Resources/Reverse Engineering Bar

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Revision as of 23:27, 3 May 2009 by Rubin110 (talk | contribs)
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Description

The Noisebridge Reverse Engineering Bar (aka The ReBar) is a batch of web pages hosted on Pony that displays information through Donkey. The setup is currently sitting on the Apple store table in the kitchen (which is where the name came from). It's more or less like a giant Chumby.

Widget System

The pages are pulled off of Pony, which also hosts the background image (originating from the widescreen Debian Lenny desktop wallpaper) and a CSS file. The general idea is if a member wanted to write something to display information, they could and place it on Pony's http server. The index.php will then display that page in it's widget rotation.

Footer widgets are currently implemented. To add your widget, simply create a page in /var/www/rebar/footer-widgets directory and the script will automatically pull it in. For examples, see the existing files. They are currently displayed in order, so name your files appropriately. If you want to exclude your file (while troubleshooting for example) preface the filename with _ (underscore) and it will ignore it.

You are responsible for handling your own CSS and formatting in your file. The screen dimention is 1680pix by 1050pix, the header and footer are 128px tall, the body is 824px tall.

If you would like to write something for the ReBar, please contact Rubin110 or edrabbit.

Current Widgets

  • Pick 8 user names randomly off of the wiki and print them on the screen, by edrabbit.
  • nbtwitter.php - Grabs the most current @noisebridge status. Currently exceeds Twitter's API limits so we need to cache this. Feel free to improve, by edrabbit
  • BART train times - (bart.php) - Grabs the BART train arrival times via xml. Feel free to format in a prettier manner. by edrabbit
  • Fortune - (fortune.php) - Everyone's favorite. by edrabbit

Ideas for Widgets

  • Currently playing song
  • List of upcoming events, scraped off of the wiki
  • Weather forecast
  • Bart times (I think Steen said he was on top of this)
  • MUNI times
  • Random photos from our Flickr pool
  • Current emails from the announce list
  • Some sort of ticker with interesting information that no one will care about
  • The current date and time
  • Dump of http://search.twitter.com/search?q=noisebridge
  • Display checkins from Brightkite and Foursquare
  • Newest posts from planet Noisebridge
  • SVN checkins to pony