Child Theme

This week’s assignment in Fast…Web was to tweak a WordPress Parent Theme to make your own Child Theme. I had tried to do something similar to make a quick and dirty website to publicize an installation for a friend over the break. I found a theme that I liked, Glossy-Stylo, which let’s you use an image for the background and looks pretty minimal, but I had had trouble changing the php so that it didn’t display the date under the post header, and didn’t show the comments. I guess in some ways I could have tried to make a page instead of a post, but I didn’t think of that at the time. Anyway, I took this assignment as an opportunity to try and disable some of those features on the theme.

Here is a screenshot of the original theme:

And here is one with the changes I made (as well as a new background image, which might be cheating but does make a pretty big difference):

I tried to find a way to make the transparent background behind the text a bit darker, but I had trouble finding both the CSS id as well as what it could be called in the php. Hopefully we can go over that in class tomorrow. Anyway, this assignment made me feel a lot more comfortable messing around with php. At first I tried commenting out the lines I didn’t want displayed, but it made forward slashes appear where I didn’t want them. In the end I just ended up deleting the lines. I wonder if there is a way to comment those out…

Anyway, here is a link to the child theme so you can take a look for yourself.

Website Proposal

I have two directions I am thinking of going in for my website final project in this class.

Light-Wake:
A friend of mine asked me to collaborate with him to make a net art piece using James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as source material. At this point we’re not entirely sure how we want the viewer / user to engage with the text, but we want to make a database of all the words in the text, and allow the viewer to encounter them randomly / interactively / non-linearly.

The text is quite complicated, and has been described by some as psychedelic. It is the last book Joyce wrote and it took him 17 years to finish it from when he started writing. Many of the words he used are completely made up, and the book was widely criticized and misunderstood when it was first published. The structure of the novel is comprised of 17 chapters, divided into four books. Here is an existing website that lets people encounter the book according to chapter and page number, with a glossary at the foot of each page.

Our intention, at least at this point, is to have each word in the database appear randomly, perhaps drawing connections between words according to alphabet, syllable length, or even meaning. Also at play in making this piece, neither of us have read the text in full.

Darkness Map:
Last semester I collaborated with two students at ITP, Rune Madsen and Scott Wayne Indiana, to make studies for a project called the Darkness Map, which measures and maps the levels of darkness in New York City at night. For our proof of concept executed last semester, Scott and I walked on each side of the street with a camera pointed at the other side and took video for the length of each block, keeping track of where we started and stopped. Rune made a program to analyze the average brightness of each frame of video, and plot the data as a histogram. I took these block-long histograms into Photoshop and organized them as best I could into a representation of the neighborhoods we walked.

The next step in where we would like to take the project would be to make a mobile phone app that would GPS-tag video clips, generate the histograms, and then layout them out “automatically” by the GPS location, not manually. People would be able to download the application, collect data around their neighborhoods, or wherever they chose to walk, and then upload these videos to YouTube, or some other database website. The histograms would be added to the map via the Google Maps API or some other system to orient the histograms correctly, augmenting the existing map with information about the amount and quality of darkness at night.

I plan to build the mobile application soon, and would like to take the opportunity with this assignment to make the website that people would be adding their content to, and seeing the progress as the “dark areas” on the map get filled in.