Front & rear end code
for designers who want to design.
Code for designers.
VACUBOMB
Art Fag - 1 Inch Buttons.
Unicorn Gas - Magic.

VACUBOMB PROPER

Projects & apps developed and designed by Wes Koopmans.

This is gonna be big — it’s so small.

I guess this qualifies as an open source project — pick any license you want. Behold the code to make the xkcd <img title> readable on a touch screen webkit browser.

I call it <xkcd title>.

Code:
var x=document.getElementsByClassName('s');
x=x[2].getElementsByTagName('img');
alert(x[0].getAttribute('title'));
//by:VACUBOMB.COM

HOWTO

  1. Open & bookmark http://ncrn.gs/c7dQSV on your mobile webkit browser (iPhone/iPad/Android/WebOS/etc).
  2. Rename the bookmarklet to “<xkcd title>” or whatever you want.
  3. Edit the bookmarklet address and remove everything before “javascript:”
  4. Open any comic on XKCD and then open the bookmarklet, magic!

Screenshots

iPhone Sample

Made with love by VACUBOMB.

P.S. I love you.

I would love sing the praises of my latest project, but it seems that I do not have to; Mark Shieh, of the @rivermrkt, took care of all the singing for me. I’ll touch on the technical aspects after I let the choir resound in a letter written to the New Westminster Leader.

P.S. (Post Script) grew from conversations between Briana* and I about interactive ways to contribute to New Westminster.

We wanted to nurture more poetic cities. It’s about seeing extraordinary beauty in our everyday lives. In this way, we are all poets. Briana and I thought tweet-sized poems might be a fun way to share our stories and experiences as friends and neighbours.

We engaged Melissa LaRivière** to create the web design and Wes Koopmans*** to develop the code and database programming. psnewest.ca has some sweet innovative features: a horizontal scroll that mimics the act of writing from left to right, a starring system that enables people to vote for their favourite P.S. poems, and every poem is also simultaneously tweeted on twitter.com/psnewwest

P.S. is social media, both online and offline. It’s about sparking conversations between friends and neighbours in more playful ways. We will refresh the poetry contest every season. For this first P.S. Contest, we are inviting people to contribute a poem about summer in 80 characters or less. The grand-prize winning poem will be featured on River Market in a grand way. The poet with the most-starred poem will receive a special edition River Market iPad.

P.S. is part of River Market’s grander Arts program. River Market Arts includes a community artist in residence program as well as public art works being commissioned for site-specific installations in and around the Market.

www.psnewwest.ca
www.twitter.com/psnewwest

P.S.
*Tenth to the Fraser: www.tenthtothefraser.ca
**Melissa’s Website: www.melissalariviere.com
***Wes is also a New Westminster resident. Our city has amazing technology and new media talent!

The front-end theme was coded based on a design by Melissa LaRivière. I believe this was Melissa’s first go at designing a website, but she was great to work with; if you are looking for some creativity, check out her website at www.melissalariviere.com.

As far as my work was concerned, the site is hosted on WordPress 3.0. I suppose I could have used custom post types, but WP was still in RC when I started development. I went with PodsCMS to hold the data. I coded a Entry Moderation Panel Plugin with PodsUI in about 2 hours (PodsCMS is great for rapid development). The whole site was developed part-time over a 3 week period. Twitter tools takes care of bringing the poems to life on Twitter; poems are automatically tweeted when they are approved on the admin tool.

There’s not much else to say, there is no blog and only 3 pages. All of the other River Market duties are handled at www.rivermarket.ca.

Thank you Mark; thank you Melissa; I’m looking forward to more projects in the future.

P.S. I Love #NewWest.

Party like it’s 99% complete.

It’s pretty much done! Not too much left, I think I’ve nailed the navigation, thank heavens for Appearance > Menu; there are some CSS tweaks that I need to do for widgets still so I can take out some content from the sidebar theme file and have it managed by WordPress; I still don’t have a good gallery, and I’m scared to attach any images to a post because I don’t know how much it will break; but other than that… This is VACUBOMB; let me know what you think on twitter!

Tomorrow I’ll post some details on the P.S. New West site that I coded a couple weeks ago, including a letter from Mark Shieh with a bit of history behind the project.

What’s next? Magic.

I’d say it’s 91% complete.

It’s close! Here’s my unordered todo list:

  • attachments.php
  • footer.php – Tweak the footer to include some sort of page menu. Currently the only other page is Pictures (holds my twitter pics) so I’m not sure it’s worth it.
  • functions.php
  • CSS for widgets (currently none enabled)
  • I’m going to rewrite a huge chunk TweetPress (WP twitPic clone) to support galleries instead of the mess it creates now.

Pro-tip: This image has actually saved the lives of those who have coded a WP template.

I’ll be launching this weekend.

Transparency.

I have absolutely nothing to hide at this point… My live site at www.vacubomb.com is a half working mess.

I decided I would develop it live, without a dev site, so that I would have some drive to get it done. I’ll be sitting on my ass for the next 4 days hammering out the new template.

I started with TwentyTen (what a crazy complicated mess) and moved everything into a “2010″ sub-folder, except the style.css and index.php. I dropped in my HTML template that I’ve been building on and off for the past 2 months, and started copying and pasting. So far, I’ve got the following files moved back for editing…

  • footer.php
  • functions.php
  • header.php
  • home.php
  • index.php
  • loop-home.php
  • style.css

I still have 18 files to dick around with. ugh.

One thing you’ll notice is that there are no comments enabled; they are disabled on purpose, I’ll be carrying the conversation on twitter. This way you’ll be responsible for your comments.

PS. I haven’t changed my site in over 8 years! My previous design is dated 2002!

VACUBOMB COMMUNICATIONS

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Find bits of me and what I do on the web on these fine web services: Ember, Skitch, Evernote & Twitter.

© 2012 Wes Koopmans
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