Appeal posters

[dracos]

[ From https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-September/007561.html ]

I'm spending a fair bit of time leaving comments on FixMyTransport problems, suggesting what people might do in order to get the things they want fixing, fixed. Quite often, the honest answer is that the best thing that they can probably do is print a page of A4 with an appeal, and stick it on/next to the bus stop where they wait for their problematic bus.

What would be REALLY COOL is this - a web page where I could stick the URL of a campaign page, which it would then scrape in order to produce a PDF or easy-to-print HTML page containing:

a) The appeal text printed really big, saying something like "Please support my attempt to persuade Arriva to run this bus on time"
b) The more details text printed slightly smaller
c) An easy to read short URL, printed quite big - along with some words which say "To sign up on your phone, open this URL"
d) A QR code for the cool kids.

If someone would hack this for me then me, Myf and the emerging new generation of volunteers could use it all the time make nice little printable pages for FMT users, which we'd post as links on their pages.

[dracos]

@symroe has made a FMT HTML to JSON convertor, at https://gist.github.com/1201766

@artesea has made http://fmt.argh.tc/poster.php?campaign=http://www.fixmytransport.com/campaigns/provide-step-free-access-to-the-northbound-platfor - he writes "(campaign picked at random) and by accident I discovered that http://www.fixmytransport.com/campaigns/[ID] works which allows for short urls and cleaner QR codes. Nothing fancy, no images, custom fonts or colour, more proof of concept."

[dracos]

PledgeBank already has ReportLab PDF generation for its pledge posters, that has worked well, would be quite easy to adapt, and produces pretty results easily.

Alternatively, a print stylesheet could do much of what is asked for directly - a) and b) trivially of course, and it would have access to the URL of the page (e.g. see Printed links in http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint/ ); and someone clever I'm sure could get some sort of background-image generating the QR code magically! :)

And if someone wanted to do this by forking the code and applying it directly to the code base, that would of course be great too!

[symroe]

The script at the above gist URL can be seen served by web.py here:

http://fmt.talusdesign.co.uk/fix-the-dire-cycle-parking-shortage-at-cambridge-s

There is no error handling or anything like that, so it will break. Will make nicer if someone actually wants to use it (although clearly the better long term solution is for FMT to provide this, I understand there are other things to be doing right now!)

[Jedidiah]

Got a mockup of how the poster could look at http://eclipse.ukcod.org.uk/~jedidiah/share/FixMyTransport-Poster.pdf

If the text was too long it could be cut "…" above the "Read the Full Story at" line.

[MyfanwyNixon]

This is excellent. I also agree with the 'read the full story' link.

One issue I guess we'll never be able to overcome is that campaigns with poor titles/body text will always look poor on a poster. EG, consider http://www.fixmytransport.com/campaigns/ac-conditiondo-we-need-it-constant.

I suppose savvy users will come to understand this feature and exploit it to their advantage.

We should have a prominent button to the posters as part of the 'toolkit' at the top of a campaign page, not rely on an Anorak to mention that the option exists.