Experience an Event From the Comfort of Your Computer Chair!

Last week London hosted the DIG London Conference 2009. DIG London is the information hub for the digital interactive gaming industry in Ontario. London has definitely become a hotspot for video game developers, publishers, technology companies, service providers and emerging talent. Echidna Solutions Corp. was also able to offer a great service for the event. Using the Twitter API, we were able to create the DIG London Feed. After seeing a feed application at the AEA (An Event Apart) conference last month, we decided to prototype something similar for the upcoming DIG conference in our own backyard. The DIG Feed enabled the online community to see all of the tweets about the event, in real time, as long as they were using the hashtag #dig09.

The Technology: The application was created using open source tools including PHP, MySQL, SimplePie Parser and the Twitter API. The user interface was implemented using a technique known as progressive enhancement to allow all browsers to implement all functionality while allowing users with "enlightened" browsers to enhance their experience with some nicer visual elements allowed by CSS3. If you visited the site with Firefox 3+ you actually had a different visual experience.

The Question: Should developers encourage visitors to their sites to use "enlightened" browsers or should we continue to create websites using "graceful degradation"? Graceful Degradation is the traditional method of development, where developers create separate style sheets or javascripts for the latest browsers that also work well for older versions of browser software.

Give it a try! This technology is also being used for SMarts London this Saturday (November 14th). Follow along at www.smartsfeed.ca and enjoy the event from the comforts of your computer chair - or you can participate by using the hashtag #smartsldn09!