In the last three days, I’ve done what is becoming a regular approach to the last bit before a site ceases to lurk and becomes public, which is to go through everything and make all the code coherent, add in anything new that has become standard, remove old stuff, and then completely strip the CSS before rebuilding it one section at a time. This last act usually removes a staggering amount of lines, gets rid of tiny weird problems, and generally smooths everything out so it’s not a couple of thousand lines of not really connected styles. It’s pretty methodical, like digging the garden, and fits my mania for as much cleaning up as possible.

And in eighteen months, that’s like a couple of decades in real life, so there was masses to change. One sad thing was the departure of WPAlchemy, which I’d been using as my always-use code for custom fields. It’s just not being developed as much as it used to, and the absence of repeating fields is something I can’t work with. So obviously I swapped the entire site over to Advanced Custom Fields (more digging of garden), which I feel vaguely confident will still be here in another two years. It’s actually brilliant and I can’t imagine doing a project without it.

Another big change was the rolling into Core of MediaElement.js, my favourite audio and video player (when I’m not using FlowPlayer, which doesn’t support audio anyway), which meant removing all my stuff that I’d set up to use this, and hooking into the core for all of Thomas’ audio and video — of which there is masses.

So, what else? Typography is using exlijbris’ Delicious family, which I find beautiful either for body or headlines; the M+ M Type 1 monospace, not sure when I discovered this, but it’s a very nice monospace; and a couple of occurrences of Genericons, which I find pretty useful for the slew of times icons are needed.

When I first began Thomas’ site, I was using jQuery to make images greyscale and then go colour on hover, which for some browsers (*cough*Safari) was mostly painful. Lucky in the intervening months pure CSS greyscale has become common enough to use, and it’s very nice (except in Firefox, which doesn’t animate the transition).

And then there’s all the loops for the individual projects pages, which hide sections if there’s no content (easy with ACF), and with the check of a box shift them around according to how wide the upper and lower rows (I call them ‘rooms’ …”Upper Room” harhar) are.

That’s about it. When I started it, I wasn’t doing any responsive design, and in the months since it’s become something I don’t even think about, it’s just part of the process, which means I suspect on some devices this site isn’t going to be so coherent. Maybe something to organise later, as making the horizontal layout collapse for smaller screens is fairly simple.

Fourth site for the month, then. The beautiful musician, composer, friend of dancers and choreographers who I really don’t see enough of (too much working to be hanging around in Berlin, where he doesn’t live anyway), Thomas Jeker now has a website where you can see what he’s been doing for the last several years, listen to his work and watch videos. I’d probably take an hour or so just to wander around: thomasjeker.ch.

Thomas Jeker — 1. arriving

Thomas Jeker — 2. news

Thomas Jeker — 3. Music For:

Thomas Jeker — 4. Music’s tail

Thomas Jeker — 5. Too Far Again …

Thomas Jeker — 6. Kasimir & Karoline

Thomas Jeker — 7. Shuffling sections

Thomas Jeker — 8. Collapsing sections

Thomas Jeker — 9. Single row

Thomas Jeker — 10. Greyscale colour images

Thomas Jeker — 11. Thomas himself

Thomas Jeker — 12. 404 absence

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Still not sure how I came to Justina Robson, but there was one post from a couple of years ago with her name, and a link to her website, and obviously I clicked it, and then had a read around and came to the conclusion I might enjoy Natural History, described as “far future hard SF”. This is always tricky for me, new authors. In sci-fi, I quite determinedly (though not always, viz. 2312), limit myself to female authors. This is because there ‘are not so many’, meaning there’s an industry-wide habit of shunting anyone of the ‘gentler persuasion’ off towards what they should be writing, lest they get vapours, or otherwise damage their delicate constitution messing about in the men’s toolshed, i.e. pushed into writing fantasy, which largely I don’t like (though I seem to read with some regularity, and when it’s good – Pratchett, or the recent discovery of Saladin Ahmed – it’s sublime). And then given that there are in truth very few sci-fi writers I think genuinely transcend the condition of the time from within which they write, who actually understand the genre as a philosophical exercise in imagining possible worlds in which we could aspire to live, and in doing so underline the hypocrisies and smallness of this one – even if writing very-near future speculative sci-fi and getting the massive historical changes gender, sexuality, and identity are undergoing (yes, this does matter, and if you think it’s irrelevant to any plot, you’re participating in some fairly heavy colonialism), and once past that substantial hurdle can then write something that is as tangible as my experience of this world, well mostly I experience disappointment.

