Stories In Flight

My fascination with stories goes way back to my childhood and I've always been attracted to the idea that authors can create whole worlds in their mind and that stories allow us to share and experience these fictional universes across space and time.

Modern technology, and specifically computers and the Internet have added substantially to the power of these concepts. The ease and reach of online publishing has led to an explosion of storytelling as human culture has never experienced before. If you are reading this, you are literally only a few keystrokes and mouseclicks from sharing your thoughts, your experiences and your inner world with an audience of millions.

These developments have been so fast that we have not been able to keep up, and sites like Twitter, Facebook and many others are constantly reshaping what it means to tell a story, to share an experience in words across distance.

Here, at Stories In Flight I am experimenting with ideas around storytelling and new technologies. Many of the things here will be very rough, often barely-finished prototypes and the occasional failed attempt. New items will be added whenever I can get a few of my brain cells to rub together before falling asleep, so better not hold your breath...

Projects

FlickrPoet
An experiment to visualize short texts with images pulled from a text search on Flickr. Results tend to fluctuate wildly between random and deeply meaningful. Works best with poems and song lyrics, but feel free to experiment!

#haiku
An ambient website mashup of Twitter and Flickr which resulted out of the work on FlickrPoet - this app will search Twitter for recent tweets with the #haiku hashtag and will then visualize them by doing a text search on Flickr. Click and relax...

Floatsam

HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet
Some simple cut-and-paste examples of HTML5/CSS3 features that are already quite useful.

HTML5 Feature: Ruby Annotations
An exploration of the very new and still a bit experimental ruby element in HTML5. Bring a strong browser.

CSS3 Feature: Multiple Background Images... And More!
Multiple background images allow for some fascinating new ways to style HTML elements. This page also explores the possibilities around using these new background features for animations.

HTML5 Audio and JavaScript Control
The new audio tag allows for simple sound integration into pages. With generated audio objects it is now also possible to create complex soundscapes for games in JavaScript.

HTML5 Audio Data API - Spectrum Visualizer
The experimental audio data API allows to access raw audio data and a processed FFT spectrum of the currently playing music through the HTML5 audio tag. Here is a small demo of the visualization potential.

JavaScript: Binary Loader
A simple AJAX solution to load binary data into a JavaScript array.

Google Font API and Font Loading Behavior
Implementation examples for the Google Font API that avoid FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text) while the fonts are loading.

JavaScript: Sorting DIVs
By far not the first example of how to sort a group of divs in a page with JavaScript, but this one is intentionally simple - kitchen sink not included!

JavaScript: HTML5 Video with SRT Subtitles
Announcing VideoSub - an easy-to-use library that adds standards-compliant HTML5 subtitle support to any modern browser.