Blank Club Encyclopedia demo
From Blankclubencyclopedia
The Blank Club Encyclopedia Demo was an attempt to create a computerized encyclopedia to archive the events of the Blank Club using Flash.
Contents |
History
The Blank Club Encyclopedia Demo was commisioned in September 2004 (see 8th Grade) to chronicle and preserve the rich history of the Blank Club. The project was organized by Levenbreech Vor, with Bannus performing most of the design work and programming and General Subwoofer as head writer. Contributing writers included Barbour, Luke and Dr. D.
Structure
Style
While the Online Blank Club Encyclopedia is designed to look and function like the web-based open source [[1]], the original Encyclopedia was designed in the image of World Book 2003, a software-based closed system. This appropiately reflects the different time periods, as at the beginning of 8th grade Blank Club was infatuated with World Book 2003, while nowadays its regarded as no more than a useless appendix on every laptop's dock and Wikipedia is the reigning champion of all information sources.
Articles
Each article was originally a .doc file written in Microsoft Word by General Subwoofer and other contributing writers. The text in each .doc file was then copied and pasted into its own Flash frame as its own seperate page. This tedious process of converting .doc's into frames was one of the major factors behind the project's abandonment.
Organization
The encyclopedia's organization was quite similar to (or as Mr. Hogan) once put it "exactly the same as") that of World Book 2003's structure. A loading screen (that was added just for effect) with a progress bar would play first as a rendition of "Mr. Q's Secret Lab" played in the background. After that, a "Main screen" (pictured below) would appear and guide readers to their articles. (more to come...)
Abandonment and Replacement
The original attenpt at the Encyclopedia was unoficially cancelled after the demo's 2 week late release. The project disbanded mostly due to the difficulty and inconsistency of Flash. This wiki, the Online Blank Encyclopedia, is the second (and more successful) electronic encyclopedia.
Impact
The Encyclopedia project is hailed by many to be a great Blank Club achievement, considering it's incompleteness. It produced the roots of most of the articles found in this encyclopedia today, although most articles are in the process of being edited beyond recognition.
