I got to use the Konami code… at work!
Ever since I played Contra on the old NES back in 1988, the Konami code has been firmly embedded in my brain. I may forget my kids’ birthdays, my MS Exchange password, and my home phone number, but I will NEVER forget the Konami code.
When facebook added the Konami code a couple years ago, I thought it was really cool. It was pointless (it just triggered lens flare effects whenever you did actions on the page), but it was fun. I immediately tried to think of how we could use the Konami code on my work’s site, but nothing really came from it.
About a month ago I started working on a beta project at work. I work for a chemistry journal publisher and am responsible for all of the front end code for our website (http://pubs.acs.org). For obvious reasons, one of the main page templates used by our customers is the Table of Contents (TOC) page. Nothing exciting has really been done with TOCs because, well, they’re just lists of articles. What can be done?
One of the things our site is constantly praised for is the fact that most of the article entries on our TOCs include an abstract graphic: a single image that attempts to convey the main point of the research. Visual representation of chemistry research doesn’t work for all chemistry disciplines, but it works very well for most. A majority of our readers tell us the images are actually more important than the titles.
So the beta project I’ve been working on is meant to enable the visually-oriented crowd. Instead of displaying a linear, single-column list of articles, I reflowed the TOC into a grid layout (which we are cleverly calling Grid View for now). Each article box in the grid provides only the bare minimum of information so that the boxes can be small enough to be easily skimmed; only the title, two lines of author names, and the abstract graphic are displayed. There are a lot more details to the project, but they aren’t important to this story.
Now usually when we launch a beta project, we do it on a separate site: JACS Beta. If the project involves using real content, we usually just copy it from the live production site and repurpose it for the beta project. That’s how I started on this project. I pulled the source code from a current issue of our flagship journal, and I put a large button on the page that activated this new grid view.
But then it struck me how awesome it would be to put this on the actual production site. Enter the Konami code.
All of the Grid View activation and layout is done on the front end; it’s all CSS and JavaScript. So the only thing I needed to do to make this work was put some JavaScript on our TOCs to listen for the Konami code and then activate the Grid View when it was entered.
The benefits to using the Konami code to activate Grid View are pretty substantial. Our customers can try the Grid View on any TOC they want, not just the single TOC I picked from the production site. We can also get great metrics on how the Grid View actually gets used.
And then there’s the viral factor. It just so happens that one of my organization’s big bi-annual national meetings is taking place next week. These meetings always bring in over 10,000 people, and there’s a lot of opportunity to generate buzz amongst our readers there. So we’ve created mysterious black cards and t-shirts with the Konami code on them and a url that directs to our beta project page. These will be handed out at our booth in the convention center at the meeting, as well as at some events focused on younger chemists who are more likely to be interested by the secret code. I fully expect the fun factor to get a whole bunch of people to try out the Grid View and then tell all of their chemist friends about it. It helps that the Grid View and all of its features is actually extremely useful to our readers, so people will probably want to share not only the fun, but also the actual feature with their friends and colleagues.
But the best thing about all of this? I got to use the secret code from one of my favorite childhood video games for a work project. That’s pretty awesome.
Oh, and if you want to try it out yourself, go to the current issue of JACS and type in the code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter.
Technoblahg
