bassistance.de

Google Plus and Facebook are good to share content, but it shouldn’t live there. For a WordPress-based blog, integrating Facebook’s Open Graph metadata helps both the G+ and FB crawlers to display a good preview for your posts. A plugin that does a good job with that is WP Facebook Open Graph protocol. For links to posts, it generates an excerpt to use as the description, and will look for images inside that post, which always helps to decorate shares.

As far as I can tell, there’s not much of a drawback for adding that plugin. It just adds a few meta elements, based on content that’s in the html anyway.

On a quiet Sunday afternoon I actually managed to render one of my old 3D models in WebGL. And I didn’t even have to deal with WebGL at all, thanks to Three.js.

The model I wanted to is an ATST, originally created for my Domino Star Wars project.

I had the model exported as a 3DS file, which I then imported into Blender, scaled down a bit, then exported to Three.js’ ASCII JSON format. Figuring out how to use the Blender plugin took a bit of digging (documented into a new readme). From there I took one of the existing examples and replaced the loaded model with my own. And tada, a rotating 3D ATST, in your browser, if it supports WebGL:

3D ATST demo

This isn’t all too interesting yet, but an important first step.

For more WebGL resources, see my WebGL Links post.

Here are some resources on WebGL, the OpenGL implementation that now runs in current Firefox and Chrome browsers.

• There’s a WebGL specification, and as usual, its intended for implementors of the spec, not for users of the API. Though at least this spec as actual usage examples, so if you’re looking for a specific detail, this could be a good last resort.
• An okay Getting Started tutorial let’s you render, BEHOLD, a square. It makes use of vertex and fragment shaders, making the whole thing fairly complicated, but hey, its hardware accelerated and you’ll learn a lot of the low level basics.
• A lot more resources can be found on Planet WebGL, there I just found this cool X-Wing demo.
• Another site decicated to learning WebGL, The WebGL Cookbook.

This is one ofmy all-time favorite cartoons that I found on the intertubes long before YouTube existed, and that I wish all my friends would know so that they’d get the references and in-jokes. So here it is, the awesome work of Don Hertzfeld called ‘Rejected’: