Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

WordPress Processing Embed is a wp plugin to embed Processing applets into WordPress posts and pages. The plugin lets you embed applets directly into the page, or, display in the page or in a new window, when alternate content is clicked.

If you have a WordPress site go try it out. Let me know if you find any problems or have suggestions. This first release does not yet include support for libraries.

Usage

To use the plugin, upload a .jar file through the media uploader and insert the shortcode [processing file="yourapplet.jar"]. A default width, height, and embed method can be set in the admin panel and they can be overridden with parameters. Alternate content can be placed in a closing shortcode. For the ‘newwindow’ and ‘onclick’ methods, alternate content will be displayed and wrapped in an anchor tag.

A more complex example: [processing file="yourapplet.jar" width="500" height="300" method="onclick"]Alternate Content[/processing]

When exporting your applet, ‘use multiple .jar files’ should be checked in the processing preferences. The plugin already includes the core.jar file.

Demo

Once again, It was time for a complete re-design of my website.

After a few frustrating iterations, my previous design was just something created to be as simple as possible so I didn’t screw anything up. White background, black text, lots of pictures. It worked out pretty well, but it didn’t exactly sell me as a web designer (to be fair this one isn’t very web-designer-ish either). It was also a little cold and unfriendly. It also had some formal issues, such as wide text columns.

This new site fixes these issues, and is also generally more visually interesting.

The Blog layout stayed more or less the same. The post meta-data is in the left column followed by the main column for the post content. A third column, on the right hand side, can be used to annotate images and other elements within a post. I’ve also added a fancy tag cloud and page numbers thanks to a nifty plugin. I’ve been struggling between having a wide column with nice big images, and a thinner, easier to read, column, with smaller images. To try and get the best of both, I added Thickbox (sorry Lokesh, I was already using jQuery).

I feel my work is much more effective when it is larger and I had to sacrifice larger images in my blog for the sake of the layout. Thickbox helped this some, but just to make sure, I added the option to add a custom background to every blog post and page. Someone with a larger screen looking at on of my projects will see an elegant column of images, but will also have it filling in the background around the page. To enhance this I also have custom highlight colors to match the background image. Any page that shows multiple posts pulls these custom options from the top post.

The Home Page has grown substantially. A work from my portfolio is still featured at the top and it’s background pulled. I’ve also added more links to other parts of my site and around the web, and a silly picture of me, just for fun.

My Portfolio now has three viewing modes (large images, excerpts, and thumbnails) and benefited from other site wide additions.

As of right now I still have some little tweaks to make, but everything seems to be pretty much in place. I hope to get some feedback from everyone on the new page look. Comment below, or try my fancy new contact form.

Despite all the work I’ve been doing with Processing I don’t have many of the functional applets on the web. This is partly due to issues with embedding applets into WordPress posts. WordPress, the content management system I use for this site, is a great tool, but it has an unfortunate habit of screwing up code posted within the page content.

There are, of course, plugins to get around such issues, but I have a better plan. I’m building a WordPress plugin expressly for embedding Processing sketches. I’ve built a very basic version without any admin options. Inserting a simple shortcode into a post adds the applet. The shortcode is contained in brackets and simply reads ‘processing file=”path/to/file.jar” width=”450″ height=”250″‘. The .jar file can be uploaded with the media uploader within the “edit post” page in the WordPress admin or through the media library. The plugin includes the core.jar, so only the specific (and fairly small) .jar file for the applet needs to be uplaoded.

My basic script suits my own needs, but I’m working on an expanded version with an admin panel to set default options, alt text, and styles. I’m also not sure how this will render in RSS readers (probably not well but it should work in the site).

If you have any questions or suggestions on how I should move forward with this or features I should include leave a comment. The plugin should be available within the next few weeks.

see how it looks »

Alex Wein is a phenomenal photographer, working with a variety of subjects, from skateboarders to abstract formations of light. I’ve just finished this website for his work. The page is built with WordPress to allow all the content on the site to be edited without touching the code. The portfolio utilizes Adobe’s Spry JavaScript Framework for the sliding effect. Although WordPress is not specifically built for this situation a custom theme I built with a little custom PHP scripting places each post based on category into the Spry Sliding panels layout, and adds the navigation above. I also wrote a simple JavaScript to enhance the design and usability of the contact form by removing the default text and changing colors.

I personally look forward to seeing more of Alex’s work as he adds it and am quite happy with the design.

If you don’t know already, WordPress is kind of a big deal, and it’s about time i give it some credit. WordPress is a completely open source content management system. Being open source it is not only free for anyone to use, the source code is also visible and unencrypted making it easy for anyone which a little scripting knowledge to customize it, or use parts of it elsewhere. A content management system (cms) is a web interface which allows users to manipulate the content of a web site without having to write any code. Even for people who do know what their doing as far as building web pages this is a far better system than manually trying to write each page. I use WordPress for this website and for a few other pages I’m working on right now.

In addition to being free, the system is also very easy to use, and most importantly very well designed. Through the interface I can add or modify posts on my blog, upload images, create pages, manage my categories and links, comments, designs, and just about anything else the average blogger could ever want to do. There is even a visual editing mode (wysiwyg) allowing users to style the content of posts and pages without writing any html. Since WordPress is installed on your own server, although they also have their own hosting service now, you don’t have to worry about annoying ads and logos and a silly looking sub-domain as you would with a service like blogger. Read On »