Written on June 22, 2010 at 11:07 pm, by Dan Fone
So I’m starting this project where a friend and I make a book. We nicked the idea from www.lookatbook.com but we figure we can go a few different places with it and have some fun.
In short, one of us does something on a page and then posts it to the other. Over time the pages make a book. I want different relationships between different pages and little reference points developing. But part of what should be cool is seeing what Annie (my friend and partner in crime) wants.
We’ll most likely be dragging other people in along the way.
I have decided not to use a proper sketchbook and am using any old paper I have lying around. Recycling and all that, you know. This means we can post each other single pages if necessary and not have to post the whole thing. This is important because we live thousands of miles apart and postage is, well, expensive.
So, over to you, Annie. Let’s see what happens.
Written on July 6, 2009 at 2:47 pm, by Dan
An ability to resolve work according to the objectives defined in your proposal
My initial proposal aims and objectives were as follows. I will speak about each one in turn:
Aims:
To make a (very lateral) history of language and meaning using the word ‘all’ as my focus.
The focus has shifted here from history to documentary snapshot. The project is about people’s perception of the word’s history and present as opposed to the history itself. I am using the internet to help me get the viewer to be part of producing that snapshot.
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Written on July 5, 2009 at 6:46 pm, by Dan
Making the plinth for my questionnaire has been interesting. I had initially wanted to make something quite complicated. I wanted it to be an object in itself. This is easier said than done though. Ideally it would have been galvanised steel and quite carefully designed.
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Written on July 2, 2009 at 12:47 am, by Dan
Okay, so I’m reminded of why I hate (hate hate hate) using other people’s scripts. The AJAX poller has stopped working. I’ve spent about two hours trying to figure out why, deleting and re-uploading different files, all sorts. It’s still not working. It’s been fine for ages. I’ve done nothing to it to the best of my knowledge. The vote goes on to the database. I checked. I checked the error log. No error. Does it give me the result graph back? Obviously not.
Very very very annoyed.
And what’s more, I have no idea what to do beyond deleting the whole thing and redoing it from scratch. I would naturally rather avoid this eventuality.
Very very very annoyed. Would blog about other things but want to fix other things having wasted so much time on that.
NB – Prospective employers please note that this problem was fixed the following day. You live and learn.
Written on June 28, 2009 at 10:29 pm, by Dan
Hurrah. It’s now gone ten on Sunday and I’ve just spent most of the weekend getting nothing done because I’ve been looking for a decent captcha tutorial. They’re all either rubbish or built for wordpress. Very annoying. I’m beginning to wonder what the best course of action is.
On a brighter note, I found a word cloud that seems to work quite well. It’s called dynacloud.js and it’s pretty simple. So that’s there as and when I need it. Good.
Written on June 27, 2009 at 8:08 pm, by Dan
I’ve been investigating how to make buttons that will give me a different kind of interactivity. Kenji’s shown me a few things. I’m undecided about the idea though. The whole point of the questionnaire (to my mind) has always been that in filling it out people will have a chance to think about the questions. That won’t happen if it’s just a case of hitting buttons. The process of thinking through an answer and typing it out is integral to the project.
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Written on June 27, 2009 at 7:08 pm, by Dan
I’ve been trying to implement two things for my questionnaire. One is a tag cloud which comes back after the user has filled in their answer. This will give them two entry points in to all of these words.
Now I come to write this I’m considering the value of having the tag cloud at all. Is it any more than a trick? Will it help people to reflect on the questionnaire. I’m actually inclined to think that the best things here will be the simplest. People will want to read other people’s answers. They’ll definitely want to do that. Who wouldn’t?
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Written on June 25, 2009 at 12:54 am, by Dan
One issue with my questionnaire is spam. Any online text form is open to a lot of spam. I need a way of protecting myself against it. The most common way is the CAPTCHA (stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). I hate these things. I think most people do. You know the things where you have to type in a mash of letters and half the time they’re impossible to see and if they’re not, at best they ruin the pleasant flow of the navigation. I really don’t want that. They’re fine for Yahoo! but not for this. I don’t want one of those CAPTCHAs coming near my questionnaire. There’s also a useful page on the accessibility issues associated with CAPTCHAs on the W3C website.
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