Jon Phillips - Streaming

A New Begining And Some Infos About The New Design

Jon Phillips — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:33:23 +0000

My last design for this site sucked in a major way (in my opinion), so I decided to do something about it and redesign it. If you’re reading via RSS please come have a look. Oh and I have a feeling this will be a long ass post!

The New Design

This new design is really just an experiment. Here’s what’s under the hood:

Six Shooter released a CSS template some time ago called ‘Motion‘ and I really liked it. I’ve been thinking of using this as the foundation for a free WordPress theme I want to release, so why not give it a try here first?

The Simple Javascript Accordions (jQuery) by DezinerFolio is what powers the ‘menu’. Ok it’s not your typical horizontal menu bar, but I find it’s pretty slick.

Ok, well the Motion template is nice, but I needed a CMS to power the blog, so of course I used WordPress. Here’s there list of plugins I use:

Chunk URLs For WordPress: This is a great WordPress plugin! It happens sometimes people will leave a comment with a long URL (cause people usually don’t take the time to write the ‘a href’ code when they leave comments, or they simply don’t know any HTML), this plugin will simply shorten the URL and make sure it don’t break your layout. Very useful!
Enforce www Preference: This simple plugin will either add or remove the ‘www’ in your URL. Search engines love this.
Flickr RSS: This is the plugin that powers the ‘Flickr’ section on the homepage. Really easy to use, very straight forward. Just needed some styling.
Gravatar: Gravatar stands for ‘Globally Recognized Avatars’. When you leave a comment on a ‘Gravatar enabled blog’ your pic will appear next to your comment. It’s fun and it looks good!
My Twitter: Since I’m a huge fan of Twitter I though I’d display my latest Tweets on here, you can see this in action in the ‘Social’ section no the homepage. This plugin is so freakin’ easy to use!
Sociable: Sorta like the ultimate social bookmarking plugin. I usually prefer to hard code the social bookmarking stuff but this is a time saver!
WP RSS Import: I had to find a way to display my latest stumbles in the ‘Social’ section. What I did was to grab my StumbleUpon RSS Feed, burned the feed in my Feedburner account (that’s just another experiment, you don’t need to actually burn your feed in Feedburner), and this plugin made it pretty easy to display my latest Stumbles. You could actually use this one to display any other feed, from another blog of yours or even from news sites and stuff.
Subscribe To Comments: Basically this one sends an email to commentators that are subscribed when a new comment is posted. Useful to get repeat visitors.
Akismet: That’s a no-brainer.

Why Go The ‘Minimalist’ Route?

Well I’m sick and tired of the term ‘web 2.0′ in design! I mean, ‘web 2.0′ has absolutely nothing to do with design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as big a fan of RSS, syndication, blogging and all as the next guy, but glossy isn’t my style. So I really didn’t wanted to go that route for this blog. I thought of designing something grungy, but changed my mind at the last minute. There’s already a truck load of people doing grunge designs, and a lot of them are very good at it, so keep up the good work guyz!

Oh and no I didn’t forget to add a sidebar. It’s just that I can live without one.

Love It, Hate It?

Now, I guess it’s time for me to ask you what you think! I know for sure some people will totally hate this new look, but that’s fine! As I said it’s an experiment. Of course if you think the design is cool, well lemme know. Whether you love it or hate it, I’m pretty happy with it (and I’m gonna start writing more stuff too)

Saw IV - Stop The Pain!

Jon Phillips — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:47:38 +0000

I went to the movies last week-end for Saw IV, and in my opinion the first Saw is still the best one, in fact I think they should have stopped there, the new one is painful (not as in ‘horror’ or ‘disgusting’ but as in ‘bad’), but when a movie is that popular, I guess you wanna cash in
Here’s a deleted scene.

It’s Been A While!

Jon Phillips — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:09:48 +0000

So, if any of you were wondering where I’ve been, well.. everywhere, except on this blog, so I thought now was the time to do something about it, and redesign it, move things around a little. Hope you like the new design. It’s still a work in progress, but I plan on spending some time here building my portfolio and tweaking things.

