On April 19th 2010 I was sad to find out a Hip hop icon had died: Keith ‘Guru’ Elam aged 48 died from cancer. He was known of Gang Starr and his Jazzmatazz.
However I was positively surprised by the great amount of respect that was flooding the internet: Guru had made a great impact on many people. They keep giving him respect to this day.
As an assignment for the Elam Family I made this Tribute website where fans can leave their memories of Guru and give him one last salute. I picked up the idea from Jay Tillery who had started his own fan site and was willing to donate the project so it could be transferred into what the family and fans need.
Going through a very hard time my self, this project came at the right moment to focus at one more contribution to Hip Hop, this time given to someone who truly deserves.
Guru Tributes gathers tributes by fans, as well as tribute events and is the base for the Elam family to communicate about Guru.
Right now (Monday, May 17th 2010) it’s still on a testing server but it will be transferred to a .com address very soon to officially launch.
Front page:
Overview of news items, within several categories: Artwork, Audio, Video, General News, Press Releases, etc. It has a twitter feed, a link to the Facebook Fan page and a navigation.
About:
Every page has a different background which leaves the opportunity for fans to send in their artwork and photos:
Tributes by fans.
They can login with their Facebook/Twitter account (or sign up) and leave artwork, youtube or just a regular comment. When they post the comment they can also choose whether to post that comment to their twitter/facebook account or not.
I integrated over 2600 comments that were donated by www.djpremierblog.com (big up to them for sending us these tributes!)
Regular Post:
We collect information on Guru Tributes: artwork, mix tapes, events. All posts can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, MySpace, etc or can be send to a friend.
Events:
Apart from having the events within the front page news, where visitors can select the category events to have an overview of just event items; the site also has one main event page. It is the main base of the events, and from there we can choose to make event items to publish on the home page.
Here people can subscribe to an RSS feed of those events or download them for iCal or Google Calendar.
The site has many hidden functionality: to post, like and share on social media, an event system, an audio system, pagination, but also CMS items like: importing feeds, analytics, performance, security, SEO and more. The hardest work was to make all those plugins blend within a simple layout.
I would like to thank Russel M. Clark for the assignment, Justin Nicholas-Elam Ruff for the connection and all help.
Also thanks to Thijs Remie, Paul Kempe, Thomas Gesthuizen, Tim Penn, Wirin Kalpoe, Peter van den Heuvel & Arden de Raaij for some last minute input.
And let’s not forget DJ Premier Blog, Kevin Nottingham for content, and all the other contributors there and yet to come!
Last but definitely not least: Guru himself for all the inspiration and art he gave us.
Online at http://www.gurutributes.com
The track on my speakers while building this site:
