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I am going to be researching the first 10 in the video game section.

--mark

and I'll be doing the last 10 in the video game section

Electronic Music, Music Tech

HEre's the rest of the starter content

Remember in all of these you are free to substitute others you find interesting as your research begins.

In some cases I'm lisitng organizations or competitions instead of individual artists. If you see something about a person in those organziation sites that's done stuff you like, again feel free to swap them out.

Video Art

Nam Jun Paik
Dan Sandin
David Jones
Grahme Weinbrun
Bill Viola
Gary Hill
Lynn Hershman
Mary Lucier
Bruce Nauman
Peer Bode

Electronic Music
Laurie Anderson
Walter/Wendy Carlos
Bob Moog
MIDI
Harold Bode
Les Paul
Synclavier
Leon Teremen/ Theremin
Gibson Magic/ Digital Guitar
Max Mathews

Technological Art
Myron Kruger
Billy Kluver/ E A T
Siggraph
Perry Hoberman
Art Bots
Ars Electronica
Journal Leonardo
Blue Man Group
Stelarc
Luc Steel

I suppose I can do video art if no one has any objections.

Here's a tentative ranking of the computer topics in order of most tempting to leat. Granted, it's kind of a soft list, as my preferences aren't that stron on these items. By the way, what was ATI an abbreviation for. I found a reference here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies) to "ATI Technologies Inc. (where ATI is an acronym for Array Technology Industry)".

Alienware
As we may think
DynaBook
Englebart Mouse and Windows
IBM PC
Apple II
Macintosh
Commodore Amiga
Commodore 64/128
Atari 400/800
Atari 512
Sketch Pad
Windows

The Technical Art stuff looks interesting, I am going to give that a shot.

Ok, I played around with what we have and have come with some restrictions on what will (should) work best.

Entry titles should not be more than 30 characters long, and should not have any words with more than 15 characters. Ideally, this way, they won't take up more than two lines on the timeline.

Item summaries should be no more than 100 words.

Each entry should have a thumbnail image in the summary that can be at most 100px in either direction.

The summary view will only have 5 influences and 5 influenced by links, so choose the most revelant first if they have more than 5. The rest will be posted in the entry's extended page.

Otherwise, since we want this to be continuously building, users can add as much information and as many links as they want. That can be done on the individual entry's page.

I've uploaded what we have so far to the class project site. There are four pages and are by no means complete. Basically just the table structure with sample info. Here's the breakdown on the design:

Tha main (index) page could list major items from all the categories at a glance across the last five years. We can do the same for each specific category, listing only items specific to that category (i.e., if I clicked General Computing, I'd get the same layout, but with just General Computing entries in the timeline).

Once you click a title, you get the category view, where you can still see the timeline, but get a quick summary (lower left box) and related items. This way you can easily browse the timeline.

If you want to read more on an item, you click a link in it's summary which takes you to the entry view. Here is repeated the title and summary, but also includes all information added by users, as well as images, influenced by, influenced, and other related links.

Lastly is the form page, where we can submit new entries. User selects a category, title, date, and enters revelant information. Once the info has been verified, we add it to the database. I have no idea how to get the form information (I don't think anyone else in the GUI group does either) so I leave that up to the middleware peeps =) )

If we implement the search function we'll need a search results page, but I think we can worry about that later.

GUI group, let me know where we are on the stylesheet and logo, and what we should do about the scrolling issue. Everybody else, questions, comments, concerns?

Great start. I recommend an iterative process of checking it against the html validator, mainly for cross-browser compatibility. Since this site could potentially go popular, we want to make sure one person doesnt have a huge job of validation at the end of the project.

Keep up the good work. I cant wait to see this project come together.

--mark

Good stuff Luis and good point Mark.
Luis can you ore someone else from GUI post a sample completed screen so that people can see what something that follows your data entry guidelines might look like??

Thanks

I had posted a couple of pics of what we're going with on my blog a while back. This is what we were leaning towards regarding the looks / functionality. You'll notice a few minor differences in the layout from what I posted, but the general idea is the same. And this is what an individual entry could look like. I don't have one of the main page (and don't really have time to make one), but it'd be the same as the first, minus the tables on the bottom. Shouldn't be too hard to use your imagination =).

I posted a sample to the class site.

Click on the "Sample" link on the bottom. That will show you (some of) what you would see if you were in the 1941-45 range. In '43 we have Bushnell is born (title is under 30 characters long). Clicking that gives you a summary at the bottom (under 100 words) with a thumbnail image (resized to 100 x 75). Next it to would appear at most 5 related links in either influenced by / influenced categories. At the end of the description you can click to read more, where the extended info is at, with the full sized image. I hope the gives everyone a better idea at what we're trying to get at. Thanks.

Luis, Nice Work on the sample.
I think, however, we can improve on one aspect, and that's the text under the title in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, around smiling Nolan's face :-)

As we're making this an annotated, overview resource that's linked internally and externally we can do much less ourselves.

Something more like this...

Who:Nolan Bushnell, Video Game Inventor and Industry Pioneer.

What: Inventor of Pong, Founder Atari, Pizza Time Theater, uwink.com

Why: Nolan Bushnell is considered to be the father of the video arcade industry. In 1971, Bushnell and colleague Ted Dabney created the Spacewar clone "Computer Space" in a self-contained cabinet; it was manufactured and distributed by Nutting Associates. While his first game was unsuccessful, primarilly due to its complexity, Bushnell's second game, implemented by Al Acorn, gave birth to the video arcade industry.

(Since the underline tags I put in don't seem to be working imagine that
Pong, Atari,Pizza Time Theater, uwink.com, Space War and Al Acorn are underlined if they are linked to internal resources (could be external resources too, we can talk about that in comments here and in-class)

If we have a large internal resource, we put a read more link below. If not we refer people to URLs and have a url list in the same general area you have influenced and influenced by info now.

I look forward to comments bu Luis and the rest of the UI team

Are we hosting the thumbnail images on Vega? I see pictures on other websties, but they dont follow our size constraints, so it seems like we have to download all of these pictures. I just wanted to make sure, before I go and mess something up.

--mark

Prof, I'm not really following regarding the linking of internal or external sources (I think I have an idea, but I'd rather wait til class to discuss and clear it up).

Regarding the pics, yeah, getting the thumbnail images will either require we save a copy and alter it or force a size change in the html (which is probably not hte best idea). Again, I think we should discuss that in class.

I made some changes to the class site to deal with the scrolling issues. You'll notice that it's awfully small, but that's just because there's no info (check the sample). The table borders are just there for structure and will also be removed once we add the color scheme.

The content area expands as info is added, and then begins to scroll when it gets too large. This should allow for more room in the item titles, though we should probably still shoot for short titles).

The pages seem to work well in Firefox, (including in 800 X 600 resolution), I haven't checked Netscape (someone want to do that and report?) but of, course, Internet Explorer is an a**hole and doesn't display it properly. It doesn't shorten the div and add scrollbars, so if anyone knows how to get IE to make a div scroll, please enlighten me.

P.S. Internet Explorer sucks ... hard.

So why not use something like an iframe instead of a div? Those things are scrollable by default.

I don't know what an iframe is. If you can take the code thats up on the site and make it work with that iframe, more power to you.

iframes aren't good to use either, they're not supported by all browsers. At least they weren't the last time I checked.

Anyway, I'm just posting to tell people (Luis in specific I guess) that my section the video art section has about 80-100 words for the "why" part. I think that's all I need to mention, if there's anything else just say so, I have the data so I can send it anywhere.

You can set scrollbars for scrollable content in divs through stylesheets. Take a look at the reference material on http://www.devguru.com/ in the CSS2 section. It's very easy to do.

David, you didn't post your list anywhere, so these are the computers/consoles that I chose to research. I basically picked the 7 at the bottom of your list.

Commodore Amiga
Commodore 64/128
Atari 400/800
Atari 512
Sketch Pad
Windows
ATI (ATI Technologies Inc. graphic cards producers)

The form that is linked from the main page of the class is now connected to the database. Everyone can begin to add their data 'cards' into the database by way of this form.

And while there is some form validation being done to help prevent errors, there still remains some more validation to be done (such as for entering a valid date). Just please be sure you are entering complete data before pressing submit, as we currently do not have a form that allows you to change your data. That should be the next form we create.

http://vega.it.rit.edu/~gamehistory/form.php

And to help out with the content portion of the main timeline, I created the following test page to show how the divs might be created on the fly based on the year selected. It is done entirely in CSS with no tables similar to what Carlo was describing.

http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/731/testpage.html

I'm sure it will need to be tweaked, but it's here just for proof of concept relating to a conversation between Christian, Luis, and myself a couple of days ago.

I have a question about the Form. What if for the date I only have the year of the invention, is it ok to only enter the year and leave the month and day blank?

year works :-)

Oh yeah, what should I do with the pictures?

I'm sorry for so many separate posts, but I keep coming up with different issues.

What should I do with the relative/extra links? Do I add them at the bottom of the description?

One thing I found out is that you can not leave the month and day blank, it will ruin the entire date entry and leave it 0000-00-00 in the database. What I did for mine was simply put 1 for the month, and 1 for the day. This worked out alright.

--mark

In the form, Computer should be listed in the hardware type menu. All of my hardware are computers.

Also add Operating system (OS) and Graphical user interface (GUI) to the software type menus.

Thanks.

Mark, Jay and I discussed that and for now that's the appropriate solution - I ran into the same problem.

Christian, the database is updated and the HW and SW types are now in there, but the form doesn't reflect those changes yet. As far as the related links, hold on to them but for now do not worry about entering them in with the description. Right now we are only working on the summaries. I'm not sure what to do about the pictures though, does anyone else have any ideas?

I updated the form, you can now select the new HW and SW types.

I have two solutions to usign a picture, but neither of them are really good.

1. We can just use a database field to link to an external picture, and then in the HTML code we can shrink it down to the size we need. This is unrelieable because the site may go down, and HTML shrinking or stretchign of photo's is a load on the server.

2. We could find out how to set up an ftp upload section and then use that program prof. Jacobs was talking about, but I have no idea where to begin there.

--mark

It also may be harder to get pictures for some things than others.
I take it the form is working fairly smoothly? I'll probably post tommorrow. I spent a lot of today picking up more sources for my final page in Current Themes. Fortunately, I did manage get all my games running on the lab comp, though Masters of Magic is a bit slow.

Another somewhat burdensome but fairly simple to achieve alternative for the picture dilemma, would be to create an images folder in the site directory. We could all grab the pictures we want, place them in the images folder then add the html within the descriptions entry. We could and have the css do the image formatting so they would all be uniform. i.e. the first line in the description would be…

Eek, it didn't show up in the previous post. Well, it was just sample html code for inserting a picture and formatting it with a class from the attached style sheet.

Christian's comment is one doable approach, at least for the time being. It might help to have a guideline for thumbnai size.

I know the image magil stuff works fairly well, but we're likely running out of time to pull that off unless someone's taken another look at it.

In an ideal world, people who wanted to post would upload an image to the in a folder. IT would either be processed by image magik on the backedn and an appropriately formatted one would be saved off to use in the DB. Alternatively IM would just be used to process the raw file eachtime it's called for display. Dunno which one is more efficient. I believe it can do both.

My apologies, but I was only able to get in the 7 entries on the list in. While I might be able to think of more, I haven't slept in over 24 hours and most of that time has been spent on classwork. As such, I doubt any further entries would look like anything other than gibberish. Not that I can really sleep now, as I have less than 2 hours before I have to go. However, I noticed my descriptions was been getting increasingly less useful and I doubt any further efforts will do any good until I at least get some rest.