So I’m going to give it a whirl, it might be rubbish – but lets hope not.

However instead of posting on this site under an F1 category I decided to start a new site entirely dedicated to my F1 musings, to keep it separate from all the techy stuff I write here, so behold F1heat.com.

The elevator pitch for Where to Start With goes like this:

Where to Start With helps you when you’re trying out new bands and artists by providing community-powered recommendations written by die hard fans.

If that new band you want to try has 10 CD’s out, then Where to Start With will give you… well, where to start with them!

The whole idea behind this site came from a need me and my friend found ourselves having; many times we would hear a song or read about a band that sounded interesting but then when we did go to try that band we would find they had a handful of releases out already. Where is the best place to start with them? Traditionally unless you got a specific recommendation for an album you would just try the lucky dip approach and hope you found a winner. If you got lucky you might have just found your new favourite band, however if you picked a rotten egg you may dismiss your potential new favourite band based on your opinion of one of their poorer releases.

A personal example was when I was recommended to listen to Porcupine Tree and given one song to try. That song was awesome, however Porcupine Tree have a massive back-catalogue (9 albums, 6 live/compilation albums and 4 EPs) and from trying a few releases out I found that they are very diverse and I still haven’t managed to get into them, although from that initial song I really wish I could. What I really needed was a guide to tell me where to actually start with Porcupine Tree, for example something that said "for starting out with Porcupine Tree what you really need to buy first is their album X".

This is how Where to Start With was born and also basically how it works — each band or artist will have an article about them which gives a short history/description of the band and each of their main releases (e.g. Albums & E.P.’s) with a little description. Any user can add these articles and each article is in the wiki-style, e.g. anyone can edit the descriptions to add new information and fix mistakes etc.

The real core of the site comes into play when people start adding their opinions on artists, once again anyone can do this, but it is better for people who are currently fans of the artist to add their opinion. Each opinion includes a rating, a recommendation (more on those later) and a personal comment on each of the albums for the artist. We then take these opinions and produce an article that gives you recommendations on where to start with the artist, what to try after that and even sometimes what to avoid.

What makes this different to other sites?

Well, whereas other sites, software and services may give you reviews, the most popular or most listened to albums those may not necessarily be the best releases to start off with a new artist.

For instance Reefs debut album "Replenish" is absolutely amazing and one of my all time favourite albums, however pretty much anyone interested in starting with Reef would be best advised to start with their second album "Glow", which is much more accessible in general. Another clear example would be Nirvana, I personally hardly ever listen to Nirvana’s "Nevermind" album any more (as I know all of Nirvana’s albums inside and out, every cough and guitar string noise included) and I would rate "In Utero" as my favourite album however "Nevermind" obviously would be the album I would recommend anyone new to Nirvana should start out with.

But going further than that after you have tried the "essential" release Where to Start With helps you with which release to follow the essential release with, a wildcard album and even sometimes what to avoid – these can be really difficult to determine from the other methods.

About the recommendations.

Each Where to Start With article can have the following recommendations for each release to help guide you:

• Essential: The the first release to try, the best introduction to the artist.
• Follow with: The next release to try after the essential release.
• Also recommended: Another good release to try.
• Wildcard: A release that may not be "the norm" for the artist but still could be interesting. If you try the essential release and weren’t so keen this should be different enough to be worth a try.
• Avoid: Yes, some users will also tell you what to avoid.

The votes of each person on each release are added up to ensure that each article has one of each of the above recommendations (where applicable) and the more opinions that are added the better the recommendations become. You also have access to personal comments of each person who gave their opinion to give you a better insight into why they voted how they voted. And finally, just in case there is a close call between releases you can also see the breakdown of the votes for each release.

Sounds great, how do I get started?

Well we’re currently in private beta and have been running with a small handful of users for the past couple of weeks but are accepting applications to the beta and adding new users on a daily basis. The reason we’re currently in private beta is to ensure that the platform is solid and discover any issues, we’re not sure how long this will take but we obviously want to be out of beta as soon as possible. We also have setup a dedicated blog for Where to Start With which you can follow if you want to be kept up to date with progress of the beta and other new things (as we’re not finished adding features yet).

It’s working for me already!

Even with the small handful of users in the initial phase of the private beta I’ve already found one new band who I would have probably a) never heard of and b) not known where to start with without the site. There is more on this in the post It’s working for us on our blog.

So give it a whirl, and do get in touch to give us your thoughts etc.

Which also means we’re one step closer to releasing it.

Which also means I’m one step closer to being able to tell you all about it, ohhhhh it’s so exciting!

This was back when I was hoping to work in some sort field in 3D animation, that is before I accidentally became a full-time web developer (don’t worry I’ve progressed a lot since I did the site for the animation).

