Digital Displays Launch
Today we launched the digital displays across all three campuses. This was earlier than we’d planned for the launch, but staff from IMS (Robbie Booth and Patrick Ryall) and IT (David Dean and Matthew West) along with several contractors (DC Tech and Team Electric) worked long hours to get the system installed and ready to go for today. (The photo at right is the test screen along with some of the whiteboarded software code that drives them.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on the code to drive this system, using our web content management system LiveWhale as the content source and pushing events to the screens in real-time.
With the advanced launch date, that meant I wasn’t able to put in the full complement of features our PubCom design group or the displays group had envisioned, but with some simliar long hours over the past week, I was able to build version 0.5 for launch today. And given that we kicked it off today with no time to run a full test, the launch has gone very well but is still what Morgan has termed “a shaky colt.” 
We have been and will continue to watch their performance through the immediate future, making updates to issues as we discover them. (I’ve pushed about four or five updates to the code today.) If you see an issue and want to alert us, please emailwwwadmin@lclark.edu or use our feedback form. And don’t forget you can post your events to the displays!
And, thanks to Michael Ford and Morgan Grether, who created and/or geo-tagged lots of events to push them the displays in the final hours before launch.