So I picked up Natural History, and have no idea what to think yet, and am trying to be strictly non-judgemental as I get through the opening scenes. One way or another, I suspect I’ll mention it in my annual reading list.

Justina Robson — Natural History

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Terry Pratchett — The Wee Free Men

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I picked this one up when I was at St. George’s, ordering a bunch of aforementioned tomes which shall commit serious haæmorrhaging on my precarious funds. But who cares? Five euros to enter this brilliant world. This one turns out to be the first, and also one I’ve read before; so many and I often forget which I’ve read until I’m part-way in. Not that it matters, a bit like Harry Potter, I can come back to them every few years with some enthusiasm.

Terry Pratchett — The Colour of Magic

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So, kitaonline.com is not a place where parents hand over their young children (though there is a number of the ankle-dwellers downstairs), it’s the Kleine Internationale Theater Agentur, who translate theatre works and do sub- and surtitles for performances; vaguely the same people who are also TEATRIS and Alte-Kantine Wedding, who reside downstairs in the old Uferhallen BVG Kantine, and whom I’ve helped out for their other two websites, as well as rehearsed/performed/taught with Dasniya there.

This site we began earlier in the year, with the idea for a “very simple site” which also had a table of all the projects they’ve done and all this in several languages. Lucky I’d a) done multilingual before and b) had been messing around seriously in DataTables so I was like a child waving around a something sharp with no idea of its sliciness, but wanting to find out.

Another kind of sliciness is WordPress (“used by 17% of the interwebz!”) and its multilingual support. Lack thereof, that is. Yes, it is well-fine internationalised, and swapping between individual languages is more-or-less basic, and it does each language very well, but two at the same time? Let alone seven. For a long time there’s only been one good free plugin, qTranslate, which I used to use without fail, and despite its shortcomings is very nice, light, fits in with the simplicity of the WordPress ethos. Shortcomings though. Like breaking on every WP update, and finally earlier this year with WP3.5 rendered useable only through some long hours of patching, which ultimately threw me into the maw of WPML. Which I can now say I can make work with everything I regularly use.

KITA, then. Where to begin? I started on the bones of WordPress’ TwentyTwelve theme. Just a habit, really, because I don’t want to have to endlessly write those bones, and also because I know if something doesn’t work, it’s not one of the fundamentals where to “doesn’t work” lies. Anyway, by the time I’m finished, there isn’t much of the original left. I’ve started using CodeBox to manage all my snippets (gah! I even downloaded Git the other night) earlier in the year, and it makes getting all the basics up and running a splendidly quick process (better than hacking around in a half-remembered project looking for the bit that does that something … umm what was it? … ). Of that original theme, I kept some of the basic styling and layout, and very tasty “responsive menu”, the one that for small screens swaps into a dropdown list, which ended up being massively useful.

That was for the gallery page. Oh yes, once again, Supersized. I’ve no idea how many times I’ve used this plugin for full-screen galleries, and now that I combine it with ACF’s Gallery Add-On, (and Genericons) I’ve got this well sorted. Only problem was long menu creeping all over nice images. So I rewrote some of the code for the responsive menu, and set it to work for the gallery page no matter what size the screen, and rolled the languages menu into it also.

