A New Generation of Campus Maps

Campus Map

“Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.”
— Angelina Jolie

conf-listing2014 has been a great year for getting out of my comfort zone, and in keeping with that theme, last month I gave my first-ever conference presentation with a couple of amazing colleagues at HighEdWeb 2014 in Portland, Oregon. I wish I could say that I nailed it, but honestly I tried to pack waaaay too much information into a limited amount of time, and was pretty nervous for the first 10 minutes or so. Still, it was well attended, we got some great questions and feedback afterward, and it was an exciting new experience that I would definitely recommend to anyone else looking to push out of their professional or personal comfort zone.

This presentation was about online maps—specifically higher-ed campus maps—and over the past several months I’ve collected a lot of information and resources that I’d like to share, in case it’s helpful to anyone else who is new-ish to online maps. Some of this will apply specifically to people working at colleges and universities, but there’s also some that could be useful to anyone interested in web-based mapping.

Before we jump in:

« here’s a link to the full slide deck ».

Continue reading “A New Generation of Campus Maps”

A better simple slideshow

Looking back in time by 900hp, on Flickr

 

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
— John Wooden

It’s a do-over! This is another fairly basic slideshow, written in javascript, html, and css. This is a dual-purpose project, it’s meant (1) to be something you can drop right into your page and use if you so choose, but it’s also meant (2) as an example/tutorial showing you how to build a simple DIY slideshow from scratch on your own. You can see a couple of demos of the finished product here: http://leemark.github.io/better-simple-slideshow/. Continue reading “A better simple slideshow”

A simple DIY responsive image slideshow made with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript

Slide Projector by macattck, on Flickr

“It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.” ― Napoleon Hill

IMPORTANT: I’ve written a new more robust slideshow, along with a code walkthough/tutorial. If you’re looking for a slideshow to use on your own site, it’ll be better and easier to use than this one. Go check it out: http://themarklee.com/2014/10/05/better-simple-slideshow/

A while back I wrote about a technique for building a simple automatically cycling slideshow using CSS animations, no JavaScript required. While that is definitely an interesting technique, it’s also pretty limited in how you can use it. For example, often with an image slideshow rather than just auto-advancing the slides you may want to let the user have control, so they can navigate forwards and backwards through the images at their own pace. These days you also may want a slideshow that’s responsive, so that it will work across a wide range of devices, automatically resize to fit different screen sizes, and maybe even allow some more touch-centric interaction–like swiping to the left or right instead of clicking “previous” and “next” buttons to cycle through the slides.

If this is what you need and you’re just looking for a drop-in solution, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, there are some great slideshow options out there already (here are just a few: SwipeJS, SlidesJS). However if you’re more of the do-it-yourself type and you want to custom-build your own to suit your exact needs, or just want to see how it can be done, then it’s pretty easy to get started with just a little bit of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Continue reading “A simple DIY responsive image slideshow made with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript”