A new screen print: Ramen
Yeah. It’s a bowl of noodles.
Poster for the Juleavslutning
This party is gonna be great. Also, I’m really happy about how the poster turned out. The poster collection have also been updated to include this one.
The Neighbourhood patrol
This track was born out of a few days of crate digging, looking through old records and finding samples I recorded waay back. After gestating a bit, enough people told me I had to just put it out already.
Playing at Seeds in Oslo this weekend, together with Olle Abstract, Ost&Kjex, Melkeveien, Kohib, and De Fantastiske To amongst others.
Gonna be great!
Podcast episode 22
New episode! This time with me and Pernille on the chit-chat, and Atella on the mixtape makin’. Been looking forward to upgrading the production value a little, now with a proper intro with an actual conversation, instead of just me ranting.
Have a listen!
Getting preview images right
Let me preface this by saying that this is not a tutorial for “how to do stuff on social media”– I’m certainly not that guy. But this is a solution to a common problem, and I haven’t seen it spoken about anywhere else. Which is super, super weird.
Basically, the idea is this: When you punch a website address into a facebook post, it grabs the first few images it finds on that site, and lets you choose one to be shown in the status post. But for many sites, and most blogs I know, those images ends up being pretty useless.
Most times when someone would post a link to my site on facebook, the default image shown would be an image from a non-related blog post, or something from the footer. This means that the people seeing that post don’t get the best presentation of the site being shared. Ugh. Many page admins have started making an image post instead, and putting the link in the description. But that just confuses people, and usually it makes the user click twice to get where you want them.
And remember, the user case we need to worry about is not you, sharing a link to your site from facebook. This is for all the civilians/fans, who shares the link on each others walls and so on, where you can’t control it.
So it needs to happen automatically.
Okay, for talking about the solution, we need go go into nerd mode for a moment:
Ideally, the default image that pops up should be like a thumbnail for your whole site, right? But naturally, you don’t want to put an image high up on your front page, just for facebook to crawl it. So here’s what I did; a simple <img> tag with the thumbnail, but wrapped in a <div> that’s set to display:none, at the top of your <body>. So the image gets parsed by the browser, but doesn’t show up on the page. Plus, because of the display:none stuff, your browser won’t spend any extra time loading the image asset, only facebook will. So no added bloat to your site.
I’m currently using this technique on www.Lysgaardsounds.com, try pasting that URL into a facebook update (you don’t have to click publish), just to see that the thumbnail image pops up in the image box.
Here’s the HTML:
<div id="site-thumber" style="display: none;">
<img src="img/Site-thumber.jpg">
</div>
And lastly, keep in mind I’m a designer, not a developer. But I know some very fine developers that have looked at it, and they say it should work fine indeed.
The very simple HTML you see above works fine for very small and simple sites, bigger systems could find smarter ways to implement this in the back end with some space age PHP, a WordPress plugin or something. But for a single-page site for a musician, that gets shared on facebook now and then, this works brilliantly.
If you tried this technique yourself, show it off in the comments!
Instagram wrap
Thought I would collect some of my favourites shots as of late, most of these have also been flying past the feed on Instagram. Some are simple iPhone shots, other come from my wonderful α6000 camera, with this magical 50mm 1.4 lens on. Damn, how I love that camera.
If these tickle your fancy, go follow me on the thing already.
Playing in Oslo & Bergen
After a few months locked in the studio, I’m about to have things to show you. This weekend seems to be the start for some of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to give you some proper soundcloud links and whatnot in not tooooo long. It’s always the last 10% that takes 90% of the time, you know.
Come friday, I’ll be premiering my new live set in Oslo, doing a couple known tracks but mostly brand new stuff that haven’t been released into the wild before. Some piano jams from that great standing piano in our apartment, some bass grooves that hits right in the 40Hz.
And right after that, on saturday, I’ll do one of the closing sets for the last day of Ekko. I’ll probably take some elements from the live gig with me, at least doing some live drum programming. Hope to see you at any of the things, if you’re in any of the towns!
Nabovarsel podcast #21
We just whipped up another episode of the podcast, with a mixtape from our Nabovarsel alibi in Oslo, Bonjour Tristesse!
In other news, I somehow got through my talk at Bergen Design Story, a part of the Raff week of design. I tried to say some smart stuff about working in the overlapping space between design and art, and the pitfalls in working with those two things at once. Think it went all right. Here’s me, not being nervous at aaaaaall:
Watercolor writing
Water&Paper&Pigment. This is a great job some times (most of the time really). The music in the video is an unreleased track I’m working on, called Trebles (working title).
Mixtape: Sandviken Parish
Here is a mixtape I just put out, just me, a bunch of buttons and dials and a microphone. This is a slow one, I’ve collected the most sludge moving, meditative and chill tracks from the last months.
This fall we (nabovarsel) will be playing at Den Elleville Festen and also curating some cool bands that will be playing with us that night. I’ll also play the Ekko festival and with BG Baarregaard in a few weeks, so plenty of music stuff happening. Check out the website if you wanna see the dates and come hang out and dance.
Enjoy the mix while there’s still some summer left!
//soundcloud.com/lysgaardsounds/sandviken-parish
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