DESCRIPTION

Doubting.us is a web-based introspective narrative documenting my travels and experiences in a time of transition. I have taken important decisions about many things recently, and many more are to come – this Website is a repository of dichotomous text/image snapshots of the experiences stemming from these decisions

CONCEPT

The main premise on which this project was built is the lack of certitude and assurance we all feel at different moments in our lives. I view this uncertainty in a very positive way, allowing us to consider different perspectives at these precise moments of doubt. As I believe not many things stand for very long, I have chosen text and images that are connected at different degrees, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and abstraction. The same way our decisions can sometimes lead us in strange and unexpected paths, the images are all taken on the spur of the moment with my low-quality cell phone camera, creating distorted narratives that barely brush the surface of reality.

TECHNICAL

PHP, Javascript and Mootools

PUBLICATION

Project is currently featured on the Design and Computation Arts home page of Concordia University.

I’ve decided to put up all the code for my doubting.us project – it uses MooSizer to scale the images, JS, CSS, PHP and HTML for the rest. I decided to strip down the functionality so it could be easily shareable and easily updated. I had everything in a database but moved it into a PHP file instead, so there is no need to setup mySql, etc.

DOWNLOAD THE FILES HERE

Installing Doubting.us

1) Download the ZIP archive
2) Upload to your Web server, and that’s it!

How to add pictures

1) Open functions.php and add a new line to the array found at the top of the doc. Here’s the syntax to follow, don’t forget the comma at the end there :
array(”name_of_your_image.jpg”,”Descriptive text”,”Slide label”,”Permalink_parameter_use_a_number_here”),
2) upload the “name_of_your_images.jpg” image in the images folder, and you’re done.

How to delete pictures

Basically just undo what you did in the last step, although deleting the image in your “images” folder in not necessary. You can take out pretty much any line in that functions.php file, just make sure the code respects the syntax described earlier once you’re done.

Doubting.us

A picture and some text for every doubt. This is a bit of my visual blog, I’ll be posting to it and feeding into this site once in a while.
Everything on http://www.doubting.us

“Free allows you to work on YOUR terms. Not your client’s. You can say, “I can do it for free, but under these conditions”. As soon as money is involved, they feel like they own you.”

- The Gorilla

I really love these patterns, they almost look like they were printed on a nice textured yellow paper.
Go check out his website, here and the pattern gallery here. It’s really worth it.

Voltage from Bam Studio on Vimeo.

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

Had this thought today while talking with a colleague at work, we are currently transitioning between many browsers as some are on the rise, others dying out – but one thing is for sure, we’ve past the time where developers had to check their website in IE and Firefox (if you had time) and that was good enough. With people buying more Macs, the Safari people are starting to have their say in the misaligned floating div wars, Internet Explorer 8 just came out, but people are mostly on 7, while a bunch (15% according to w3schools, using stats of their users) of dinosaurs are still lagging on IE6. Then you gotta make sure the Chromers are happy since they already have 3% in less than a year and moving up fast, and if you’re lucky enough that your css hasn’t exploded in a million pieces a few times, you can check Opera and then maybe pat yourself on the back…

I’m all up for choice and having options when it comes to choosing whatever technology suits you best, but we web people should all get raises or something, you know…

I’m currently rebuilding the new company website, and have been slowly looking around for places to submit it once it’s done (everything will be XHTML/CSS). Here is my list up to now, it’s amazing how many of these you can find just by going through the “friend” list of them. 22 and counting…

http://www.thecssgallerylist.com/

http://www.cssglance.com/
http://www.csszone.org/
http://www.csssnap.com/
http://www.cssstar.com/
http://www.cssleak.com/
http://www.ecssited.com/
http://www.csscontainer.com/
http://www.cssflash.com/
http://www.cssbay.com/
http://www.csscreme.com/
http://www.cssperk.com/
http://www.css-design-yorkshire.com/
http://www.css20.com/
http://www.cssburst.com/
http://www.cssdance.com/
http://www.divinecss.com/
http://www.bestcssvault.com/
http://www.urbantrash.net/cssgallery/
http://www.designflavr.com/
http://www.mydesignaward.com/
http://www.coolhomepages.com
http://www.newwebpick.com/

I was in the bus for a few hours last weekend, and decided to fire up processing to make some simple patterns.
I actually really like the results, most of them are really simple in code, a bit of stuff in the void setup() and a class that randomizes the positions/alpha/color.
They actually work really well website backgrounds (tiling) in low opacity. Hmmm I would like to silkscreen one of these large format to see what it looks like.