Stookstudio - Webdesign and development - ExpressionEngine Pro

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06/10/07--02:58: Home (chan 1208672)

I hardly ever go there anymore (except for the occasional visit to my parents) but today I took my car to the garage and consequently had to walk all the way through the centre of the town I grew up in to take a train to work. While I was growing up, this was my universe, this was what I knew; it's only when I went to college that I saw that the world was a lot bigger then my hometown. But today I walked through those streets I remember so well: past the school where I learned to read but not to shut up, past the hospital where they took out my tonsils, past the home for the elderly where the grandmother who raised me doesn't remember my name or my face anymore, past the spot where they tore down the cinema I spent my sunday afternoons in, past the guitar store where I bought my first guitar, the ice cream parlor that still has the best mocha ice cream in the world, the market square where I wasted away hours in the arcades playing Donkey Kong. All those streets and places, still somewhat familiar, yet all profoundly changed by the implacable march of time. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right after all.


07/11/07--07:29: Textplates 07 (chan 1208672)

Even though I use ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for the websites I build I do keep an eye on the evolution of other systems such as Wordpress and Textpattern. I recently read the excellent Textpattern Solutions book and when I stumbled upon the annual Textplates design contest I decided to port the old, dark version of this blog to Textpattern. It was a fun exercise and a good excuse to dig a little deeper into Textpattern. There are some similarities to EE and although some things are handled quite differently all in all it was a rather smooth experience. I dubbed the design P&T, submitted it and, lo and behold, it’s been accepted as an official entry into the competition. This current excuse for a blog stays on EE though and will get a makeover in the month to come to have it blend in more with the rest of my portfolio site which is due somewhere in July-August. For now I’m working on a few new things and enjoying dogsitting this fella. Update: no Textplate joy I’m afraid, although the template I liked best did win the contest. Better luck next year?


06/30/10--04:39: A sprinkling of CI (chan 1208672)

One of the best new features of ExpressionEngine 2.0 is that it's basically a CodeIgniter application, which not only means you can write CI code straight into your EE templates, but you can also leverage existing CI libraries in your EE2 install. In the "Elsewhere" section in the footer of my blog I list the 5 latest links from my Delicious account. I couldn't find an EE2-compatible plugin to parse my Delicious feed so I turned to Elliot Haughin's Simplepie CI library to get the job done. Just drop the Simplepie.php file into your /system/libraries/ directory and you're set to use in in your EE template. You will have to create a rss cache folder inside system/expressionengine/cache/rss/ and make sure it's writable. The following snippet is all that's needed to generate the linklist you see at the bottom of this page: <?php $this->EE->load->library('simplepie'); $this->EE->simplepie->set_feed_url('http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/erwinheiser?count=5'); $this->EE->simplepie->set_cache_location(APPPATH.'cache/rss'); $this->EE->simplepie->set_cache_duration(7200); $this->EE->simplepie->init(); $this->EE->simplepie->handle_content_type(); $items = $this->EE->simplepie->get_items(); //output feed items echo "<ul>"; foreach($items as $item) { echo "<li>"; echo "<a href=\"" .$item->get_link(). "\">"; echo $item->get_title(); echo "</a>"; echo $item->get_description(); echo "</li>"; } echo "</ul>"; ?> Don't forget to enable php in your template. I'm sure a plugin or extension will pop up in the coming weeks, but for now it does the job nicely


07/06/10--21:02: Stookstudio is live (chan 1208672)

Blame Michael Boyink. After he relaunched his site in december 2009 and freely admitted getting some outside help for the design, I felt a kind of relief in a way and compelled to get some outside help myself. My little freelance business stookstudio had been without a decent website since it started well over 3 years ago. I've been blessed with being busy since day 1 but it also meant I had little time to spare to roll out something for myself. Enter Benedikte Vanderweeën. I met her briefly at last year's EECI convention in Leiden and I really liked some of the work I saw from her. She was an absolute joy to work with: she listened to my ramblings, looked at my Littlesnapper clippings (pieces from sites, print work, even LP sleeves) and went to work. I had some pretty specific demands (rgba colours, a few specific fonts, a minimal design), and it's great to work with a designer who also knows how to code and knows where the pitfalls are. I felt we should start with the case study pages and she absolutely nailed those on the second try, the rest grew from there. It was great to see it all come together, and she was very receptive to my requests for the odd tweak here and there. In short, she's a consummate pro. I'd work with her again anytime. I took my sweet time developing it, because I really wanted to do it justice, but you can tweak a site forever so I'm launching today. The site's running EE2.0 with a minimal set of add-ons (Freeform, FF Matrix), although lots more are installed (this is a sandbox after all). Coded in HTML5, with a sprinkling of CSS3. Fonts by Typekit, FF Meta Web Pro for body text, Bonveno CF for other things (for IE this becomes Anisette). IE6 users get a stripped down stylesheet with a little humorous message telling them to at least consider upgrading their browser. I'm aware the @font-face type rendering is better on a Mac (then again, what isn't?) and there are some issues with FOUT in some browsers, but if you can't push the envelope a bit on your own site then where can you? I haven't checked yet in IE7, but in IE8 it looks as good as it's going to get. The rss feed is still missing live and I probably won't be adding comments. So there you have it! If you like it, drop me a tweet or drop me a line. Thanks for stopping by.


