bamboostudios.com is the creative webspace of Jacob Tilgner. It is also an experiment in branding and marketing. It has been a long road to the present site and along the way there have been a few twists and turns.

A Brief History of the Site

This site underwent three or four redesigns from Oct. 2004 - August. 2005. In Sept. 2005 I took the site down and the domain remained innactive for the remainder of the year. In January 2006 I re-launched the site with a new custom content management system. While this system worked well enough as a standalone web application, it lacked a lot the “under the hood” features required to make it compatible with the vast majority of modern web applications and networks. I took custom coding pretty far and even went so far as to create RSS feeds from my dynamic content; I even had these feeds validating. The problem is that syndicating content properly really doesn’t stop there. In order to make my custom system fly I would have had to understand and write considerably more code. I would have to invest time in learning and understanding how XML-RPC works, how to create a trackback system, how to setup an automatic ping system, what RDF is and how to use that, how to create some kind of tool for combating comment spam, and yeah… probably a whole lot of stuff that I don’t even know about. So…. that brings us to…

This Version of the Site

This version of the site is powered by Wordpress. Other publishing systems that I’ve used to serve up part of this site include Blogger, B2 Evolution, and Wordpress 1.5. Those times the rest of the site was pretty much custom and static. This version of the site is created entirely using Wordpress. What’s more… I didn’t just use some quick fix gallery solution for displaying the artwork you see on the site. Instead I use the Image Manager plugin to create cropped images and auto handle thumbnail creation, then I use a custom field to store the value for the thumbnail file. The reason I do this is because then I am able to publish full sized images as part of the core wordpress post system, creating a URL and feed item for each entry. I can use the custom field value for the thumbnail to provide a sort of teaser for the full entry. With each image having its own entry in the post system it’s then possible to have comments for each and use various plugins on the single entry views.

If all of this sounds a little bit confusing it’s probably because it is. I have to admit that the whole process of publishing each image this way is a bit more tedious than it should be, but so far I havn’t been able to find a solution that offers me the kind of flexibility that I want with any greater ease. I really shouldn’t say that it’s tedious, because really it only takes about 1 min to publish an image if it’s already a reasonable size. The only extra work, really, is entering the value for the thumbnail into my custom field…. and really that only takes about 30 seconds…. so I really shouldn’t complain.

This site uses an extremely customized version of the Kubrick theme… but, it’s actually so customized that you really couldn’t say this is Kubrick at all. That’s just where I started with it. Normally when you go and create a wordpress or drupal site (or whatever CMS) you would start with a theme that was a lot like what you wanted in terms of layout etc. In my case that was pretty much a moot point. I was prepared to get my hands dirty… and indeed I did. Not only did I go ahead and master the “Wordpress Loop”, but I also dived in and learned the template tags, passed a bunch of parameters, and got familiar with a good deal of what wordpress can and can’t do. Did I mention that it kicks major ass? Well, just to be clear: Wordpress kicks Major Ass!

All hype aside, working with wordpress objects is a dream and really let me focus on how everything looks instead of how it works. That is pretty much the main reason for leaving my custom built CMS behind and taking the time to learn wordpress.

More about the site… yet to be written.