• December 19th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Music
  • Review

Below are my most listened albums of 2007 (in no particular order). The only requirement for these selections were that they must be solid albums as a whole (no skipping tracks here!). These albums are must-haves for anyone serious about music. I’ll be announcing my top 10 before the end of the year is out so stay tuned.

* under the radar - a true gem

• Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
• The Bees - Octopus
• Interpol - Our Love To Admire
• Ulrich Schnauss - Goodbye
• The Thrills - Teenager
• Tegan & Sara - The Con
• Taken By Trees - Open Field
• Stereophonics - Pull The Pin
• Sigur Ros - Hvarf-Heim
• The Shins - Wincing The Night Away
• Rogue Wave - Asleep At Heaven’s Gate
• The Rakes - Ten New Messages
• Radiohead - In Rainbows
• Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
• New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom
• LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
• Kings Of Leon - Because Of The Times
• Kanye West - Graduation
• Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob
• The Good, The Bad, & The Queen (Self Titled)
• Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace
• Explosions In The Sky - All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Devendra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Baby 81
• Band Of Horses - Cease To Begin
• Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare
• The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
• The Go! Team - Proof Of Youth

 

Albums from 2006 that had heavy rotation in 2007

• Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out Of This Country
• The Rifles - No Love Lost
• Koop - Koop Island
• We Are Scientists - With Love And Squalor

Want to see my listening habits? Check out my Last.fm profile.

Of course if you want to give a quick listen to any band mentioned above I recommend Hype Machine.

Did I forget anything? Feel free to comment to add anything I may have missed! (Although I may disagree.)

Popularity: 12% [?]

• December 1st, 2007
• Filed in
  • Review
  • Web Development
  • Work

Recently I’ve begun work on a newer, cooler, better, version of Costumzee.com with the elite hax0rs over at Mech Media. Scott and I decided to utilize a php temple engine called Smarty for better separation of code and presentation. A couple things worth noting before I dig in here:

1. The extent of my PHP knowledge is minimal - what I know of PHP is what I’ve done when tinkering with WordPress
2. My knowledge of backend web development is also minimal. I’ve been a frontend guy my whole web career. I pwn xhtml/css/javascript, but server-side dev is completely new to me (I’m finally nipping that knowledge-gap in the butt).
3. I do have knowledge of template engines. When I worked on Quibblo.com full time, we used the Perl Catalyst Framework and I got savvy with Template Toolkit which allowed me to dive into Smarty fairly quickly.

But without further ado.. Couple things I Love about Smarty

• The {debug} function. At the drop of a hat I can see everything available to me and integrate it on the front end (.tpl files).
• Plugins. I needed a way to paginate, and with minimal knowledge I was able to leverage SmartyPaginate to get the job done.
• I was productive day 1. It’s PHP (which is not a challenging language to begin with) and there’s a separation of code and presentation. I’ve dabbled with ROR, and the learning curve of doing something productive, interesting, and unique is just so much easier, because you don’t have to worry “am I doing this the way they want me to?”.
• Smarty documentation is awesome. It’s brief and concise with really world useful examples. When I do get tripped up with something Smarty related it’s a matter of referencing the documentation and in a couple minutes I’m on my way.

The very few things that I’ve gotten stuck on have been mostly due to a lack of my PHP knowledge and not so much a result of issues with Smarty so far. And unique to my situation, I had Scott right there to bounce questions off of when I hit a wall which was also great.

All in all it’s a great to leverage a templating engine like Smarty when you’re beginning to learn more about backend web development. I’ve always shied away from it because I was always working with other programmers that were more than capable in that area and my talents were always restricted to the front-side of the glorious interweb.

I was never interested much in PHP. I always felt like the future of the web was with a framework like Ruby On Rails, but I am pleasantly surprised with my Smarty experience so far and it’s made me excited to develop with PHP more down the road.

Currently, I’m developing with ROR and Smarty and I hope to compare and contrast the two in the future, stay tuned.

Popularity: 11% [?]