Airfront Live
What took you so long?
Those that know me will be glad I’m writing this post because it means I’ve finished the one thing that has been tormenting and mocking me for over a year.
The next time I see them they wont have to hear me moan about “not getting the chance to work on my site” or about how “I got so far with it but started to hate it”.
I’m finally launching version 1 of my site. So not long in the making, I’ve only been in business for over 2 years! The clichéd “Cobbler never getting the chance to fix his own shoes” doesn’t quite cover it. To a degree that’s true but it was more than that, it the creative’s worst enemy perfectionism. We all have this little demon that sits on our shoulder saying otherwise perfectly legitimate choices are wrong or could be perceived a different and less interesting way but the truth is that there’s no “wrong” choice and everything can be perceived differently.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be very busy with client work from the first day I left the BBC and started Airfront. However along with limited time I was also striving for something too perfect in my own mind, which of course I was never going to achieve. Thankfully I realised the mistakes I was making and why I wasn’t getting very far and so here we are.
Technical details
The following is an overview of the site on a technical level and in upcoming blog posts and screencasts I will delve into them in a lot more detail.
Server side
This site is running on a LAMP server provided by the excellent Layershift. Content is handled by the ExpressionEngine (EE) a flexible CMS and is combined with some very powerful plugins such as Pixel & Tonic Matrix, Solspace Freeform and others. I’ve written some custom PHP for the very bespoke or simple functionality rather than bending EE to do something it wasn’t really designed to do.
Front-end
HTML, CSS and JavaScript wherever possible make use of some newer features supported by modern browsers which degrade nicely for older browsers. Referred to as “HTML5”, “CSS3”. My JavaScript library of choice for this site was jQuery 1.4. Combined with Modernizer and the Google WebFont Loader.
Some gratitude
Dotted around this site, particularly the homepage is the use of other people’s work as a kind of hat-tip to them. You will notice on the homepage, the poster on the wall of my office changes randomly to some posters by Eboy, Pixar, Kevin Cornell and others. I’ve written to these fine people and asked their permission, some have got back to me and other haven’t, so if you’re one of the people that hasn’t I’m hoping I have the OK to use those images.
The calendar is based on the brilliant Field Notes Brand calendar.
The office scene will be topical and seasonal as the weeks roll on. Helps me experiment and learn. For this week, can you find one of my favourite Pixar characters? (An easy one really).
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and really spark some awesome conversations.,
Paul
01/02/2011
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