Archive for October, 2008
Digital Welcome Sign
We wanted something cooler than the average “Welcome to our office” sign. Rather than go out and get something lame like a whiteboard, we decided to over-engineer a digital version.
Our first thought, was to link it to an iCal ics file to get it’s data. This way, the administrators have the ability to change it, and it’s “pushed” to the server, which happens to be the computer that this runs off of.
A PHP script re-loads every minute that gets the current data from the file. So if I add a meeting, it’s on the board one minute later. The script posts someone’s name 20min before the meeting starts, and takes it off 10min after the meeting is scheduled to end.
The way we did this is by making the event name the Company that the person is from. That way, we can add 4-5 attendees and have it still show one company logo. If we don’t have their logo in the system, it ignores that part and loads nothing. Here’s an example of what it looks like when “Joe Cool” from Microsoft has a meeting scheduled.
But when there is no meeting scheduled….
It politely tells the managery of solicitors we were seeing “No Solicitors - Seriously, we’re quite busy and nobody wants you here.” No joke…we were seeing 2 a day, and now it’s 1-2 a week. Evidently they can read!
We also added Cleveland Weather, and a running total of transactions we’ve processed this year. It’s fun for the employees to see as we’re walking by, and the clients get a kick out of it too.