This site is about a whole lot more than just doing citizen science. While I really hope all of you will spend some time exploring the different projects we offer, we also hope that you’ll take the time to learn as well. Part of learning is consuming content like Astronomy Cast and the Weekly Space Hangout. This material from our partner projects currently forces you to leave CosmoQuest, and go out to Google+ and join us on some link that we have no way of posting ahead of time. This is annoying to everyone involved – You want to know where to find us, and we hate having spend the first few minutes of every show posting links. It was kind of a mess. But most computer messes can be fixed with a bit of code.

Here is a link our new Hangouts on Air with CosmoQuest webpage.

Over the weekend I channelled my computer science tendencies into creating a mechanism to stream Google Hangouts on Air onto our website. Not only that, but the code grabs (when a show is live) the Hangout’s comments, and it keeps a twitter stream showing in the sidebar (with a link so that you too can tweet!). Due to the limitations on the Google API, I couldn’t get the code to allow users to post to the Google+ Comments, but there is a link you can click to go to the google plus site for the show, where you can embiggify and comment.

Putting the Pieces Together

Figuring out how to get everything wasn’t easy. The hardest part, as it too often is, was fighting with javascript. Thanks to StackOverFlow and WebDeveloper forums, I battled my way through. Here are the things I sorted with documentation and examples. Please use this post to make all needed comments.

• Reloading comments that scroll to the bottom of the comment div:  This problem required two different issues to be solved, and then the code needed to be combined.
  • Problem 1: Scrolling a div to the bottom [documentation] [example]
  • Problem 2: Reloading the div [documentation] [example]
• Use VBulletin Login on a non VB webpage[documentation] [example]
• Get people tweeting. Here, I combined to Twitter widgets:The Twitter Search Widget and theTweet Button
• And then there is the whole Google API thing and a backend for posting shows …

And yes, I’m going to make the full code available to you.

Getting the Code

One of the goals of CosmoQuest is to do everything in a completely open manner. We’re not going to share with you our first draft, really ugly, kludged together initial code. We will, one piece of software at a time, share everything with you when the code is stable enough and commented enough that you can get it up and running faster than you can code your own solution.

• Download the code from this webpage,
• Documentation can be found here.

Everything we do will be released under the (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license. We ask that you please link back to CosmoQuest.