Anyway, all this is just a nice diversion for what KITA is really about. DataTables! I love this plugin. It’s one of those ones that reward you the more you learn it, it’s insanely powerful for pulling chunks of data and spitting it out in a table which you can then do all kinds of stuff with. And getting Advanced Custom Fields to be the base for this is such a good way to do it.

The idea is each performance KITA has translated can be seen in the table, which can be searched and sorted. They’ve done hundreds of works in the last decade, so that’s a large mass of data to deal with (and I probably should have AJAXed the table but Ajax is what you clean baths with), so I spend some time pondering how to make it easy to add new projects and from that easy to disgorge it into the table.

It ended up being that each project is a separate sub-page (basically a bucket to hold the data and not really a page you’d go and visit) of the original language project page, What we did, with all the info going into ACF custom fields, and the seasons for each project are separate repeating fields. A Date field for the final performance filters whether a project will appear under ‘Current Performances’ or only on the projects table – yes, same data, in one place formatted as a nice line of text, in the other as a row in a table – and another field to declare what the Artist column should be sorted by.

At the other side, what you see uses a couple of the DataTables plugins: Fixed Columns, and Column Visibility; and then 300 or so lines of jQuery to do the fancy stuff. Lots of little things like taking the hash from an URL and putting it in the search field, sorting the artists based on that hidden field (because obviously sorting by ‘last name’ doesn’t work when there’s three names or only one and it’s the name of the company and as many exceptions to the ‘last name’ as there are names), removing ‘the, der, die, das, la, le, les…’ from the works’ titles for reordering the columns; responsive hiding or showing of columns based on browser width’ highlighting search terms; translations of all the non-data parts of the table; and everything that appears when it loads for the first time. Yes, code-y excitement.

What else? The address info is formatted using microformats hCard and Schema, which means it can be snagged as an Address Book card right off the page, (as well as being all semantic, y’all. Getting it to validate though, hawhaw, most amusing!. Probably should not try and jam the two formats together, no?) Using webfontloader for the fonts, lettering.js to make the title look nice (released under the excellent WTFPL). And it’s responsive! (Well, it tries to be.)

So, KITA — Kleine Internationale Theater Agentur is alive.

kitaonline.com

KITA Online – english

KITA Online – russian

KITA Online – address with microformats

KITA Online – Supersized gallery

KITA Online – gallery and menu

KITA Online – DataTables

KITA Online – DataTables german

KITA Online – DataTables responsive

KITA Online – DataTables hash filtering

KITA Online – Advanced Custom Fields

KITA Online – same data different formatting

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Yoga & Shibari Wednesday 15th May
For May, once again there is only one training class. If you’d like to come, please register beforehand at workshops@dasniyasommer.de !

When: Wednesday 15th May, 19-23h.
Where: TEATRIS/Alte Kantine
Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt
Uferstr. 8-11
13357 Berlin
More information

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As for the price, well if you bought cheap shoes, harness, ‘biners, and quickdraws, you could probably kit yourself out with everything for sport climbing for the cost of a rope. Which in Australia tended to be on on the high side of $350, so understandably I never shelled out for one. Here though, I have to remind myself that things are relatively affordable, even Shimano SPDs leave change from a hundred for a couple of books (yes, was in bike shop yesterday, bike needs servicing), so, rope it is. Still a sizeable chunk of €200 though (enough left over for enough chocolate to be sick on), but that’s for 70 metres of 9.2 mm Mammut Revelation. Not sure when I’ll be leading a 35 meter pitch, but not to worry, it’s very pretty (the pictures don’t do the colours justice, either).

