What is Culture-Mood

Culture-Mood (or CMood for short) is a Web based widget that allows you to share with the rest of humanity (or at least the subset of it that accesses your Web page) your particular cultural interests at a given moment in time.

My Culture-Mood as of Sept. 1st, 2004, for instance, looks like this:

It just shows the "mood" I am, culturally: what are the books I'm reading, the music I'm listening to, etc. At any other time, my mood would change (once I finished the books, for instance), so it would be reflected in my Web page.

The idea is that hopefully, people would put their own CMoods online, and link them to the CMoods of other people, creating a social network around, well, cultural tastes.

If you want to have your Culture-Mood in your Web page, download the following javascript file, and put it in the directory where you have your Web page.

cmood.js

Modify the first lines within that file that contains the data of your own cMood:

var image = "cmood/ouatitw.jpg";
var cmood = new Array(4);
cmood[0] = new CMoodItem(
	"Soundtrack",
	"Once upon a time in the west. Ennio Morricone, 1969",
	"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000002W71/104-1607961-3213529?v=glance"
);

cmood[1] = new CMoodItem(
	"Movie",
	"Kill Bill Vol. 2, 2004",
	"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378194/"
);

cmood[2] = new CMoodItem(
	"Book (Literature)",
	"The Illiad, Homer",
	"http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=The+Illiad%2C+Homer"
);

cmood[3] = new CMoodItem(
	"Book (Scientific)",
	"Graph Theory with Applications",
	"http://www.ecp6.jussieu.fr/pageperso/bondy/books/gtwa/gtwa.html"
);

Each of the four entries consists of a category, a description, and an URL pointing to some Web site of interest related to that item (the URL can be an empty string if you don't have or don't know any interesting URL)

In addition, the cMood allows you to put an image (related to some of your four categories).

Link the cmood javascript file within your Web page by including the following text in the <HEAD> section:

<script language="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript" SRC="cmood.js"></script>

Finally, add the following text in the HTML code of your Web page in the place where you want to see it:

<script language="Javascript">
<!--
	showCmood();
//-->
</script>

And that's it! You have a Culture-Mood in your Web page!

Just a few guidelines:

Please don't remove the link to this Web page. It would help for other people to make their own CMoods
Don't use more than four categories. Why four? Is a manageable number, and keeps the CMood simple
Use just one image
Use simple categories. A suggestion of categories:
- Movie
- Album
- Book (Literature)
- Book (Scientific)
- Song
- Soundtrack
- Artist
- Theatre show

Use a simple layout. I would suggest you to use the same layout and styles I used here... but you're free to use the style that best fits the look and feel of your own Web page. If you peek at the HTML source of this Web page, you'll realize that I use CSS styles for formatting. The styles I used for my CMood are as follows:

	#cultureMood tr.row1 {
		background-color: #FFFFFF;
	}
	#cultureMood tr.row2 {
		background-color: #EEEEEE;
	}
	#cultureMood td {
		font-family: Verdana, Arial;
		font-size: 10px;
		color: #000000;
	}
	#cultureMood td.details {
		text-align:right;
		font-family: Arial;
		font-size: 9px;
		color: #808080;
	}
	#cultureMood a.details {
		font-family: Arial;
		font-size: 9px;
		color: #808080;
		text-decoration: none;
	}
	#cultureMood a.details:hover {
		color: #FF3300;
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
	#cultureMood a.symbol {
		text-decoration: none;
	}

Feel free to use them in your HTML file.