Actually the reason I’m writing this is because my last post was in July, over 3 months ago, and a lot of things have changed and I decided to turn this blog into some sort of an “online portfolio/design blog” kinda thing. I still run my other blog and it’s going fine, and I also started another one called FreelanceFolder, with a bunch of great writers such as Dave Navarro (no, not the guitar player, the guy behind Your 30 Hour Day ).

On the musical side, things are going awesome, we’re still in the studio recording the album, which should be out real soon. We’re also working on the website, which should be ready to go live pretty soon. Stay tuned!

Ear Sucker Now With B5Media

Jon Phillips — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:15:21 +0000

Just a quick note to let you folks know that my blogging friend Roberta, who runs the killer “Ear Sucker” music blog, recently joined the b5Media team/network.

b5Media is a network of blogs, they have something like 240 blogs, in 14 channels, and over 2.5 million visitors per month on the network. How cool is that?

Congrats Roberta, you truly deserve it!
Visit Ear Sucker (what a great domain name!)

Now I really want an iPhone! :)

Jon Phillips — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:47:21 +0000

Now, come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to spend 600 bucks and get one? See all it can do?

I’m Selling My Ibanez (SOLD)

Jon Phillips — Mon, 28 May 2007 05:04:15 +0000

Yep, i’m selling this baby, an Ibanez Prestige RG3120, here are some specs:

- Maple bolt-on neck with Rosewood fretboard
- Quilted Flamed Maple Top, Twilight Blue, Mahogany Body
- 24 Jumbo frets - Floyd Rose Lo-Pro Edge
- Dimarzio Tone Zone and PAF Pro pick-ups (stock)
- 5-way pick-up selector
- Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom, 10-56
- Tuned down 1 step and drop C

Reason i’m selling this guitar is to buy a Gibson VOS 1959 Standard which goes for around 4 grand. If you are interested in the Ibanez, please contact me using my contact form! Thanx a lot!

Guitar Videos

Jon Phillips — Sat, 26 May 2007 04:09:41 +0000

Here are 2 little videos i did a while back, the first one is actually some warm-up stuff, and a bit of a solo i did in a song from my previous band! and the second video is the chorus of a song from my previous band aswell (tapping )

I just found those little movie clip on my comp (lost somewhere) and i said to myself “mah… why not”, of course, I’ll put more recent videos eventually, but here it is for now!

12 Year Old Drummer That Totally Rocks!

Jon Phillips — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:16:37 +0000

Hey folks, here’s a video of Daniel, a young drummer I know, he’s been playing for about 3-4 years now, Mathieu (my best bud and drummer) is his drum teacher!
And Daniels’ sister, Samantha, is definitely gonna be a kick-ass guitar player! (hey i’m her guitar teacher)
Check out Daniels’ video! Hope you like it! Feel free to leave comments, i’m sure Daniel would appreciate it!
(* I thought it would be cool to give Daniel a little exposure, so here it is!)

No Need To Photoshop When You Have A Brand New Imac!

Jon Phillips — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 05:06:22 +0000

My friend (and drummer) bought a brand new 20 inches IMac not so long ago, and took some piictures using the built-ni cam! When i got those pics, i couldn’t help but think it would be cool to post that on here to show what can be done with that built-in cam! That was after i stopped laughing! Here are some samples! Enjoy!

Little Design Update - Was About Time!!!

Jon Phillips — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:49:53 +0000

If you’ve been on my site before (if not, well… Welcome! Enjoy your stay! Glad to have you here!), i updated the layout/design… damn it’s hard to find a wordpress theme that looks good (to my personal taste.. hey it’s my site after all! hehe) and that is not a pain to customize! The one that’s on right now kinda looks good (i like the rotating header thing.. just hit refresh and you’ll see), but 4-5 hours to customizing a “simple” theme is way too long… I might as well make one from scratch! (mmm.. good idea Jonathan! Do it.. and use Cutline theme this time!!) The K2 theme just doesn’t cut it for this site… and still the theme that’s on is not “there yet”…. oh well, i’ll work on that later, gotta go to sleep now!
And i need more pics for the rotating header!

By the way i haven’t forgotten about the guitar videos, it’s in the process, i’ll upload some this week for sure!

Take care! Cya!