Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

General Discussion Other

evanlivin..

Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

in General Discussion • Other • 1 year ago

I started out creative coding on Processing, but lately I have been working with openFrameworks. While these two communities are pretty close I find that a lot of information pertaining to creative coding is spread across the internet, interspersed throughout blog posts, artist's websites and community forums. However, much of this information is relevant to any and all development platforms.

For example, If I want to have a sphere travel in an elliptical orbit, I might have to search the processing forums, the openFrameworks forums, stackOverflow as well as blogs. Couldn't this appear in a wiki as some subsection of animation?and perhaps have code snippets for the most popular frameworks?

Would it be valuable to have centralized wiki to collect and link all of these resources, or is this something better left to the respective communities?

Replies(9)

quaghm

Re: Should I create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

I find there's definitely some value in it. Might as well become a highly used platform for creative coders, a centralised community sharing knowledge and inspiration beyond the applications themselves. Because now, you have the Processing forum, a few websites for sketches and examples, a lot of blogs with single post valuable information, ...

Even though there are a lot of different programming languages for creative coding, there's no solid base on the creative part iself. Why not bundle all that and make it easier to learn and find information? Easy to do with categories etc, so people can find whatever they are looking for without using Google to traverse dozens of websites.

And while we're at it, I would really like to help :)

— And with a killer layout of course. Please no standard wikipedia template :p

amnon.owed

Re: Should I create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

Yes. This idea is very good. Your description pretty much sums up why.

As the number of creative coding platforms is growing exponentially, this only becomes more relevant.

Wolfram meets Wikipedia meets OpenProcessing? So when is this gonna be done?

hellochar

Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

Count me in. We could do something like http://langref.org/ that shows you how to do various tasks in many different programming languages; in our case we could have Processing/OF/Cinder/AS3/MAXMSP/others. A centralized network of information would be a huge asset, especially to newbies as creative coding gets more and more interest.

evanlivin..

Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

I got a little antsy and purchased a domain name and I can host, though I havent created any content yet. A wiki seems to be the best way to allow a community to update and maintain a site, certainly a necessity for something like this. (Sorry quaghm) a Wiki also seems like the best way to manage all of the inevitably cross linking that will created in a site like this.

It would also be nice to have some sort of gallery with links to source code when available, though I don't know how to organize a gallery given the enormous amount of output this community has.

@kylemcdonald over at openFrameworks said " i think it's good that the communities are all active in their own space, but what would be really cool is an aggregator. something that tells you "here is a link to the relevant thread on the OF forum, here it is on the processing forum, here on stackoverflow".

I think he's got a point. I'm not trying to copy ALL of code snippets from the processing wiki to another, instead it might be best to link current existing code snippets, but try to get new code snippets onto this new site.

If anyone is interested in helping me code this, P.M. me.

Ideas for features or structure?

evanlivin..

Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

I have set up what I think is a suitable framework, but I'm not opposed to changing it. If anyone is interested in contributing/helping transcribe or link to current information, check out ccode.info.

Also, I still really like the idea about getting something like openProcessing running on this site, if anyone has any ideas of how to do so, let me know.

p.s. I've only got shared hosting, which makes the wiki a little slow. If anyone is interested in hosting this project let me know.

PhiLho

Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

You didn't give an URL...

datamosh

Re: Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

http://ccode.info/

PhiLho

Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

Thanks, it stands out better this way...

It is, indeed, very slow... But it looks clean and nice.
There is an error on the Jobs page:
Notice: Undefined index: fr in /home/evanlivingston/ccode.info/Jobs/Zend/Translate/Adapter.php on line 398
Obviously, it detected I have fr in my preferences and tried to access a French page but failed. That's OK as long as it falls back on the English version, but it would be better to do so silently...

The remainder is mostly MediaWiki, obviously, so it has a robust base...

evanlivin..

Re: Re: Should we create a comprehensive creative coding knowledge base?

1 year ago

@phi.lho Thanks for the info, however I don't like the way this site has shaped up. I think the site needs to be more powerful to really have an impact on the community. I'm thinking of starting from scratch.