London Sound Survey

I had this great idea about a year ago: Wouldn’t it be great if there was an audio version of the geograph project. A visual map of the UK divided into grids with each grid offering a sound recording made from that location. Read more

Cloud Hosting for Beginners

Recently the time came for Scenography the Theatre Design website to move to a new server, we were a victim of our own success, increased visitor numbers and users meant increased bandwidth and storage bills, we’ve often considered moving to a VPS or even a server of our own, but at the moment that seemed like overkill – however there is an alternative to medium to large websites needing to stretch their arms: Cloud Hosting. Read more

Premium Wordpress Themes and Laziness

I admit it I was far to lazy do create my own wordpress theme for this site, I seem to have spent the last 2 months working on code, wordpress themes and web site designs… the truth is I’d much rather be doing something else. So the prospect of designing and coding my own wordpress theme was just one step too far. I’d never bought a premium wordpress theme before and hadn’t really intended on doing so. What I needed for my site was something that dealt with video embedding nicely I first looked at the free Videographer theme by Zoomstart. It worked fairly well, but perhaps wasn’t pretty enough and would have required a bit of extra work. My hunt around the web and the wordpress theme repositories didn’t pull up anything useful or even that useable for my needs.

Then I happened across the Tubular theme by Brian Gardner and available from Studiopress. Video embedding is dealt with very well, and it’s attractive out of the box, the code is nicely laid out and the css is easy to edit – all in all it’s a very nice package and as you would expect (you hope) from a premium wordpress theme there’s good support available in the support forums.

I know some people would reel at the thought of paying for a premium theme when there are so many good free themes out there… but I’m just happy to have something that works and if that means spending a little money so be it.

From Gallery2 to Wordpress

After over a year using Gallery2 to display my audio recordings i’ve decided to give it the axe. Part of my decision was the need to move the audio files off of my hosting account and save myself some bandwidth but also because I’ve grown a little unhappy with Gallery2. Ultimately it is designed as an image gallery  - but even so I’ve found it to be a complicated, over designed resources hog. Gallery3 is currently in development and maybe that will be better. But I don’t think it’s an environment that’s going to work displaying audio recordings. Also I can’t help but think that a Wordpress installation with the right plugins can produce something just as effective as Gallery2 and possibly even Gallery3.

DSA Media made us a great gallery/album system for Scenography – The Theatre Design Website, it’s simplicity is genius compared to a Gallery2 installation it’s a real dream and so easy to maintain and use.

I’ve now converted my audio files to movie files and hosted them on Vimeo. They’re all in here and you may browse through them using the categories link on the right.

More about using Vimeo later!

Trains in the Snow

While taking a walk in the Snow (February 2009) I came across the amazing sight of the midland mainline trains rocketing through the snow leaving mini snow vortices in their wake. Read more

Elvaston Castle

Elvaston Castle is on the verge of being turned into an elite golf course and hotel. Join the fight toSave Elvaston Castle

This Tree Belongs To: Art Installation/Protest part of the campaign to save Elvaston Castle Read more

Sutton Bonington in the Snow

Photographs of Sutton Bonington in the Snow (February 2009) Read more