Of changing plans

Wowee this here blog gets stuffy and cobweb filled waaay too much. Suffice to say we have been busy again – Truck (the music company I work for in my spare time) has been blown apart and then risen again phoenix-like, I have started a music podcast in a bid to not look so lame against David’s regular blogging and of course we are still trying to deliver Anthology so everyone we have excitedly spoken to about it can actually use it!

To bring you up to date with the latest we now have a deadline of the end of this Summer to have something real, tangible, useable and great to release to the world (or at least have a couple of major websites running off of it). We are fed up of being proponents of almost-vapourware!

So the new plan is to hire a programmer to help David finish off all the serious PHP heavy-lifting that needs doing for all the features we want to launch with. It is just proving too large a beast for him on his own. To pay for this we are falling back on our day-to-day skills of web development, and then we just need to find someone either close to home or try out some rent-a-coders (anyone know any good ones?).

Right now we can’t reveal much but what I can say is we have chosen to work on these sites for a few reasons:

• They will help pay for the programmer
• They are for people we know and trust
• And above all, they will demonstrate Anthology’s strengths and be great adverts for its flexibility and power!

Both sites are for pretty cool things that we are excited about – we should be getting to work with some really talented people who are going to be carrying out some pretty cool things with their sites. Oh and I can also tell you that these sites will both be strongly music-based (quelle surprise!).

One last thing – I should mention that we had a great time at BarCamp London 2 and it was ace for me to finally meet a lot of the ‘heavy hitters’ and people out there doing things on the London tech scene – and thanks to everyone who came to our very enjoyable ‘Future of Music’ discussion.

See you at BarCamp

Whew!

Things have been a bit quiet around here, haven’t they?

That’s not to say we haven’t been busy – the lack of posts on here are quite indicative of how hard we’re working on making Anthology extra special.

Anywho, the entire Culture crew is coming along to BarCamp London 2 next weekend. The last BarCamp London was excellent, and I have no doubt that this one will be too.

We’re still not quite ready to show of Anthology to the whole world, but if you’re at BarCamp you might get a sneaky peak – hope to see you there!

Insure your ideas

So, you’ve got a ‘Big Idea’. To get this Big Idea on the move, you are certainly going to have to involve “the dreaded” lawyers at one point or another during the process (in a side note, all advice I have had so far has suggested getting them involved as early as possible, which is what we have done).

Anyway, we have just had a quote from our lawyer for the cost of the first piece of work by him for us – it’s just a few contracts needed to make sure we are covering our backs in certain ways – the only problem is, the price of this work is roughly 10 per cent of the entire budget for getting Culture off the ground. Obviously, this made us balk somewhat and forced us to have a good old think, especially since you can download contracts of this kind from many (seemingly) reputable places on the web, including some recommended by the UK government’s Business Link.

So what is the cost of these contracts online? Only £6.50. Our lawyer wants £400 (plus tax @ 17.5 per cent). We could get roughly 72 downloaded contracts for that price.

It’s obvious which way to go right?

Wrong.

We have every reason to believe that our lawyer is rooting for us all the way and giving us good rates and advice – he is not going to screw us over.

But, this is ten per cent of our budget!

The £6.50 sure does look tempting to go for, and I have read a lot about people using these contracts in real world situations – but how do we know this is going to cover our needs properly (the UK Patent Office themselves say there are ‘no “one-fits-all” agreements’ that can protect you)? And also, none of the people who have used these contracts ever had to actually use them in anger to get them out of a sticky situation, so they go unproven – our lawyer is going to do his utmost to plug any gaps or loopholes and make sure that we are protected and he will stand by his work if things get tough.

What this comes down to is how much you value your Big Idea. You need to look at the use of a lawyer tailoring contracts and agreements to your needs as an insurance policy. You really have no idea if what you have downloaded will cover your ass in a tight spot – you’d have to get a professional to check it over to know that, so why not involve them in the first place? If you think your Big Idea is worth significantly more than that £400 (not forgetting that juicy tax) in the long-run then you should really seriously consider making sure you and your idea are ‘insured’ properly.

Plus, we got a second opinion from our ‘back up’ lawyers. I recommend getting free back up lawyers if you possibly can – parents of your friends are always useful…

Development Progress

It’s been maybe a bit too long since we last updated this here site, but that’s simply because we’re working hard on the development of Anthology. Development being the cause of the post-drought I thought it’s high time we talked about it a little…

Riding the wave of hyped-up “Web 2.0” online applications comes a related wave of developer tools and libraries aimed at making modern online development easier. On the server side Ruby on Rails gets by far and away the most hype – and it certainly has its merits, but also strong negatives (like difficulty in deployment) – but it’s certainly not unique – there are ever larger numbers of rapid development frameworks for almost every language out there. Anthology – for a variety of reasons – doesn’t use any of the current frameworks on the server side; we’re using straight PHP for it’s flexibility and server-ubiquity.

