Holy Cats!

Hello everyone!

It’s been awhile, I know, but that’s because I’ve been rockin’ it over at Electric Mohawk a lot these days.  If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it! I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the site and I’ve been very privileged to have wonderful writers on staff.  The site was launched on July 5th, and I have already seen some tremendous results. Your support is appreciated!

I’ve also been in talks with Alex Zavistovich about releasing an update for the Molotov iScream, an app I worked on with a few others last year as a fundraising initiative for the Molotov Theatre (they’re pretty awesome, check them out if you’re in the DC area).  The update will include:

• Refactored code
• Optimized scream selection
• iPad version

Electric Mohawk… Redesigned!

Upon my return from Lollapalooza last week, I began working on the redesign for Electric Mohawk, my music blog. The site is a personal project of mine that is informal and provides music news, reviews, bootlegs, and whatever else I feel like posting on the site.

I was surprised to find that before my departure to Chicago, Gary Flavin of PointZeroDesigns said that he had a new logo and background image in the works for me. Not only did this save me a lot of time, but Gary is simply just amazing at what he does, so I knew I would be receiving a quality logo.

Big thanks goes out to Gary for taking the time to make the new logos for me. It made the redesign process much easier for me and breathed some new life into the site.

Check out the site when you have some time, and let Gary know he did a spectacular job in assisting me with the redesign

New Site: Electric Mohawk

I’m pleased to announce the recent launch of a new website I created called Electric Mohawk.  The site is a music blog centered around my musical interests and will ultimately include live audio downloads, reviews, random rants, and (eventually) guest writers.

The site, like this one is WordPress powered, and was one of the first sites I updated to WordPress 3.2. Overall, I’m very impressed with the update.  As the site grows, I will be adding more functionality and features that I hope will benefit the readers.

The design isn’t 100% final, maybe 85% at best. In defense, many sites are constantly re-vamped and tweaked in order to become more aesthetically pleasing, become more user friendly, or just for the sake of breathing new life into it.

I’m hoping the best for this site, so feel free to check it out and subscribe.

Gashouse Records

This is a website I put together while wrapping up my final semester at UWSP for some friends of mine in California that own and operate Gashouse Records, a start up recording label out of California.  I’ve done some work with them in the past and have known some of the personnel involved with the label for quite a long time.  The label and its artists have a lot of potential and a very strong work ethic. Check out the site and some of the artists on the label. My personal favorite is the first mixtape released by Jasson C called Welcome to Pacoima Vol. 1: J Day.

The site was built using WordPress and a number of plugins, including Share and Follow, Hyper Cache, Cincopa, and a handful of others.

Mostlyjunkfood and A Lesson Learned

All right, folks. This is actually something I helped work on a few months ago as I was wrapping up my studies at UWSP.  I met Marc from mostlyjunkfood from a posting on the WordPress Job Boards.  Initially, the problem posted was an SEO issue,  which was quickly resolved, but there were some other issues with the website.  First, the background image was roughly a 1024×768 image being used as a background for a website.  Second, there were many images on the site that weren’t optimized for the internet.  Third, there were a number of WordPress plugins that were bogging the website’s load time.  Here’s a few things that were done to improve the site performance:

• Instead of using a large image as a background image for the website, I took a slice of the image and made it seamless using GIMP.  After that, I applied the new image as the background image and utilized the repeat-x and repeat-y properties for CSS. This reduced load size by over 700 KB.
• The header image, as well as a few other images on the site, were not properly optimized for the web.  The header image alone was over 800 KB before it was optimized.  I’m a firm believer in the Export Wizard feature available in Adobe Fireworks (and you should be, too).  After the image was optimized with the wizard, the size of the image is now roughly 10% of the original size
• For plugins, all unnecessary plugins were removed, and some were replaced with better alternatives. For example, the original caching plugin was replaced with Hyper Cache, one of the best performing caching plugins out there (want proof? Here it is from Tutorial9.)

After those fixes were applied, I was pretty dang happy with the performance, and so was Marc, but there was one more problem: the home page would load, then jump to the middle of the site.  I was afraid that it was something broken in the WordPress install and began talking with Adam from WebMovement, LLC about possibly re-installing WordPress, but Marc found the solution! It turns out the lazy loading feature in the Digg Digg plugin was the culprit and disabling the feature alleviated the issue.

One thing to always remember with WordPress, or any other CMS, always check the plugins.  Typically, a plugin or plugin setting is the culprit in any common CMS issue.  Had I gone and disabled the Digg Digg plugin, I likely would have found the issue. It’s an easy piece of troubleshooting that’s just as easily forgotten.

For all of you out there that enjoy hip hop, indie, or music in general, be sure to check out what Marc and the gang are up to on mostlyjunkfood.com. They always keep the content fresh and have been great to work with!