Digital Quoteboard

August 18th, 2007
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

So one idea that I have had knocking around in my head for a while has been a digital quoteboard. I remember how in college I would go over to somebody’s apartment and there would be this quoteboard full of funny one-liners which if taken of context or more often, taken in the context of who said them, were hilarious. Of course they are usually only funny if you knew the people that said them. I thought about how there are a lot of online communities of tight knit people who could have a little bit of fun with a digital equivalent and so I whipped up this little example. I will probably refine it here and there over time and will probably release the source soon (it is not that much code). Other things I have thought of were live javascript based editing and WordPress permissions hook ins. It currently works by having a php page render a csv quote database into a jpg so you can have static links to the results, ensuring that it will work in every browser (the above image is the actual linked image and thus may change as the database changes). So far what I have found is that there is a great disparity in exact results or even basic functionality in using the same Truetype font on different operating systems and different versions of the graphics libraries that PHP hooks into. Also, it appears that some fonts do not fully define things like punctuation and formating such as tabs. Feel free to leave a quote by going here. Although I may decide to remove general access to it in the future 😉

4 Responses to “Digital Quoteboard”

  1. kalaxy Says:

    Awesome. It’s a great idea. Now if only I could remember something worth quoting. (BTW I tried adding another quote and couldn’t get it working.)

  2. snielsen Says:

    To add a quote you simply press the add button and the bottom and that will load the page again with a new quote. You can then customize it with the provided input boxes and then press the update button to change the picture.

  3. kalaxy Says:

    I did that. It added a new text field with all the details for me to customize my quote, however the quote doesn’t show up on the board. If you go to the edit page my quote is still there it just isn’t showing up.

  4. snielsen Says:

    It was there but the coordinates were too far off of the viewable area. I have moved it into the middle now and it shows up nicely 🙂 Ahh, classic Simpsons quote from the college days…

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