Posts tagged with “Random Thoughts”
My last post created quite a buzz – and gathered all kinds of celebrities on my blog!
It all started with these few comments
Hola, Lead Architect from Digg here (…)
~Joe Stump
Founder of PBwiki here, (…)
~David Weekly
Hi – CTO of PBwiki here, (…)
~Nathan Schmidt
Followed by this one.
Hey – Tim Berners-Lee here, Creator of the World Wide Web. Keep up the good work.
~Tim Berners-Lee
I thought it was funny enough, so I didn’t delete it. Unfortunately Tim Berners-Lee attracted all kinds of other well known personalities, including Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bruce Waine, Clark Kent, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, God and others. I’ve saved a few of these comments here.
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After having watched The Fountain for the 50th time, I remembered Darren Aronofsky saying how the whole movie is a journey into the light. It is very dark in the beginning and becomes brighter and brighter towards the end. Since this movie is about 90 minutes long, this is a very slow transition – one that you probably more feel than see.
Well, a few days ago I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey compressed into a single picture and instantly had to try it with The Fountain. Aronofsky didn’t lie.
Each row represents 45 seconds of film. The Original is about 9000 pixels wide and 200mb heavy. Still, despite the movie being absolutely beautiful, I somehow expected more from this. Maybe I’ll streamline my process a bit more and try it with other movies – suggestions welcome!
And now for something completely different. A few friends of mine and I recently joked about the low dollar course and how the Euro is now the currency. Long story short, we came up with a T-Shirt design – which I clicked together in Illustrator a few days later.
If you want it, vote for it! Update: damn.
Clean URLs are everywhere. No Web 2.0 site is complete without them and many of the Internet heavyweights retrofitted their sites in an attempt to please search engines. Many of them completely miss the point.
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A few weeks ago I was asked to build an Intranet-Site for a small company. Nothing too fancy – just the usual groupware stuff like News, Calendars a Blackboard etc. I was given some Photoshop Files which were easily translated to XHTML. The layout was already approved by the client so this step was pretty much a no-brainer.
I always wanted to try out the Drupal CMS and figured this Intranet-Site would be a perfect fit for it. Drupal was developed with community sites in mind; every aspect of it was designed support the extensive built in User and Rights management. Just what I needed.
My XHTML file was quickly adjusted to function as a Drupal template. Not everything was working right from the beginning, but I figured I’d first work out the hard stuff and care about these “small rendering bugs” later. So I carried on to build my content – which is where my odyssey started.
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Doing logo design isn’t easy. Making a logo for PhobosLab felt particularly hard, because the name, despite of the very real Mars moon Phobos, is quite abstract for a weblog. Well, I settled for the real thing and actually used Phobos as a logo, as you can now see in the page header. No, it’s not the Deathstar – Phobos has a huge crater on its side, in case you’re wondering.
I also pimped the stylesheet a bit, but in the end didn’t do the complete redesign I intended to. The image on the right was a first draft of it.
Update: Yeah well, as you can see, I did do the complete redesign now.
1990s (complete with frames) vs. shiny Web 2.0?
Edit: Turns out Ron Paul also has a new Web 2.0 site for his 2008 campaign.
A newly launched website, with which I’m in no way affiliated with (it wouldn’t correspond to the laws in Germany, *cough*), has an interesting approach to “create” content. Users constantly deliver new images and web links that are always up to date and show what’s hot in the web at the very moment – probably faster than any other fun site, forum or blog.
The website I’m talking about is Pr0gramm.com (probably NSFW at any time of the day!). It’s actually not only a website, but also an IRC-bot, that idles in different channels on the chat network Quakenet. This bot catches all URLs written in these chat channels. If an image URL is posted, the image is downloaded by the bot and displayed with a thumbnail on the website in a matter seconds.
There’s no extra work for anyone – the website constantly gathers new content and the chatters benefit by having an archive of everything posted in their channels for free. I won’t say it’s Web 3.0, but as users don’t generate content knowingly, I guess it’s not exactly Web 2.0 either.
Pr0gramm.com also has another cool feature, which probably has come to your attention already: Image thumbnails are generated in different sizes, corresponding to their importance (the rating), and are then sorted into a big grid. There’s some PHP and Javascript going on, to calculate size and position of these images. For matters I won’t discuss here, *cough*, I’m quite familiar with the inner workings of all this. So I’ll write another article about this technology as soon as I find some more time.
