Thought & Theory

After a lot of code wrangling, we finally released the Myspace page for Kanye West as of midnight EST last night. You can actually listen to the entire 808s and Heartbreak Album in it’s entirety for FREE right now, so stop by when you get a chance.

Some Random Notes On Designing for Myspace

• The class names aren’t even close to being semantic so Firebug is your friend.
• The best bet for figuring out the code is studying some of the free layouts out there and seeing how they managed to hack the CSS. In a sea of myspace spam sites, there was one legit site that was my saving grace for this project. Check out Design Myspace for some really solid layouts with some semblance of clean code and design.
• You have to post in your ‘About Me’ section in order for the code to work. For musicians, you have to post in your bio section.
• There is no grid. You have to force one onto the design. Tears usually ensue after trying this for an hour.
• You can’t use “#” signs in your css or code, for some reason everything is a class. Makes the code non-semantic, but you gotta play by the rules I guess.
• No JS allowed
• The layout is 800 wide. Why it isn’t 770px or any other standard is beyond me.
• I dig how the myspace menu is transparent for the most part. Way to go Adaptive Path!
• The new 2.0 layouts use fully W3C compliant code. Unfortunately musician profiles are stuck on 1.0 for now.

Overall it was an interesting experience and I’m glad I got the opportunity to work on such a visible project (He’s averaging about 100,000 plays an hour and it just came out). I look forward to finding ways to keep things fresh and cannot wait till 2.0 profiles are green lit for musician profiles.

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