Evan Mitsui, Gloria Leung, Charlie Cho and Oliver Janousek
As my studies at BCIT’s new media program draw to an end this week, I sadly had to say goodbye to the online crew at CBC B.C. I had been working there two days a week since January for my practicum requirement, and here are a few of the projects I got to work on:
Photo galleries
User-generated content is an important component of the site, and maintaining the galleries can be a time-consuming process so I helped in keeping them up to date. The weather and encounters with wild animals galleries had daily submissions from great photographers across the province. I was amazed by some of the submissions, such as the owl that crashed through a window (it was OK!) and the two moose licking salt off cars in a driveway (in Fort St. James).
Also I created a gallery (largely from my own photos) for the Chinese New Year festivities in Vancouver’s China Town.
Another photo gallery project was for me to collect photos from the Illuminate Yale gallery. Regional Web Developer Gloria Leung had great photos from her building, but we needed some different angles, what to do?
We knew there were some great shots on Flickr, but could we use them. Ended up adding some fantastic photographers to my Flickr contact list so that I could message them and ask for their permission to use photos. To my amazement, I had responses back within half an hour, and could create an Illuminate Yaletown gallery.
Google maps speeds development of interactive content
For the Road to the Games interactive map I created an icon set (pictured below).
Road to the Games Google map
Creating illustrations 32×32 pixels was a challenge. What was distinctive enough to be distinguishable at that tiny size? And it had to stand out from the map background (Gloria gave some good advice about this – take a screenshot of a Google map to test against).
Found Shadowmaker to be a useful tool in adding the perfect drop shadow. Hurray for automation!
The wonderful part of Google maps (besides it being free!) is the ability to add content to a location – photos, video, text, links. So another part of my map project was to keep it up-to-date. Since it was an Olympic map, the name “GM Place” needed to be changed to “Canada Hockey Place,” for instance. And grabbed new updated photos of David Lam park and Robson Square.
Google has so many tools of use for webmasters, and the practicum has got me thinking about how I might incorporate maps into my websites in the future. (Though I was disappointed to find lakes missing from Yellowknife, NT, my former home. Apparently, it’s too far north for detailed mapping.)
