New site for Child Support Ghana goes live!

Finally, after many hours of work, the new web­site for the Child Sup­port Ghana NGO and Dutch Foun­da­tions is live. Child Sup­port Ghana is a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion based in the Upper West Region (UWR) cap­i­tal Wa, Ghana, West Africa, who sup­port needy chil­dren by pro­vid­ing them with a roof over their head, lov­ing care, edu­ca­tion and health­care. This orga­ni­za­tion is the vehi­cle for the awe­some work my dad is doing in Ghana. His work is sup­ported by a Dutch Foun­da­tion who raise funds and vol­un­teers for the projects. Doing their web­site, has been a long stand­ing side project of mine.

Screen­shot of the Child Sup­port Ghana homepage

Read more…

Tags: Child Support Ghana, sideproject, webdesign, webstandards

I support web standards!

Mon­day, Novem­ber 30, 2009 is the 3rd annual Blue Beanie Day. Started by Doug Vos, Blue Beanie Day is a way to show sup­port for web stan­dards and accessibility.

Herko sup­port­ing Web­stan­dards Blue Beanie Day

Excerpt from the 3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day Event Page:

It’s easy to show your sup­port for web design done right. Beg, bor­row, or buy a Blue Beanie (or Blue Toque in Canada) and snap a photo of your mug wear­ing the blue. (Or get cre­ative with Pho­to­shop). Then on Novem­ber 30, switch your pro­file pic­ture in Face­book, Twit­ter, Flickr, (and any other social net­work) and post your photo to the Flickr Blue Beanie Day 2009 group.

Want to help with plan­ning the 3rd Annual Blue Beanie Day? Plan­ning a meetup or tweetup in your home­town? Orga­niz­ing a group photo in your city? You might qual­ify to win a free copy of Zeld­man and Marcotte’s (brand new) Design­ing With Web Stan­dards 3rd edi­tion. Con­tact Dou­glas Vos.

Kevin Cor­nell makes it even eas­ier for us this year by pro­vid­ing an illus­trated blue beanie pho­to­shop file.

So don a blue beanie, spread the word and keep work­ing towards a truly open web.
Some of my col­legues also sup­port Webstandards:

Raph dons his blue beanie

Jules also sup­ports webstandards

OWMS Smurf sup­ports any­thing for a beer

@michellethonen man­ages to look like a kitten

Stan­dards in da hood! Word.

Euhm… no comment.

A Lean Mean Blue Beanie Machine

Tags: BBD09, webrichtlijnen, webstandards

Ben Westbeech lights up RAW Rhythm Festival 2009

The 2009 edi­tion of the RAW Rhythm fes­ti­val, hop­ing to fill the shoes left vacant by its pre­de­ces­sor DRUM Rhythm, is fin­ished. Two great days filled with good food, good friends and great music and per­for­mances. Here is my review.

Day one: start with a bang

The fes­ti­val started with an early per­for­mance by Lamb, one of –if not the most — my favorite bands. Lamb got back together again after they split up 5 years ago to per­sue other projects (such as Lou start­ing her own label Infi­nite Bloom, and singing on two Cin­e­matic Orches­tra albums, and Andy doing Hoof and Luna Seeds). But now pro­ducer Andy Bar­low, singer Lou Rhodes and bass­player Jon Thorne are tour­ing the fes­ti­vals again, play­ing their old songs. We saw them first at the Cac­tus Fes­ti­val in Brugges, Bel­gium a cou­ple of weeks ago, and the basi­cally played the same set.

Lamb live @ RAW Rhythm 2009

Lou Rhodes tak­ing cen­ter stage

Lamb used to be 5 peo­ple, with Ice­landic Oddur Mar Run­nar­son play­ing the gui­tar, and Dane Niko­laj Bjerre as the main per­cus­sion­ist. But now it’s just the three of them on stage.

Lamb had the dif­fi­cult task to play early in the evening, in the largest venue at the West­er­gas­fab­riek, with gor­geous weather out­side. By the time they started play­ing, there were only about a hun­dred peo­ple about. Their audi­ence grad­u­ally grew, but they had to work hard to get the pos­i­tive and ener­getic vibe they’re famous and loved for.

I espe­cially liked Lou’s singing, her voice has matured over the years and become rock solid and frag­ile at once. Her voice is a love it or hate it thing, appar­ently, as a friend who joined us for this per­for­mance told us later, her voice annoys him.

And Andy and Jon were their usual ener­getic selves, with Andy fir­ing up the fans by tak­ing the bongo’s (or what­ever these drums are called) to the front stage and solo­ing a bit.

I loved see­ing Lamb per­form live again, this must have been our 8th time. And I can’t wait for their live CD/DVD to be released (as their Wikipedia page announces). But in all hon­esty, their per­for­mance was lack­ing that bit of extra fire, the inter­ac­tion with the fans and audi­ence, and frankly, the drum­mer. It made a big dif­fer­ence, but not enough to ruin the performance.

There’s one lit­tle anec­dote I’d like to share with you all that relates to Lamb. I twit­tered about the per­for­mance, and I got a spe­cial kind of reply:

Tweet @Herko Lamb was awe­some! As usual @RAWrhythm #RR http://twitpic.com/ca9d6
Reply @Lamb_lover It’s so easy using up roast lamb left­overs, wrapped in foil and kept in the fridge they’re good for two days

Ben West­beech and Jazzanova

The rest of the evening were ded­i­cated to walk­ing from one hall to another, find­ing some good tunes to dance to. Ducth rap­pers Zwart Licht were able to get the crowds going crazy in an instant, but that was just loud noise. Ryan Leslie was a slick smooth talker with a good show on the main stage, and Dizzee Ras­cal was ok, but not my kind of music. Nneka was great, she has a voice like a real soul diva. And then we came to Ben Westbeech.

