NettiS'napsi

The student association (a.k.a guild) for bioinformation technology in Aalto University, Inkubio, has long published a print magazine called S’napsi. From time to time, the editor-in-chief would grace the editorial volunteers with a call for a web issue, and in 2017 I wanted to try my hands at the technical implementation.

As this was practically my first foray into web development, the chosen stack was quite basic; HTML, CSS and JS. A simple website with content dynamically hidden and shown based on jQuery callbacks on <a> tags, considered by few to be the peak of SPA accessibility.

In addition to the written contents, one of the main attractions was a timelapse of our guild room, which was gathered from a web cam over a month’s time. Gathering the data was simple, as the individual screenshots were already stored on a Linux server, so they just needed to be copied before they were rotated. However, figuring out how to use FFmpeg to render a huge folder of images into a video that could be reasonably embedded to a website was a nice challenge.

Another challenge was posed from figuring out how to embed a game made with RPG Maker into the website. It turned out that RPG Maker’s support for HTML5 exports was really all that is needed, and just having it lazily load was good enough for our purposes.