Similarly, there’s a huge proliferation of client side libraries concerned with the GUI and end user experience. The ones I’ve been looking at have all been Javascript based, but there’s also some interesting work going on using Flash and Adobe’s Flex platform – while I’m not normally a huge flash fan (as it’s abused more often then used appropriately) I think there’s interesting possibilities when using it to build online applications. Flash’s traditional problems – accessibility, usability and inflexibility – seem to have been solved if you have a competent Flash developer, and Flash seems quite inherently suited to web app development, with its rich set of user interface abilities.

Back to the Javascript libraries, there are a few main contenders. By far and away the most popular ( according to a poll on Ajaxian ) is the Prototype framework. This isn’t hugely surprising at it’s built in to Ruby on Rails, so I’m guessing a lot of people are using it as they’re getting a lot of functionality without having to write the code themselves (RoR has several methods of integrating the server-side code with the client-side code – it’s all quite nifty). It’s also one of the most basic of the frameworks, adding some fairly simple things to the language making it a good foundation to build your own code on top of.

Indeed, Script.aculo.us – the second place in that survey – is based on top of Prototype and adds a nice additional set of more interface-lead functionality, with effects and basic widget functionality. I’ve used Script.aculo.us on a couple of projects to get a bit more movement into normally static sites, and it works really well. However, it does suffer from what almost all of these libraries suffer from – not very good documentation. When going through that first getting-to-know-you stage with all of the libraries I’ve tried so far, you’ve really got to employ more guess work then you should do – simply because the documentation is often extremely lacking, often being no more then a few bits of example code.

And talking of bad documentation, that leads us straight to Dojo. Now, don’t get me wrong Dojo fans – Dojo is great for a number of reasons I’m just about to get into, but documentation isn’t one of its strengths. Part of the problem seems to be that Dojo is undergoing rapid development, so documentation that was originally written is now out of date and needs redoing. This is coupled with the fact that vast stretches of the basic functionality seem to be undocumented – while you can look at the source when you’re first starting with a framework that’s really no substitute for good docs.

Once you’ve got to grips with it, though Dojo really shines. It offers a complete package – unlike Prototype’s bare-bones approach, or script.aculo.us’ focus on effects Dojo focus’ on allowing you to very quickly make GUI based web applications. To this end, you can quickly add elements such as split views, sortable tables, menus and more to your pages without having to write any javascript, and this is baked up by a strong foundation that handles ajax requests and all the other additional communication functions (such as event handling) your app may need. Dojo also seems to be right on the cutting edge of javascript development currently, with things like the new client-side storage module they’ve developed, which can really open up new possibilities in app design.

Needless to say, I’ve become very impressed with Dojo.

Of the others, newcomer YUI is the most interesting looking to me. For a start, it has a huge amount of resources behind it – Yahoo are basing all of their sites on this foundation – so it’s good, stable, well documented code. My only worry is the file size of the library – the bigger the file size the more your users have to download – while it’s comparable to Dojo, Dojo do some fairly cleaver things with packaging, compression and dynamic loading that really help reduce that initial hit. In addition, YUI isn’t quite as fully featured as Dojo (yet) – I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, however – then it gets really interesting.

Based on the above, we’re using Dojo extensively for Anthology. One of the key aspects that we think will differentiate it from the assorted and varied competitors is the interface, which we’re aiming to be both simple but powerful. Dojo really ties in nicely for rapid development of sophisticated web interfaces – Anthology has a very desktop-app like interface with menus, sortable tables, animations and lots of ajax all of which is really made easy by Dojo.

New Wave Publishing

Hello there, it’s been a while. I have had some fun with a bout of RSI down my right arm, a trip to Hong Kong, and many gigs including Peaches playing an insane show with many skimpy outfits and a giant inflatable phallus, then the next night in the same venue, being utterly blown away (again) by The Knife. Anyway, enough about me…

We want to catch a ride on the wave that is just building momentum. And no, I’m not talking about the so-called ‘New Rave’ scene that David seems to be getting dangerously caught up in.

