tumblr + custom theme | update from web/iphone for projectswebmedia.com

One of the biggest problems that i have when updating what i am doing with work is updating my own company website, my old site is at http://projects.cc and i have not updated it since me and nathan (guy i worked with) stopped working together so i decided something radical needed to change for the new version. So today i am opening up http://www.projectswebmedia.com - it's a tumblr based website so i do not have to worry about hosting/security or even updates.

I wanted a website i could update quickly
through the day i can switch around on too many different jobs and i really should be updating clients about what i am up to - my last contract at sleepydog fell foul to communication issues i feel yet the work and ideas i have been building should have been of value to the business/projects if i had a constant stream of this to be easily found. i also watch a lot of videos, post a lot of links and post pictures often of progress to skitch through the day with notes on them for the css slicer or coder that i am working with. if we are moving towards live i think having a site i can update rapidly either from the web or an iphone application is vital.

but why not just use a cms like wordpress/movabletype like you do here or on ammoboxproject.com
while i love both wordpress and moveabletype (i'm slowly thinking about moving me.dm over to WP believe it or not) they do not have applications currently that can take advantage of rapid updating without either building, composing (ok maybe not wp so much) - It can take a number of clicks and pages on both to get something posted. The tumblr web app is light weight, even simple and the iphone more so with the rapid ability for me to update in a twitter style rapid fire is what i am looking for. at the moment the tumblr application does not support video but with the new iphone3gs out i am sure the developer of tumberette will be adding that feature.

the functions of the new projectsweb.com
the first theme design was very much an experiment in theme design for tumblr as it supports custom themes, the api and some trick json/ajax scrolling - it is so far from standard it is painful! - It's just something i have always done since i have owned a computer 'made it custom' - i just cannot use other peoples themes - i have to either customize them or start from scratch like i did with this one. Another thing with tumblr is that i had not seen anyone do a horizontal design with the content going left to right like a time based layout like rezpondr does so that was my first mission. Below is a list of things we (me and petr) did to get the design on tumblr together (and also the problems we had!)

i used colourlovers.com to get some nice palettes of colours together
decided that i would utilize posts, links, pictures, video and audio functions of tumblr (not using quote or chat thou
audioboo has an export to tumblr feature but currently that sends to "posts" and not "audio" (using tumblr mp3 player instead would be better)
panic part, tumblr only displays 15 posts max at a time per 'page' - not a problem with vertical designs but a killer for horizontal
anic averted, we will use an infinity scroll technique with js/jquery/api/json that will load another bunch of posts via ajax automatically - we force a load at onload
utilize streampad so that any mp3 content that is found can be pushed to the bottom bar for easy playback.
intergrate a wufoo link for people to get quotes from us
tumblerette has an audio recording function which works really well for doing audio recordings (not sure of the length but quality is good - a good backup to audioboo)
as you cannot store images on tumblr we dropped them on our new cloud files service over on rackspacecloud for super speed. ;)
setup cname for bitty and tunage easier to remember locations for css/images and the music files on the cloud files system

Of course we have a lot yet we want to do and we were really struggling at times of how we would get more than 15 posts loaded in, we used the api with the json interface and hosted the .js files and code on another server in the cloud and used the infinity scroller - a sweet piece of code to pull in more than 15 posts (that is 15 items of media across all services) at a time. i am really chuffed with what we made happen in this first version and it opens up the world of tumblr customizing to us. this roughly took about two weeks to do and the design was rushed but it is pretty close to the lightweight nature i wanted. We have a lot more to add to it thou for the portfolio and clients and that is included in this below.

external rezpondr api call for our rows of content served on other sites for our social media footprint
all twitter accounts and rss feeds shown at the top somehow (?)
go retro and bring back the walky talky system from days gone by (for live/realtime later)
get notes and love elements from tumblr intergrated (so people can vote on videos etc)
~~pixel shift align and change some text elements that have hard to read text~~
looking at some kind of caching incase the json api backend is playing up or is down for any reason
search box and better presentation of standalone items (ie, things got sent to twitter)
jquery click on image and get a better fullsize version with rating and comments
tweetboard on the left side
footer or head intergration with the network of other sites it is connected too
vat/company id information
pull in blog posts from other networks of sites (need to build rezpondr service first)

So as you can see, still plenty to be done but i am happy that an idea/concept was realized and getting that json/api pull thing working makes me very happy that an experiment went well. i hope you'll drop in and check it out as it progresses! :)

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