Interactive Calendar and Digital Yearbooks

October 20, 2005 7:07 PM

Help us make an interactive calendar to put in our digital yearbook.

Some of us are making a series of yearbooks in CD and DVD form for our study abroad group, with collections of our experiences and memories.

One CD is a data CD (anything not video, photo, or music) and one of the things I'd like to include in there is some form of an interactive calendar. I had envisioned something along the lines of this:

* Different "pages" for each month (we're spending approx. 5 months together)
* Each month will have their own date "squares" or segments
* These date segments will have one-liners about what happened that day (projects, birthdays, special events, etc)
* Clicking on those one-liners brings you more information, perhaps with some photos and other media

One idea was to use Flash to make this. Problem? We don't have anywhere to program Flash in, and none of us know Flash enough to make this.

It'll have to be something relatively low in filesize (who knows what else will end up on the CD), accessible to both Macs and PCs, easy to create, and doesn't need overly specialised software to run.

I could probably handcode it in HTML but that may seem a bit plain. Does anyone else have other suggestions?

Thanks!

posted by divabat to computers & internet (2 comments total)

for non-programmers, i think this is hard. i needed something similar and ended up writing my own toolkit, but i wouldn't recommend you use it (it's not exactly easy to use).

i wonder if you can use something like excel and then save to html? or sign up with a web-based calendar of some kind, fill it in, and then save the html pages to disc?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:54 AM on October 21, 2005

It will definitely be hard to actually program something, especially since we have so few resources (if any) for it.

For some reason I thought there'd be this Calendar Generator out there where I can key in the dates and info and it'll generate an HTML document for me...

I'll probably just handcode it myself (yay Notepad). Though the web-based calendar isn't a bad idea.
posted by divabat at 3:58 PM on October 21, 2005