West­beech is a producer/singer/DJ from Giles Peterson’s Brownswood Record­ings label. His was a DJ set with vocals. Jaz­zanova was there to tweak some knobs as well, appar­ently they know eachother and have worked together for a bit. But West­beec clearly wanted to have a good time. He played an impres­sive set of funk, soul, house, hip-hop and sang in some of those tunes as well. There weren’t many peo­ple in the audi­ence at first (Dizzee Ras­cal was per­form­ing on the main stage), but as the set con­tin­ued, the dance­floor filled up nicely.

Ben West­beech + flutist @RAW Rhythm

Ben West­beech & Jazzanova

Ben West­beech (photo @arnecoomans)

And thus ended day one of the RAW Rhythm fes­ti­val 2009. The old Drum Rhythm vibe was there, the qual­ity of the artists was high, the food was good and the weather was too.

Day two: not so much

The sec­ond day of RAW Rhythm started with us get­ting more bracelets, as the pho­tog­ra­phers and crew bracelets we got yes­ter­day appar­ently didn’t cut it for today. So now we got a new photo bracelet, and uniquely a back­stage access bracelet. We looked kinda like a freak­show with all those tags, if you ask me.

Tagged

This sec­ond day was main spon­sor G-Star RAW Denim’s day, appar­ently. They held a ‘pri­vate’ party, invit­ing a bunch of ‘celebs and babes’ as my brother put it. This meant that there were a lot of peo­ple there who didn’t come for the music, who were more inter­ested in how they looked, and by whom they were noticed, and this didn’t have a pos­i­tive effect on the fes­ti­vals vibe. It became more tense, and more crowded out­side. The effect was that DJs were play­ing in a smaller room, near empt, while out­side were hun­dreds of peo­ple drink­ing and eating.

Any­ways, back to the music, so to speak. Sur­prise soul act of the fes­ti­val was Lee­lah James, sort of a smaller (and younger of course) ver­sion of Tina Turner. She has a great voice, and an awe­some band, but she clearly didn’t like that fact that she had to start off for a rather empty and docile main stage.

And we saw De Jeugd van Tegen­wo­ordig, which was nice (but also not my kind of music), and Chuckie and Lil John. Chuckie is ok, but Lil John is just nasty. And for some rea­son, there’s a LOT of talk and inter­rupt­ing going on, in stead of just play­ing the music and let­ting every­body dance.

We also saw Roni Size, who is clearly still king of the jun­gle. His beats got the whole room up and jump­ing from the very first start. Roni Size was awe­some. For me, it was the best of the whole day.

Any­ways, the sec­ond day just didn’t reach the same high as the first –for me. Over­all we enjoyed our­selves very much ‚and hope to see the fes­ti­val return next year!

Tags: festival, Lamb, rawrhythm

Long live XHTML!

Smash­ing Mag­a­zine pub­lished a comic strip writ­ten by Jeremy Keith and drawn by Brad Col­bow about W3C’s recent announce­ment to end the XHTML 2 work­group char­ter by te end of the year. There has been a huge amount of dis­cus­sion on this topic within the web­stan­dards com­mu­nity, and Jeremy Keith’s expla­na­tion of the exag­ger­ated reports of XHTML’s demise is a great way to get the gist of the matter.

Comic explain­ing why XHTML isn’t dead

Tags: HTML5, webstandards, XHTML

RAW rhythm festival FTW

This week­end is the first edi­tion of the RAW Rhythm fes­ti­val, held at the West­er­gas­fab­riek in Ams­ter­dam. RAW Rhythm is the sequel of the Drum Rhythm fes­ti­val, a pop­u­lar fes­ti­val a few years ago, that had to cease its aciv­i­ties due to a new law that pro­bibits tobacco-advertising in The Nether­lands. Now it’s ‘back’, as the organ­is­ers found a new spon­sor in G-star RAW jeans.

I attended two or three edi­tions of Drum Rhythm, and saw some of the most mem­o­rable per­for­mances I have ever expe­ri­enced there. I saw Lamb per­form a truly mag­i­cal and ener­getic set, I saw Left­field give one of their last per­for­mances, I saw Aus­trian lounge-duo Kruder & Dorfmeis­ter get­ting a crowd jump­ing, and many many more.

So I was very happy to dis­cover that there will be a new edi­tion of this fes­ti­val, and even hap­pier when I found out that my favorite band Lamb had actu­ally reformed itself (after split­ting up for solo projects a few years ago) and were going to per­form there again! I cre­ated a Last.fm event for the fes­ti­val, as there wasn’t one yet, added all the acts to the ban­dlist, and saw it grow and grow.

My brother, who is a pro­fes­sional con­cert and event pho­tog­ra­pher (he’s 3voor12 Ams­ter­dam’s phtog­ra­phy coör­di­na­tor), has now arranged for two pho­tog­ra­phers wrist­bands for the whole fes­ti­val! This means that we’ll be able to go back­stage and go every­where! So this is going to be a very mem­o­rable fes­ti­val for me.

I’ll post a review and photo’s after the weekend!

Tags: festival, Lamb, music