An homage to Pages from Ceefax

I always loved Ceefax as a kid, and in particular (for reasons that probably indicate some manner of mental deficiency) Pages From Ceefax, the small non-navigable subset that was broadcast after-hours accompanied by a variety of big-band and easy listening music. And with a spare bank holiday weekend at my disposal and a girlfriend who is more accepting of my eccentricities than is necessarily prudent, I put together an HTML5 canvas + Javascript version that pulls in RSS feeds from the BBC news website and renders them in a hand-made sprite font:


Click image for project page – requires HTML5 canvas support

Two sprite fonts (one for character data and one for the graphics blocks from the header section) are combined with feeds from the BBC periodically downloaded by a cron job. Three feeds are in use in the above sample – the Top Stories, Sport and Business feeds. Each of these map to a single page (signified by the Pxxx number at the top of the view).

These are then split down into subpages so that both headline and byline are rendered together. For a given page there will be one or more subpages that contain the actual content – these are cycled between on a 15 second interval, and when all of the subpages of a given page have been shown the next page is slotted into place.

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