style switchers are nothing new, it was the first time I had messed with one. Needless to say, I was giddy as a schoolgirl the first time I saw that text resizin’ with a mere mouseclick. As for the contrast issues, I knocked the color of the test a few shades down from white, which actually seemed to increase the readability.
I’ll admit that the designer in me found it a bit, um, nervewracking to see the public banging away at a work that still very much in progress. But in the end, it worked out for the best, as we were alerted to a number of glitches that were easy to fix early on, but might have proved troublesome after the new design launched.
Most of the redesign process went fairly smoothly, but there were a few bumps along the way, mostly involving the Movable Type integration. Once again, I can see why so many people use MT. It’s a very flexible system, and I know that the new design doesn’t tap into half of what it can do. However, that flexibility comes at a price.
For example, all of the templates that I modified were located within the “Templates” section of the MT admin area, simple enough. Except for the template that lays out the search results, which is actually a static file that you have to hunt down on your web server and edit. I realize that MT has a justification for why that is the case, but I had to go digging through the documentation to find where I should even begin to look for it.
As impressed as I am with MT, I think I still keep my homebrew system (though it’s very much in need of some updating).
I’m really pleased with how the site turned out. Not to sound immodest, but I really don’t think it looks like too many of the other movie news/rumor/scuttlebutt sites out there. I go to a number of movie sites throughout the day, and none of them look or feel like Twitch. There are still a few technical glitches that need to be ironed out on the MT side (such as the “comment preview” screen), but those will be taken care of in due course. And at some point, I’d like to beef up the style switcher to allow people to change font and link colors, etc.
If you’ve somehow made it through this dissertation, you’ve earned yourself a break. Take a few minutes and check out Twitch for yourself. And if you’ve got some ideas or feedback, be sure to let us know.
Opus is a website masquerading as a blog masquerading as a webzine. It’s where I (that’d be Jason Morehead) write about music, movies, art, web design, religion, family, and whatever else happens to interest me at the time. More...
Not sure where to start? Then check out this revolving hand-picked list of some of my favorite articles and reviews.
