Sculptures.org.nz
About this site
This website was lovingly created in September of 2011 by the Squizlers as an entry into The 2011 Mix and Mash competition.
Big thanks to all the Squizlers who spent many long hours in getting this website up and running.
- Matt Lane for the idea, research and witty facts
- Keith Miller for the techie stuff and design
- Merel Rip for picking up a couple of tours
- Vaughan Curd for sending in photos a day after his daughter was born!
- Alana Cornforth for picking up a tour for us
- Nuala Miller for photo finding, processing, loading and the odd witty aside
- Curdin Krummenacher for the logo & design bits and bobs
- John McCormick for zooming in the maps just right
- Jack Doig for helping out on a tour
- Evealyn O'Connor for donating a $75 Google AdWords voucher
Thanks also to those who gave their time and smart phones up for testing the site!
Data sources and bibilography
Wellington City Sculptures dataset
Wellington City Council
Responsive Web Design
Ethan Marcotte (A Book Apart)
Art & About
Frances Sutton (Steele Roberts Ltd)
Wellington, A City for Sculpture
Jenny Harper and Aaron Lister (Victory University Press)
Wellington Sculpture Trust website
Some photos from Flickr, linked to when used. Also some wikipedia articles.
Cool technologies used
Responsive web design
There's no need for a separate mobile website / app when you use the new cool kid on the web development block - responsive web design. We've used it so that the same website works for wide screens, laptop, tablets and smartphones. Resize your browser window to see the website adapt to the new screen width.
jQuery Mobile
It's still in beta, but we're using jQuery Mobile and it works well. We've used it to make the site work well on mobile devices - it provides nifty screen transitions, buttons and loading messages. We like it!
HTML5 Local Storage
We've used HTML5's local storage capability to record if a user likes a sculpture. Once a user has pressed a sculpture's 'like' button, they won't be able to press it again. Cookies are used as a back up for those browsers which don't support Local Storage.
Squiz Matrix
Squiz Matrix is our content management system. It stores the page templates and content and serves them up as desired. We've used the built in JavaScript API to store the number of 'likes' for each sculpture.
HTML5 GeoLocation
On the tour and sculpture pages we show the user's current geographic location on the map using HTML5 GeoLocation. This helps them find out where they are in relation to the sculptures. The location is determined by the device's geolocation ability. Mobile phones with GPS will probably give a more accurate location than wi-fi triangulation.
Google Maps
Almost forgot about these as we use them so often. But the site would be a whole lot less useful without Google Maps and its API. So cheers Google.
Offline (coming soon)
We're not quite there with it yet, but soon you'll be able to use this website when you're not connected to the internet. This will be handy when going to sculptures which are outside of the city's free wifi zones. We'll do this using HTML5 Application Cache. Nearly there!
