Category Archives: World Wide Web

Getting an Open Day online

Computers and IT, Garching, Munich Quantum Valley, Outreach, World Wide Web

Partly in my spare time and partly in my working time, I designed and coded the website for this year’s Open Day in Garching.

I had already built the site for last year’s event, but due to the much larger number of participating institutes, chairs and companies, this time I added a system to filter all the activities on campus based on language, target audience, formats and tags.

The site uses WordPress along with some modifications to both the theme and the code.
As part of our support for the event, the MQV team has been collecting and filling in all the information and content for all the activities. The design elements for the Open Day were provided by mattweis and I adopted them up for the website design.

There is still a lot of content to be added, but you can already get an idea of what to expect from the Open Day, which will take place on 3 October 2024 from 10am to 5pm.

MQV will be present with a booth and presentations at the LRZ: Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Feel free to pass by to learn about MQV and the website ;)

In addition Build Your Own Particle Detector will be present, along with the Belle II and ATLAS Experiment, at the booth of the cluster of excellence ORIGINS.

Reviving a school website

Coding, Computers and IT, Design, Munich, World Wide Web

Earlier this year I took on the task of reviving my son’s high school website. Now we have finally reached the point where the school has decided to officially move from the old and outdated site to this new one.

After another less successful attempt by someone else to relaunch the site, we decided to go for a slimmer and simpler approach this time to minimise maintenance.
Using WordPress, I derived a minimally modified but dedicated child theme based on Twenty Twenty and wrote a bit of PHP, Javascript and HTML/CSS code to adapt the site to the needs and wishes of the school staff.

Some content still needs to be added, but the site is already more functional and complete than the old one, so the school decided to launch it at their summer party today.

I will continue to support the school team with maintenance, development and working on the long list of ideas we still have for the site. These include updating some of the images in collaboration with the photography course and better integrating the school newspaper and other school projects.

Jackbox Games

Computers and IT, Family & Friends, Games, World Wide Web

In these special times during the COVID-19 pandemic and while staying at home and practicing social distancing day and night, I thought about having an online game night with friends and remembered the good old classic You Don’t Know Jack game I had on my PC ages ago.

Turns out, I actually bought a few Jackbox Party Packs and some other Jackbox Games via HumbleBundle over the years and I just completed my Steam collection via a special offer on Green Man Gaming.

So I wanted to give a quick run-down on which games there are, which one I/we like most and what worked well for us.

Jackbox Games actually released a tutorial page on how to play their games with remote friends. Somehow Twitch and Youtube don’t (yet) work well for me, but both Skype and Zoom did a fine job (despite the sound coming through the mic together with my speech).
Also they have some games on sale, or even for free, right now on Steam and elsewhere.

For all games you need one computer running the games and a (mobile) device with a browser for each player. That’s it. And while the number of players is limited, many of the games allow for an almost unlimited number of spectators (audience), which can still take part as an extended jury.

If you feel like playing a bit, just ping me directly on Steam or elsewhere ;)

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