Dear Students,

Below is a prospectus for six $500 grants, which will be competitively awarded next month to students currently enrolled in any ETB (Electronic & Time-Based) Art course at CMU. The grants will be awarded for the best project proposals, for projects which will be completed by the end of the semester. This is an ideal way of funding your final project. These grants are supported by the Fine Foundation.

STUDENT GRANTS IN ELECTRONIC TIME BASED ART

The Fine Foundation has generously granted the ETB area with funds to support student projects. There will be 6 production grants, in the amount of $500 each, awarded to students as completion funds for Electronic Time Based Art projects.

Proposal guidelines:
– 1 proposal (3 pages max)
– 1 budget (1 page max)
– Sufficient visuals to support your proposal.
All video must be on YouTube or Vimeo with links included in the proposal document. All visual documentation must be linked to a website or included in the 3 page proposal. No DVDs or hard copies of material will be accepted.

Proposals should be emailed to Professor Jim Duesing duesing@cmu.edu by 6PM on March 17, 2010. Late proposals will not be considered.

The students who receive grants will be asked to present their work at the end of the semester at a public event.

Also: In addition to these six grants, two additional. awards of $500 each will be given to completed Electronic Time Based Art work at the end of the school year. Details for how to compete for these 2 awards will be announced at a later date.

Demonstration of uploading and embedding a PDF file into the course blog.

• First, I upload my PDF to the blog with the “Upload/Insert” “Add Media” button.
• While I’m in the Media Uploader, I copy the file URL of the PDF, which is: http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/golan_noll.pdf
  
• Of course we could always just leave it at that — a link. But we could also embed the PDF directly into the page. Our site uses Google Doc Embedder, a WordPress plugin that permits embedding of PDF, PPT and TIF files. I follow the instructions on its documentation page, embedding a shortcode which looks something like this:
  [ gview width=”600″ height=”600″ file=”http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/golan_noll.pdf” ]
• Note that the extra spaces around the brackets have to be removed for this to work correctly.
• Note that this plugin uses the Google Doc renderer for PDF, which doesn’t render graphics as nicely as Acrobat.

And we see!:

Here’s a demo of a Flash upload and embedding in the blog. It’s a little easier than the Java applet. For this demo, I’m using one of Adobe’s free demo example programs.

Instructions:

• First, I remembered to create a project whose filename included my name and my project number (and as a precaution, had no capital letters).
• I Published (exported) my program, from Flash (Shift-F12 or File->Publish).
• I logged into the blog and chose to “Add New” Post (not Page).
• I used the Upload/Insert “Add Media” button (8-pointed star) to upload my .SWF file. Before closing the Uploader window, I made a note of its storage location URL, which looks like this: http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/3_graphics.swf
• This blog has installed the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin, about which you can read more here. In the Post Editor, you will see either a red Flash button (in Visual mode), or a “Kimili Flash Embed” button (in HTML mode). Press this button, and you will now be editing the Kimili Tag Generator.
• Paste the storage location URL into the field labeled “Flash (.swf)”, which currently has “untitled.swf”.
• Enter the dimensions of your Flash program into the “Dimensions” fields, and press the Generate button. This will insert some text beginning with [kml …. ] into your blog post.
• I remembered to Categorize my blog Post with an appropriate category, e.g. Project-0.
• I also uploaded a zip archive of my entire Flash project, for archival purposes, which I linked in here: flash_as3_sample_drawing_3.zip.

And voilà!:

Note that these instructions also appear here in expanded form.

First, I prepared my files:

• Before I exported my applet, I gave my sketch a good name, like “golan-demo”.
• This project name is good because it contains no caps, no spaces,
  and because it includes my name and project title.
• I edited my applet’s HTML file so that the div margins were 0 (zero).
• I also renamed my applet’s HTML file to “golan-demo.html” instead of “index.html”.

Then I uploaded the files to the blog, and edited the post:

• I uploaded the applet’s HTML file. I copied the URL that was generated by WordPress for the uploaded asset: http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/golan-demo.html
• I also uploaded my project’s .jar file, the “loading.gif”, and the Archive zip of my project.
• Then I inserted the IFRAME HTML code, in the post’s HTML editing mode.
  It looked like this:

  <iframe frameborder=”0″ src=”http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/golan-demo.html” width=”600″ scrolling=”NO” height=”350″></iframe>

and it produced this:

Here are some important last notes:

• I gave my uploaded Post the Category, “Project-0”, so that it could be found alongside its sister projects!
• If I didn’t feel like using the IFRAME, I could also just have created a link to the uploaded HTML file (as long as I also uploaded the other assets, like the .jar file):
  http://golancourses.net/2010spring/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/golan-demo.html
• Once you add the IFRAME code, It’s important to never edit this post again in “Visual” mode (non-HTML), or else the IFRAME code will get accidentally clobbered by WordPress, which is sucky.