Month 105

I tend to lose track of things I’ve managed to get done, so have been thinking about keeping weeknotes for a while. I reckon monthnotes might be a better bet for me, though. This isn’t really in the spirit of things but seems more achievable. I’m going to date them from when I first registered this domain which is also close to when I started freelancing.

So, month 105 then. Off we go…

The beginning of September marked the end of my first major stint doing operations for Suburb. In the 8 months from December we managed to (deep breath) move offices, tweak the business model, re-brand, develop and launch a new site, shift everything onto a shiny new domain, hire a bunch of nice people and improve a lot of the under-the-hood processes and tools. I hadn’t done a great deal of operations work before so I’m grateful to them for taking a punt and trusting me enough to muck about with their business. I hope I’ll get the chance to go back and do phase 2 soon.

After the best part of a year at Suburb and last year’s long run at Grand Union, now feels like a good time to get back into hands-on development. There’s so much exciting stuff happening right now. HTML5, Boilerplate and Usable cross-browser polyfills! OOCSS and responsive web design! Web performance optimisation! Modernizr! The transformative effects of git! node.js and YUI 3! It’s hard to know where to begin… so of course I’ve ended up doing some dull-but-useful WordPress 3.x work for most of this month. Sigh. Next month.

I tried hard to avoid playing Minecraft and succeeded, with a degree of regret. However, avoiding the lure of the craft meant I had enough time to pick up with Uncharted Audio after the traditional summer break (people don’t buy records in the summer, apparently). We launched a new shop based on the rather excellent Bandcamp. No coding required but adding metadata and uploading tracks, art and lyrics took a surprisingly long time. We’re very happy that we can sell records with much less faff, though. We released a free odds and ends compilation called Dance Audit Hour to celebrate (read: plug) the new shop. We wanted to spread it as far and wide as possible so released it under a Creative Commons license. It’s been downloaded a couple of thousand times to date and was featured on WFMU‘s Free Music Archive. Worth doing.

We also released Cursor Miner’s Luna EP…

There isn’t normally the time (or, more to the point, budget) for video but we had to have something for Luna and were lucky to have Jamie Bradshaw make one for us. Watching the renders go from datamoshing test to full-on space glitch earlier in the year was hugely entertaining.

Luna brings us one step closer to the release of Requires Attention, Cursor Miner’s fourth studio album. More about that in month 106, if all goes according to plan.