Just as the advent of PageMaker on the Mac back in the mid-80s brought about the ‘Desktop Publishing Revolution’ so software such as Anthology will help to bring about the ‘Web Publishing Revolution’ twenty years later.

People are becoming aware that they should be the ones filling their websites with content, not their web designers and web designers are realising they don’t want to spend the time updating websites when they need to be creating new ones. This is where CMSs have traditionally been seen as the answer: people can publish their content without needing to know how to code. Unfortunately, the problem with existing CMSs is that they aren’t generally flexible enough for web designers to integrate easily into sites and they aren’t simple for end-users to use to update content.

D Keith Robinson’s article on Vitamin points to people rethinking their ideas about content and to remember that most people ”...just want to correct an error, publish their thoughts, share their knowledge…”, but the only solution he offers up is creating custom CMSs for every job a web designer works on. This is obviously far from ideal for those with little knowledge of PHP and those who are time and/or cash poor.

Another problem with most CMSs is that they have been created to tackle specific problems – a programmer just wants to run their own little site and releases the code as open source once they have done it; a publishing company makes a CMS that is really good for online news sites; and then there are popular content systems like WordPress, Flickr and YouTube… but I digress. My point is that nearly all the solutions out there are far too specialised. What is needed is something far more open and flexible, something that the web designer or even keen home user can easily use to define how they want their content handled, not be at the mercy of trying to bend an inappropriate system to their idea. Using WordPress to run a website off feels to me like trying to do the page layout for a book with Word instead of InDesign.

So, why not create a framework for people that is at once both very flexible and very user friendly? This seems to make perfect sense to me and I have no idea why something combining the two didn’t already exist when we were coming up with Anthology. We are hoping that Anthology will be able to solve many of the frustrations that are faced by people wanting to publish on the web – we want to help break down the barriers to making great content-driven websites – and we think that that is where much of the web will head in the next few years.

Personal Content Publishing

Yes, the acronym is PCP – we may have to think of something better.

That’s what Anthology is about, though – allowing you (yes, you! Errm, except you there. Not you. Everyone else.) to publish online your content. Your content, of course, comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes – some people may want to publish photos, some people want to have a blog, some people want to publish news, album details and tour dates.

Anthology will do all of that.

Oh yes!

Currently, the solutions for this problem of getting your “stuff” online are not very nice (in the same way cougars aren’t*), and if you want to do anything other then a blog they’re really not very nice (at all). It’s very much like trying to put a square peg in a round hole – possible with a large hammer, but not very practical in the long term.

I’ve been using Textpattern a lot recently to solve exactly this kind of problem, and I think currently it’s the best solution out there. It’s perfectly possible with Textpattern is post several different types of content, and construct things like photo galleries and event calendars, but anything more really starts to get very complicated, very quickly. The interface is also a little odd round the edges – it seems as though “normal” people don’t really get certain aspects of the default Textpattern interface, and when you start using in odd ways the problem is only exasperated.

Jeff Croft has a very interesting post on this very subject, and he completely hits the nail on the head; we need a way of managing our different types of content – with complete customisability – and their just isn’t a good solution at the moment.

Without a hint of smug-ish-ness, I can quite confidently say that Anthology will solve all that.

•••

* Unless you face your fears, then they’re quite personable. See Talladega Nights if you don’t understand

A year in the making...

So, what’s the story behind Anthology? Well to make things clear I need to explain a little bit of the history of my life.

I helped to found the independent record label, Truck Records, as art director, back in 1999, a few short months after a group of my friends had held the inaugural Truck music festival. I was only seventeen years old and the oldest of us had only just started university. We all knew each other from the local music scene around Oxford, England, and the others had originally drafted me in to do all the artwork for the festival. Both Truck festival and the label were (and still are) all about fresh-faced optimism and reflect our belief in doing what we think is right and believing that there are other people out there like us who like what we do and want to come along for the ride.

Fast forward to 2005 and we were desperately in need of a website that could keep up with the pace of change in the music industry, and something that reflected the new attitudes to music distribution and promotion. We were still stuck on a site I had designed in 2001, and it committed such crimes as the use of frames ( David – boo! ) and tables ( David – hiss! ) for page layout. People had learnt how to fiddle with the html on the FTP server so that they could update news, show dates, etc but this inevitably had caused the site to become a bit messy and patchy what with everyone doing things a bit differently and forgetting to close html tags and the like. What we needed was a nice spanking new look to the site (long overdue), married with some sort of back-end system that would mean that the least techie of the Truck staff could easily upload news, dates of shows, downloads, artist press shots, CD pack shots etc. And I wanted it to go further than that.

