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Welcome to the Hackdays!

This provides a collection of resources and guides for hackdays where the aim is to create browser based applications that run from the local file system. Because of this there is the restriction that datasets need to come from CORS-enabled web servers or else need to be loaded into iframes or saved locally. You can find out more about this at the Enable CORS website and test endpoints using the Test CORS tools.

There is a page of data sources and a page of Javascript Libraries to help you.

Although we won't get involved in this, programmers use standard patterns of thinking to create these Javascript libraries. These are called algorithms. Examples of algorithms for sorting and similar manipulations of data are illustrated in these videos. Enjoy!

Start off with the Green Slopes. The exercise here is to make up an HTML web page that uses the MIT Simile Exhibit javascript library to make a simple faceted browser of a dataset that it on the Scottish Government Labs website. The Exhibit library has two versions (2 and 3) and examples are given for both.

Then progress to Blue Slopes which has exercises based on the Green Slope work to use Exhibit as a faceted browser for RSS feeds. This also includes ways of filtering and organising RSS feed data based on terminology that you develop and also shows how to display a timeline.

If you get on OK with them you can either continue doing more with what you learned on these exercises or else move on to the Red Slopes and Black Slopes