Mammut Revelation – 1

Mammut Revelation – 2

Mammut Revelation – 3

Mammut Revelation – 4

Mammut Revelation – 5

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Ditching WPAlchemy for Advanced Custom Fields, updating to FlowPlayer 5, swapping all the text, images, video over to those, rewriting the templates, messing around with ways of loading web fonts without ugliness, hmm what else? Adding Apocalypse PRD (even though it was not such a good work, but the poster was quite spectacular, and Emile in Canton Opera demon attire!), adding other stuff (should really replace some of the background images …)

Oh! Yes, video! I’ve been using Flowplayer for ages, since whenever I first tried to find non-Flash video players (video on the internet, despite YouTube and Vimeo and the rest, is a nightmarish horror in inverse proportion to set up as it is a joy to watch), and while for a while I went over to mediaelement.js when HTML5 video became supported enough for me to say, “Sod off!” to browsers that couldn’t handle it – and mediaelements is still my default a lot of the time (it’s light, easy to set up, and is now in WordPress Core; as well, I’ve always liked it) – when FlowPlayer finally made the transition to HTML5 video … drool on floor. Slo-mo and fast-forward, default support for skipping through the timeline, works on Android and iOS … playlists! Actually it was the last one that was important for me, because I’d always had the video as a playlist, and making an ACF {/FlowPlayer playlist in WordPress was mainly what I wanted to do.

So now, I just need to choreograph some new work, no?

Frances d’Ath Website – Index

Frances d’Ath Website – bvg(dy:fr:hf)

Frances d’Ath Website – Apocalypse PRD

Frances d’Ath Website – Jute Disintegration

Frances d’Ath Website – abjection

Frances d’Ath Website – Photography

Frances d’Ath Website – Video

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It’s been planned for a while, and with me running WordPress 3.6 bleeding edge nightlies on a couple of sites to test the impending Post Format Tumblr-isation and rolling of mediaelement.js into the core for video and audio, and the sad demise of WPAlchemy (well, it’s still going and for many situations it’s beautiful code, it’s just that I can feel it going the way of qTranslate, and the multilingual disaster that was), and me replacing that everywhere with the truly brilliant Advanced Custom Fields … Dasniya’s site was last properly attended to – when it was made one with WordPress – two or so years ago, which makes it creakingly old. Dasniya also was making noises about having a proper blog to dump all kinds of things that didn’t really fit into the current table-sized site, and I was also looking at FlowPlayer again for video, since they released the HTML5 video player with awesome slo-mo/fast-forward functions (as well as all the other stuff that make it my favourite when needing more than what mediaelement.js can do).

So once finishing my site last week, I began hacking away at Dasniya’s. Some days later, after a quite intense coding jag, it emerged around 5am this morning. In-between, I truly spent way too much time looking at the SQL database and so much PHP and jQuery and CSS and making everything work together, and of course once the great, broad strokes have been swung, it comes down to shuffling things around by the pixel.

Overall, it looks the same, behaves the same, though the typography and layout has been given much more attention, and I’ve lopped close to half all the code out. In turn, I added back in that half in the form of her blog, Zur Zeit, which takes advantage of aforementioned Post Formats for video, images, galleries, and the slightly obscure asides and statuses. Not quite finished yet, still beating at the code a little, getting it to work in various browsers … in another two years I’ll probably do the same again and look at my old code and wonder what I was thinking.

Dasniya Sommer Website — Klicken

Dasniya Sommer Website — Video

Dasniya Sommer Website — Kontakt

Dasniya Sommer Website — Demnächst

Dasniya Sommer Website — Zur Zeit

Dasniya Sommer Website — Blog Footer

Dasniya Sommer Website — Images & Gallery

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Quick being about a day and an half. First I had to swap all the old custom fields code from outdated plugins (sadly departing from WPAlchemy), then get it working with the new (yay (etc)! ACF), then get Flowplayer 5 working with playlists (much mashing ‘return’ until things spluttered into existence, somehow failed to get the JavaScript method working), then playing with all the new methods … yawn, there goes a day … Then deciding I should re-encode the video to whatever format will be outdated in a year or two, and then deciding to add some new pages and videos of old projects … and finally going through all the templates and html5-ising them, cleaning up junk … hopefully it all works. (It did remind me I need to make some new work also.)

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