I envisioned a site that someone could just click a button labelled ‘new artist’, for instance, and they would then just have to upload all the assets for that artist (biog, photos, videos, pack shots etc) and, ‘bam’, there on the site would be all the resources needed for any type of user the website would encounter – from music fans (wanting news, tour dates and downloads) to journalists (needing high quality press shots), to distributors and shop staff needing high quality pack shots.

Not only did I want the site to do that, though, I wanted to say what releases (albums, singles, EPs, downloads) were associated with each artist. So for each release you would need the capability to upload the artwork, track listing, any tracks that would be downloadable or previews, and perhaps other details like the catalogue number, release date and so on.

Now when a visitor ended up on an artist’s page on the Truck Records site they would be presented with a nice picture of the artist, their biography, a list of their latest releases all with little pack shots, their upcoming shows, any available free downloads and watchable videos, there might even be a blog written by the artist if they didn’t maintain their own website.

But not only would the artist section work like this, the front of the label site would need to display the latest news, upcoming shows, latest releases and all sorts of other info to lead visitors further into the site and another important aim of the website was to maximise monetization opportunities through our own shop, with site-wide buy links for releases and merchandise.

The whole site would be serviced by one database containing all of Truck’s assets and would service the artists’ pages, the front page, the releases, tour dates, downloads, and shop sections. Any data uploaded into the database would be used throughout the site to make the site a living, breathing reflection of all the activity of everything Truck was up to behind the scenes. And this could help Truck stand up there with a respectable website on a level with much larger entities while it was run by only one full-time member of staff, but also allow the many spare-time workers and assorted interns to maintain it.

OK, so this all sounds great, right? But how on earth to do this? I had heard of things called Content Management Systems before and I assumed this was the situation they were meant for. So I fired up Google and started searching. I went to sites with names like “A million and one open source CMSs” and poked about with things like Drupal. I also read about things like Zope. I read manuals and forums. It started to dawn on me that you pretty much needed to be a programmer to just be able to get these things installed and running. Past bad experiences with getting basic PHP photo galleries to work didn’t fill me with confidence – and the most programming I have ever done was some Basic on my ZX81 back when I was about nine and some fiddling with HyperCard when my parents bought our first Mac back in 1992. So another problem I had was that the £500 budget I had for the new Truck website wasn’t exactly going to cover a programmer who could sort this out for us, let alone build us a custom CMS.

So, anyway, one day around this time, this guy shows up new in the digital department at my day job. He seemed to be doing a pretty good job so I chatted to him about some artist websites Truck needed doing. A few jobs well-done on, and I posited my problem to him. He seemed pretty interested in the challenge and we started discussing the problems involved in doing it.

The story goes that Archimedes was in the bath when he exclaimed ‘eureka’ after figuring out his displacement theory, then went rushing off into the street, still naked due to his excitement. Well, I was in the shower, and I managed to clothe myself before rushing off anywhere. But my eureka moment wasn’t really that exciting – it just seemed to make sense – in fact I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of it before or wasn’t doing it already…

All the thinking I put into my ‘dream record label website’ led us to believe there must be at least some other people out there with the same needs… and the same problem we had: how to make a dynamic, database-driven website if you were just a lowly web designer or entrepreneur with a great idea but no budget for a programmer?

So here was our new plan: develop a system flexible enough to build almost any type of website with, that almost anyone could use, as simple and as powerful as possible. Another big problem most (if not all) the CMSs, blog systems and assorted other website back-ends exhibit is appalling user interfaces. Programmers ain’t graphic designers, and they certainly ain’t usability experts. They think in functions, “it works, what’s the problem?”. Well the problem is that people who aren’t programmers or computers need to use it and they just want it to work without having to jump through hoops to get it to do what they want.

This is what led us to Anthology.

Welcome to Culture!

Welcome, welcome one and all! As the inaugural poster on this spiffy new site I’d just like to say “hi!”. We’re a small bunch of people who are trying to do something interesting – yes, it’s all a bit dotcom/web 2.0 (yuck!), but hey – we don’t choose the buzzwords.

Our product is a little thing called Anthology – of which you can see a pretty picture above. It’s a new way of creating and managing websites that even your mum could use. We’re very excited! Excited like kittens!

We’re going to be detailing the road to Anthology on this here blog – we want you to be as excited as we are, so subscribe to our feed over to the right there to be the first with all the Culture news – be the envy of your friends!

Stay tuned!