Greetings! The big news in our Hacker Wednesday Report this week is that our Kickstarter project is FUNDED! We thank all of our wonderful backers! We had some press about our project in the Bandon Western World that gives a little background on our project. We are very happy to see the website become a reality, and it is so much fun working with New Artists Productions.

We’ll be spending the next week getting the site ready for our Rural Design Collective Launch Party on September 4th. This primarily involves completing the animated stage by adding the navigation into the site and the photography slideshow. We also have a pesky bug with IE9/Windows Vista that we are trying to track down (if you view the stage with this browser combination, the curtain will not open, and even though the site is not 100% ready yet, this is definitely a BUG not a FEATURE ).

The month of September will be devoted to writing tutorials to support the transition of the site, and helping New Artists Productions create the password-protected area for the participants in their program. Speaking of which, we spent much of this week’s session reviewing Users and Roles in Wordpress, and how we will utilize this feature to build this section of the site. We have an idea how this will work, and will be setting up a test page soon to “kickstart” this really cool feature.

Thank you to our kind and generous backers again – we could not have done this without your support! Thanks for supporting another successful #rdcHQ Project!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! Today, we conducted a little research into the accessibility space to support our documentation efforts. Using a plugin for Internet Explorer called MathPlayer from Design Science, we created audible renderings of Jasper’s equations! Cool!

The Sandbox Speaks!

Surprisingly, MathPlayer does not work with the MathJax CDN, which is unfortunate given all of the other features that MathJax supports based on the prior work of Design Science. Hopefully, support for audio renderings for equations in ALL browsers is on the horizon. And although SVG is supported in Internet Explorer 9, the equations that we transformed to the SVG format using SVGMath are not rendering in Microsoft’s latest web browser offering. More news soon.

In more productive MathML news – Jasper has 70 equations left to author before we beta-test the workflow that we have developed. We’ll be releasing this with our documentation at the Rural Design Collective Launch Party!

Zoo Adventures, Part II

In RDC Home Movie News, Nate has released Part II of Zoo Adventures! He worked with Friend of the Rural Design Collective and mentor Dave Wilhite of PortOrford.TV to finesse some of the earlier parts of the video in iMovie, so we are re-publishing Part I as well.

Zoo Adventures, Part III is coming … next week … stay tuned!

An #rdcHQ Weekend Update! We have successfully coded our stage using jQuery and the Easing plug-in (ht @vivalasam), and despite a few details to work out with the background image, we are quite pleased with the results. This dramatic introduction to the site will highlight select content for upcoming events, such as the “Chili & Cabaret” fundraiser that New Artists Productions is currently organizing. We’ll be designing and coding a slideshow of photographs for the stage and the navigation into the site this week.

Kickstarter News

We’re still on the fundraising campaign trail for our Wordpress Track. The funds we raise via Kickstarter go to our two mentees – Jenn and Oceana – who are working to make this project a reality! We have four days to go in our fundraiser, and we need just $294 to make our goal. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding, so we are hoping to raise the rest for this worthy project! The Rural Design Collective thanks YOU for your support!

SVG Meetup + RDC Launch Party!


We shifted gears in our SVG Track this week, working out a consistent style for graphs in the MEDIUM level. We added six new schematics to the repository, and are working on a new production schedule to extend the SVG Track into September. We are excitedly beginning preparations for our third annual art exhibit in the “Art in the Information Age” series – αἰτία – and our Rural Design Collective Launch Party where we share and celebrate the work we have been creating all summer with the art and design community.

News from #rdcHQ – we are deep in the code working on the animated stage. A few revisions to the layout were made based on feedback from New Artists Productions. The idea is to get the photography to be front and center so it can effectively tell the story – (the logo will animate on stage before the slideshow).

We also made a quick thumbnail video of the animated curtain. This is just a rough draft – timing is off, and details will be refined.

More to come …