05/22/11--16:08: Grant Lee Buffalo live (chan 1208672)

Grant Lee Buffalo were on of my favourite bands of the 90's and I vividly remember the concert they did at the now defunct Pacific concert hall in Antwerp, back in '94 or '95. A traditional bass-drum-guitar lineup, they produced a massive wall of sound of epic proportions, with both Grant Lee Phillips's 12-string acoustic guitar and Paul Kimble's bass both fuzzed up in anger when needed. All 4 albums they released were great, with Fuzzy and Mighty Joe Moon both vying for a spot in my desert-island album list. After disbanding in 1999, singer Grant Lee Phillips released a few great solo albums (most notably Mobilize), but that GLB sound was gone... until yesterday. When the trio took to the stage and launched into The Finest Hour, it was like being taken into a timewarp, that sound immediately evident. It also showed just how important the interplay between Grant Lee (a great singer in his own right) and Kimble is to GLB's sound. Not a lot of people present at the Royal Circus, Brussels, a bit surprising as there were only 4 European dates. Still, the audience loved it and it was apparent how much GLB loved to be on stage. Those present got a truly magical concert, with mostly tracks from the first 2 GLB albums. Highlights? A beautiful Mockingbirds (maybe my fave GLB song), an almost hypnotic Bethlehem Steel, an elegiac You Just Have To Be Crazy, and the almost obligatory Fuzzy and Jupiter And Teardrop. The only song missing from the setlist for me was Hyperion And Sunset. Really hope that this reunion is no one-off because on stage was a band that was really kicking, not a nostalgia trip. Also kudos to whoever was manning the soundconsole, this was the best live sound I've heard in ages. Several tracks from the concert are on youtube


09/18/11--17:14: Someone that I used to know (chan 1208672)

A great track from Belgian-Australian songwriter Gotye (Gaultier) from Making Mirrors, an album that gets better with every listen.Available on the site as a 24-bit download as well, if sound quality matters to you.


12/07/11--09:07: Farewell Steve (chan 1208672)

When I went to university in 1986, the VUB (University of Brussels) was one of the first in the country to have a computer room with about 15 Macintosh computers. For a kid whose parents couldn't even afford a Commodore64, walking into that room was like walking onto the bridge of the Enterprise. It had a mouse, a graphical user interface and 128kb of RAM. I dropped out of college in '89 and drifted away from computers for about a decade, but I was a Mac convert since that day. In '99 with the rise of the internet I got a G4 (which lasted me a long, long time) and back into working with computers. In the decade that followed we saw the iMac, G5, G4 Cube, OS X and Apple's expansion into consumer media with the iPod, iTunes and eventually the iPhone and iPad. In '99 people would roll their eyes when you said you were a Mac user, nowadays all my friends and family own an Apple product of some kind. The success of the company since Jobs' return to the helm has been unprecedented. Today that man is no more but I'm sure his spirit lives on in the company he created. Visionary, consummate showman and public speaker, charismatic dictator (the famed reality distortion field); Jobs has been called al these things and more and probably was all these things and more. Trailing through some websites today, reading the comments, a few petty souls still can't help jabbing him one last time. I guess you can't get to the level he was without at least annoying some people. So be it. I for one am going to miss the keynotes, where Jobs introduced new soft- or hardware, the unbridled enthusiasm with which he showed off yet another Apple device or innovation. It's clear that Apple was his life's work and his passion. I'm grateful for all the cool stuff he unleashed and for giving me the tools I work with every day. Rest in peace, Steve, you will be sorely missed.


12/13/11--02:40: Moon river (chan 1208672)

There's something about Lisa Hannigan that just leaves me defenseless. 2 minutes of pure class, with Richard Hawley backing on guitar. I'm sure Mercer and Mancini would have approved.