Suquamish, Washington, USA
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Electronic Music discussion: making a website from scratch
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Written December 17 2010 , Tags: css, html, php, celibacyclub
About a month ago i noticed my website was all messed up, an old version of wordpress was my cms, somehow it stopped working, leaving a buch of garbled stuff. i couldnt really see what went wrong, and didnt really feel like re-doing a wordpress install (my version was so old it wasnt upgradeable), so i decided to start with a css layout template and make something from scratch.
while quite time consuming it was a fun process, and im satisfied with the results link . at first the site was made of several mostly identical html files. this seemed to work ok but as the number of pages grew updating several files became a pain. i started looking for a way to make some of the elements once, instead of duplicating them. i searched around looking for a way to load a page inside a div elememt, finding all sorts of complex javascript/ajax/actionscrip kinda stuff.. arg.. but finally i found a way to use php to load pages in my divs, one nice little print file line, and i was in business, of course now i had to change all the .html to .php but that was easy. next i attempted to implement a javascript mp3 player.  ... i found it difficult to get everything set right and displaying properly, so i gave up, and just used soundcloud. seems good, though i still need to customize the colors on the soundcloud player. comments are handled by disqus, a nice comment system i fell in love with @ engadget.com.
So what experiences have em411ers had with their web presence? thoughts on using a service vs doing it yourself? also id be interested to hear how people have made non flash meda players work on thier sites.
Also, ive released a little album i made some years ago called Backwards Call of the Space Birds, which is available from link , as well as marsupial standoff, which i released a while back but maybe some havent checked it yet. its an album of mixits from maybe 2002-2009.
Also #2, i started a bandcamp page. i was resistant to the idea for a long time imagining it costs money. i guess it doesnt! woo! so yeah its @ link and only has one song so far, which is also available here for free, but if anyone ever feels like supporting the club, it would be greatly appreciated and help me bring more of my weirdness to the world.
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12/17/10
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Fant00m
I rather spend time on music than sorting out scripts, SEO etc. I like being able to download plugins on the fly. So for me, WP is the way to go.
12/17/10
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celibacyclub
yeah its defenetly easier to update and manage.
im thinking of using a wordpress install to put a blogroll inside of my site, so i can kinda have the best of both worlds.
12/17/10
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Fant00m
kudos for building it yourself btw. Just for learning alone a good project!
12/17/10
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Fant00m
celibacyclub said: "yeah its defenetly easier to update and manage.
im thinking of using a wordpress install to put a blogroll inside of my site, so i can kinda have the best of both worlds."
Yeah just install it in a subfolder or domain. Works like a charm
12/17/10
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trstFundKila
for a non flash based player there is always html5
Dec 18*
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ST8
I must admit i use wp for everything. Although i do write themes/plugins from scratch for it, its nice to not have to write html everytime you want to update it 
PS. at one point i did write all my sites from scratch with php/mysql/css/html, but at some point i found it easier to build on other systems (such as wp)
12/18/10
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celibacyclub
yeah i like wp for blog post kinda stuff. though for more static content, i find wp themes dont quite cut it. theres always some underlying wordpressness that bothers me, as so many sites follow all these conventions. so i think ill probably still use wp for regularly updated content, but use a custom site to contain it.
also kinda interested in ajax and using it to update things without pageloads. seems like so many fun things could happen with interactivity when the site can be continuously modified by user imput, making it function more like an application.
12/18/10
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ST8
for ajax check out jquery, thats a really nice js library
Dec 18*
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celibacyclub
yes definitely, thats what ive been investigating.
seems its popular enought to have lots of help available on the web for using it to do certain tasks.
12/18/10
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hecanjog
Yeah A+ for rolling your own, dude! Love the serif logotype floating on the sea. :-)
Take a look at the google font api - they just added a few nice new serifs that might make the rest of the copy on your site match the nice type in the header image a bit more. It's a really nice and easy-to-use wrapper for the new css3 @font-face feature, takes care of all the nasty fallbacks and etc for you: link
It's still powered by a little flash element for actual playback, but this little open source player has its heart in the right place and is pretty sexy: link
12/18/10
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hecanjog
Oops - and careful, you've got two head, body, and html blocks there - browsers render html in a pretty forgiving way these days, but check out the w3schools html specs for usage of those tags and elements: link There should only be 1 html, head, and body tag per page. This can be useful for debugging markup if you're unsure too: link
Dec 18*
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celibacyclub
yeah! that page i print for the navigation has a head and body, i guess i should take those out.
flower looks great, also nice to see it has a wp plugin version.
edit: woo! compliant! link thanks for the tip hecanjog
edit edit: seems that last error i tried to fix made the code show up on the page.. i guess i need to define the css for that div in the index vs having it in the file thats loaded into it.
12/18/10
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celibacyclub
1 error doesnt seem that bad though compared to em411's 182, or hecanjog.com's 26 ;)
12/19/10
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fakeBlooper
i use blogger and tweak the css so you cant tell its a blogger blog. i use dropbox for file storage since they allow hotlinking. the whole setup costs about $10/year (the price of domain name registration). you can actually create a very functional website that looks nothing like a blogger blog using the blogger cms, css and plugins but i chose to stick with the basic blog type layout: link
12/20/10
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Jenoki
I did mine with squarespace this time 'round.
It is kind of expensive at $22 a month compared with doing it from scratch... but for an all in one CMS with unlimited storage (20mb max file sizes though ) and custom CSS + HTML a wysiwyg editor, it's so easy to quickly build a nice looking website, I think it's worth it.
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