Big Faces – a mashup of The Big Picture and Face.com

Big Faces

Just put up another quick side project: Big Faces, which aggregates the excellent Big Picture Blog (by the Boston Globe and its many contributors) and just shows the faces. I used the Face.com API to crop the faces before uploading them.

I have in mind a multi-level photo-exploration app but because it’s been so long since I looked at using Backbone.js, I needed some practice. As it is, the fine work of the photographers and curators associated with The Big Picture stands on its own power. I probably should rethink it so it doesn’t require a 700K JSON download…

The process is simliar to the Congressmiles demo I did last week.

On the front end, this uses the excellent isotope JQuery plugin. It also has Backbone.js though I vastly simplified the project so much that I pretty much ditched using any of Backbone’s useful features. The Backbone boilerplate was extremely helpful, though, in organizing the project.

I'm a programmer journalist, currently teaching computational journalism at Stanford University. I'm trying to do my new blogging at blog.danwin.com.