URL: dharmafly.com/crunchies

Planet what?

‘Planet‘ sites are a new and wonderful way to draw people with common interests together online… and today is the day we get to demonstrate how.

What’s all this green stuff?

This weekend, at Barcamp Brighton3, we’re giving Brighton’s best New Media pros some special treats, in the form of Dharmafly Crunchies; little boxes of spirulina (it’s like a tiny green seaweed), known for being a potent superfood.

The fancy boxes were designed along with the brilliant minds of John Cooper (Kapow.me) and Ellen de Vries.

Why?

We’re hoping that spirulina’s special powers will entice these social media buffs to go online and post tweets, blogs, photos and videos of themselves ‘doing stuff’ with their Dharmafly Crunchies.

What’s happening on Planet Crunchy right now? Take a look.

So what’s a Planet for?

A ‘Planet‘ site can draw people together online under one coherent, enthusiastic umbrella. So they’re particularly effective tools for social media campaigns where you want to get people discussing a hot topic, and find out who’s talking about you.

Lifestreams are another great use for Planet technologies. They can be used to round up all your online and offline activities to keep and share them in one place.

A Planet site for you?

If you want to find out more about using Planets for campaigns, for you as an individual, or you want to be involved in building one, get in contact and we can give you lots of enthusiastic help.

What’s under the bonnet?

It looks like magic, but in fact it uses a whole host of web technologies. It takes in RSS feeds from Technorati, Google blog search and a load of social networking and news sites, passes them through Yahoo Pipes and SimplePie and finally into WordPress, along with a smattering of jQuery, combining them together into one seamless package.

URL: goomusic.net

Goo Music are a vibrant, young band management company in London. They manage The Subways, a high-energy band who are currently putting together the final touches to their second album and are about to launch a world tour.

We’ve created a distinctive website for the business, in the style of a one-page fanzine that keeps itself up-to-date with feeds from the Twitter and MySpace profiles of both Goo Music and The Subways.

Photographic

The site design uses a layering of photographic images:

• a pavement from Lancaster
• an old plectrum
• a penny
• a guitar cable, and
• a stapled stack of papers (actually it’s part of a manual for LSL, the scripting language used in Second Life)

We now have browsers that can handle part-transparency in images (since Internet Explorer 6 finally left the scene). So, it has become possible to sculpt this kind of photographic layering into a website, bringing the viewer into a richer visual environment. It can be more laborious to create such a design than with standard techniques, but the results can be impressive.

Semantic

Although we have gone for a highly visual design, we have also given full consideration to accessibility and the usage patterns of different users. For example, the design adapts well to different text sizes in the browser and it is built on a backbone of semantic HTML, for the benefit of screen readers, search engines and the best of the Semantic Web.

The site is constructed from HTML microformats (specifically, hAtom, hCard and xFolk). These are small building blocks of information that can be read by both humans and computers.

We’ve used microformats to build the site’s blog posts, contact information and links, where they allow people to interact with the information in useful ways. For some ideas about how to interact with microformats, see the Bangladesh River Journey post.

Full RSS Feeds from MySpace

To bring in content from MySpace, we had to be a bit sneaky. MySpace, for all its wisdom, doesn’t provide full RSS feeds. For example, the feed for The Subways’ blog shows just the first couple of sentences of each post.

We first tried using the Dapper service, which lets you convert HTML on any website into RSS feeds and more. However, as you’ll see from the Dapper feed we created, and its resultant RSS feed, Dapper doesn’t quite have the sophistication yet to deal with MySpace. So, we took advantage of Scott Reynen’s MySpace Feed Creator web service to create a full RSS feed, which we then convert back into HTML on the Goo Music website.

Road Crew

Full kudos to Aidann for his rough and ready design, Pete for forging the CSS styling and Kaanchan for the back-end piping of feeds. Rock on…