The first batch of Little Printers from BERG started shipping last week, and I got mine a few days ago. He’s all set up on my desk now, and looking very cute.
Little Printer
Naturally, one of the first things I did was to take a look at the developer documentation to see how to create a publication myself. It turns out to be pretty straightforward – each publication is simply a page of HTML/CSS with some meta-data held as JSON. The content and meta-data is presented to BERG Cloud as a simple web service, and they use that to distribute your publication to any Little Printers that have subscribed.
I have a couple of ideas kicking about for things I’d like to use Little Printer for, but to start with, I figured I’d do something simple. As many of you probably know, I’ve been a fan of Tiny Speck’s MMO Glitch for a very long time now. Sadly, the game formally closed last week, and is no more. I’ve written a bunch of Glitch-related tools over the years, and as a consequence have a fair amount of game-related data cached. I figured this was an opportunity to put it to use.
Glitch was well known for it’s high quality artwork, which extended to the individual player’s avatars. The avatars were highly customisable, and players could change both the facial features and the wardrobe, which led to a huge amount of diversity in their appearance. I have copies of the avatar files for rather a lot of players now, so why not show them off to the world. And so, the Daily Glitch was born. This is a Little Printer publication, that each day, showcases a random Glitch from my database.
Glitch on Little Printer
The choice of Glitch is random, and I don’t maintain a history of who has already been shown, so I guess it’s possible that we’ll get a few repeats here and there, but given the number of Glitches I have stored, I suspect that’s not really going to be a problem.
If you have a Little Printer and would like to subscribe to the Daily Glitch, you can do that here.