Now I can only assume that people are reading things like the about me page and are thinking that the character (who appears on every page and doesn’t really look very human) is a real person as that is the only way to explain some of the submissions I’ve got through the contact form. Here are a few gems from over the years:

Hi, My name is xxxxxx, I am a deaf actor who lives for mime. I was not aware there was a school of Mime and would like to know more details about the school you went to.

I didn’t have the heart to reply to that one.

I’m emailing on behalf of a new game show which we are filming for Channel 5 in the Autumn of this year. Celebrity contestants will have to learn a skill from experts and then be rated on their performance. We are looking for an international expert of mime artistry and would be interested if you could assist. However, please note that no fee will be paid to the experts for taking part in this program.

If it were paid I would have done it just for the giggle, hell I should have done it anyway – it would probably have been more entertaining than the program they were pitching.

And today I got the following:

Nursing home summer party August 18th, based in Surrey. Would like to know your prices.

Maybe I should have taken up some of these offers, or at least replied to them, and earned myself a few quid here and there.

Now we’re on the short road to getting something designed and built and I’m really excited. There’s not much to tell right now as it would all just be pie in the sky, but I shall be sharing as much as I can as and when things progress.

Disclaimer: I understand that this post is kind of pointless and lacking of any real substance for you, but I’m just a little giddy about this idea.

I use WordPress to power this site and ever since day one I received lots of spam, at first I just manually cleaned them up but once I started getting some decent traffic I had to move onto a more automated solution. So looked at lots of different plugins for WordPress and tried about 5 or 6 until I came across the fantastic Spam Karma plugin , since that day I haven’t looked back.

I think I’ve had to manually moderate 3 or 4 comments that Spam Karma couldn’t handle automatically out of the 20,000 it has caught and I’ve not seen any false positives. So the long and short of it is if you’re having problems with comment spam (and I don’t know who doesn’t these days) and using WordPress then Spam Karma will be a blessing to you.

One thing I’d love to see is a standalone version of the Spam Karma system, i.e. not just a WordPress plugin as it seems that spam bots have become really aggressive recently and hammer away at any form that have a textarea (actually I’ve seen comment spam come as from forms that only have selects and radio buttons).

What better way to celebrate than with a new release of my most popular piece of code, with just shy of 3,000 downloads so far, the JavaScript image cropper UI is now at version 1.2.0.

So looking forward to the next year I’ll try and post more regularly and hopefully get the 4 or 5 code based projects I’ve been working on (and off) released.

…when I was releasing the JavaScript Image Cropper UI I really noticed how much this theme had begun to bug me, mostly for it’s lack of definition and space. It’s a tweaked version of a great Wordpress theme, it has served me well, but I feel it’s time for a change. So I have created a design from scratch…

So here it is in all it’s glory and on a new server to boot, as since the launch of the Image Cropper UI and the resulting traffic the old server has been up and down like a yo-yo. Luckily plans were already in place for the new server and the build was completed late last week.

It took me slightly longer than I initially predicted to get from the mock-ups to the final full Wordpress theme, mainly because I found they way wordpress themes are implemented a little ugly and not the nicest things to deal with initially.

Anyway it’s all in place now and I still like it, although I may have to tweak the comments presentation a little. Here’s a quick list of the major changes:

• Complete new design, giving more space & easier to read content
• Fluid layout, within reason
• Added ability to subscribe to comments
• Added robust code syntax highlighting for posts & comments
• Added ability to use textile for formatting comments
• Added pagination to comments, for posts with lots of comments this is a great benefit
• Utilised Wordpress custom fields for code pages, this provides a consistent and cleaner look to my code project pages.

I hope you all like it.

IgniteImage.com is a website for my web design company Ignite Image, which specialises in creating stylish, modern, accessible, functional, professional, exciting and standards compliant websites for bands and musicians. I’m extremely proud of both the aims and objectives of this website and company and the website itself.

We are a small team of four at the moment; there is me, responsible for design & development, another excellent developer, a designer & marketeer and an artists relationship manager.

All four of us are closely involved in the independent music scene, with us all being active musicians and regular gig attendants; on a personal note almost every one of my closest friends are members of active bands. Being us so closely involved with unsigned and independent artists as well as being web developers we have had constant requests to create stylish and functional websites for our friends, on a shoe-string of course.

This has given us lots of experience in the common requirements and problems faced by independent artists wanting to create their first online presence and we want to share this knowledge and expertise with other artists outside our circle of musician associates.

We aim to offer the most competitive pricing and feature set without compromising on quality to artists and musicians who wish to create an exciting and modern web site for themselves.

So why not head over to Ignite Image now to learn more, if you think we could help you out or you just want to learn more then don’t hesitate to contact us.