Over the last couple of days I’ve been working on a pet project of mine and today I bit the bullet and launched www.gossy.us
Gossy is fan site for my favourite artist Matt Goss. There are a couple of really informative fan sites out there and loads of social networking links but nothing pulls them together. So I created a new Wordpress blog and got working on bringing feeds together to develop a dynamic and easy to manage site.
There were a number of things I learned over the last couple of days that have been invaluable for future projects, whether personal or work related.
As we all know Wordpress has some really great plugins and one which came into play today was HITS – IE6 PNGFix. I’d spent some time trying to fix the transparency issue with pngs in IE6 going the hardcoded route but something wasn’t right. Eventually I thought there must be a plugin for this and hey presto – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hits-ie6-pngfix/
Another superb plugin is Tubepress. Tubepress lets you integrate videos from YouTube, either using featured, favourites etc or as I did, from a specific user. It comes with a whole host of customisation options called “Tubepress Shortcodes” which basically let you add things from video runtime to opening videos in a jquery style modal window. Fantastic!
During the development I learned of the Facebook fan box facility. As someone who is still relatively new to Facebook it was something I’d never come across before. I never really like using widgets out of the box, preferring to customise so this is something I’d like to revisit and perhaps later blog on, how to write your own css for Fan box.
Gossy is still very much under development. I like to think I have a good eye for design, especially detail but what I realise time and time again is I can’t do both at the same time. So I imagine I’ll eventually sit down and rethink the site layout but in the meantime I’m reasonably pleased with the simple grunge style I employed.
Any Matt Goss fans out there, let me know what you think either here or at gossy.us. Thanks!
