I have just completed re-branding David Usher’s official website (http://DavidUsher.com) and MySpace (http://myspace.com/davidushermusic) page in preparation for the release of his new album, “Wake Up And Say Goodbye“, which will be released on September 9th, 2008.

The site design is clean and simple, matching the “nouveau-disco” theme of the album cover design and layout.

Built on the WordPress platform, I upgraded to the latest version, adding some new spam-filters to combat comment spam. I also created a WordPress plug-in called “dutube” which allows David to attach YouTube clips to his blog posts, but using a custom video player rather than the default YouTube one.

To add motion to the pages, I removed the Flickr photo badge, and wrote my own code, using the Flickr API and a JavaScript library called jQuery, to grab a series of recent fan photos. The code cycles through the photos automtically using a fade transition, and allows the site visitor to manually cycle through as well.

The phpBB3 forums were also re-skinned the fit within the design, and the reaction seemed to be quite positive.

> Check it out: DavidUsher.com

1. Amanda 07.02.08 / 12pm

   Hey Jonathan,
   I love that there is lots of reading material on your site now. The work you’ve done is amazing, it really shows your artistic abilities in so many different ways. The album covers you designed are absolutely spectacular!
   Are you using php 5.0? We’ve tried to upgrade from 4.1.1 and it only shows the php page and nothing else. We have a database using MySQL and PHP. I was wondering if you upgraded or had any problems? Any suggestions? What we are trying to do is integrate a barcode generator but we need to upgrade php versions.
   Your site and David’s are way cool, I love the black backgrounds with white writing. I look forward to more info and updates from you! Are you going to be making your own forum?
2. Jonathan Gallivan 07.03.08 / 4pm

   @Amanda – yeah, I’ve upgraded all my servers to PHP5, and the only issue I had dealt with some sites that had some directives in .htaccess files. Are you getting any errors in your server logs? I suggest creating a new blank file called “info.php”, and then throwing the following code in it: <?php phpinfo(); ?> … if that page doesn’t run, then you know you have a problem with the PHP installation itself.
3. Amanda 07.05.08 / 9am

   Thanks for your help. We’ll try it and see what happens.
4. Amanda 07.09.08 / 7am

   So when we tried what you suggested and the first time it came up with the phpinfo page.. BUT that was the one page it would see for some reason. So what we did was a clean install of everything on a new server. I tested PHP and MySQL and all the other things that I installed, however when we moved the files of our database over we found were they needed to be and copied them there, we can see our index.php pagebut it now says No database selected. We searched the error and are working on it. Thanks for your info. We’ve made progress at least.
   Can’t wait to read more blogs from you! Cheers!
5. Brenda Lynn 02.15.09 / 8am

   Your work is impeccable !