Publications
Dalliance
Knocking about at www.dalliance.co.uk.
With a remit to cover “Music in West Yorkshire but not all music and not all West Yorkshire” Dalliance is more of a scrapbook of gig reviews and assorted other music reflections. For two years it covered the prosperous Bradford music scene but since the ebbing away of those days it has — more or less — covered the wanderings around the North of England (and, at times, New York City) following various bands and artists.
The website is popular with the target community which tends to give it an insular feel — one gets to know the bands that one reviews and reviewing them objectively becomes harder — recording around a hundred unique visitors for a new article. It is popular with promoters who seem to comp free records for review despite the fact that to the start of 2011 the site had never reviewed anything other than gigs.
Free records are a dream come true and perhaps suggest a direction for the site in the future.
- Dalliance also uses Wordpress with custom plugins written in php that interface with Last.fm to bring band photos to the articles.
BfB: A Bradford City journal
Dead, but still remembered at www.boyfrombrazil.co.uk.
In 2010 www.boyfrombrazil.co.uk recorded 337,602 unique visitors and 486,152 page views as it detailed another season in the decline and fall of Bradford City Football Club. Launched over a decade ago in January 1999 BfB started at the top covering the club’s promotion to the Premier League of English football but has since had a fairly constant decline to cover.
BfB has carved a niche in the community it serves with near daily detailed, in-depth articles taking a considered view on events at Valley Parade and is richly rewarded with a daily readership which seldom slips under a thousand — representing one in ten of the attendance at the club’s ground — and a loyal and interesting community of commenter makers.
The website has a core of values around the idea of good writing and intelligent football support which sets it aside from other football websites.
Written in the main part by Michael Wood and Jason McKeown the site has boasting over 125 writers in the past decade the site offers a platform to any and all who feel they wish to — and have the perspicacity to — avail themselves of it.
In November 2011 — after an especially good series of articles — the site was concluded following a series of discussions with the club in which far too much about the inner workings of the current Bradford City board were revealed to me.
- BfB uses Wordpress with a some custom plugins & theme written in php to make sure it does what I want it to.
- Back in 2005 the whole site was written in classic asp using xml and xslt to power it.
These Films Are Linked
Kind of in beta at thesefilmsarelinked.cabinpressure.co.uk.
An experiment of sorts These Films Are Linked is a series of articles about movies and the links they have to other movies.
It is micropublishing taking a single element of reviewing and splitting it into a feature and the aim - aside from writing practice - is to see how much interest will come to a website about a single and specific angle on a subject.
The website was a three hour project, a practical exercise in taking nothing to something in a single afternoon.
- These Films Are Linked was created as a three hour project in Wordpress.
484s
Now a distant but happy memory.
Movie Page www.foureightfours.co.uk was also published under the Cabin Pressure banner.
The website — which was an attempt to bring the values of BfB to a wider audience — had a team of a half dozen writers who provided reviews and features. In retrospect was most notable for including an interview I conducted with usability expert Jakob Neilsen about his five favourite movies.
In its six month run it averages around 1,000 page views a month which considering the massive field of general movie websites it operated within was respectable. The lesson of 484s though — need it be learnt once more — is that the best website find an area of specific interest and cover it in depth.
- I wrote my own CMS in classic asp using xml and xslt to to run 484s.