Spenlen Media

When we first heard of this weekend’s Sacramento BarCamp we knew immediately that we wanted to participate in some way—not just as a participant, but as a contributor. We weren't sure exactly what that would look like until I was scanning the call for volunteers on the BarCamp wiki page.

One item jumped out instantly as a perfect fit for both our design sensibilities and our technical expertise: the conference badges. After confirming that no one else was taking care of the badges, Michelle got to work on a badge layout based on Andy Ford’s customization of the BarCamp logo. Her design is one of the most attractive conference badges I’ve ever seen:

Armed with Michelle’s design, I started work on writing some code to generate the badges automatically. We definitely weren’t interested in creating each badge one-by-one, and I wanted to incorporate some ideas I had seen floating around the web, including Gravatars and a little thing called a QR Code.

Probably the most interesting thing about these badges is the back side, which features a large two-dimensional bar code—the QR code—that contains all of your contact information. Think of it as an electronic business card. Anyone you meet at the conference with a camera phone can take a picture of the back of your badge and import all of your info straight into their address book.

I’ll be giving a brief presentation tomorrow talking about how we created the badges, from the RE Framework’s new RE_Pdf component for PDF generation using PHP, to integration with the Gravatar, Twitter, and Google Chart APIs to obtain the dynamic content. I will post a follow-up here Monday with the contents of that presentation and a link to the source code so you can create similar badges for your own gatherings.

If you’re at the conference this weekend and are one of the lucky recipients of these badges, here’s what you need to start scanning:

You’ll need a fairly new camera phone and will need to install a reader application. If you’re not an iPhone user, this website seems to have a good list of links of apps for Blackberry, Nokia, and other popular models. My phone is an iPhone, so I haven’t actually tried any of these apps, but please let me know if you find a good one for your phone and I’ll add a link to it here.

If you are an iPhone user, the App Store gives you many options. I downloaded all of the free offerings, and only one seemed to work reliably. In fact, most of the apps I tried wouldn't work at all, even when I made the barcode ridiculously large. The App you will want is called “Barcodes” and has a Zebra as its logo. Here’s an iTunes Store link for the Barcodes App.

Also, please drop by the registration table in the morning and say hello. We’re looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow!