There are many ways to display text on a computer screen, but most require at least some manual effort from the user. It’s annoying enough even if you’re dealing with one machine, but it gets even more of a hassle when you’re trying to display something on multiple devices of varying size and capability. That’s where BIGWORDS.PAGE by [SpeakingOfBrad] comes in.
It’s essentially a simple web page you can control via a carefully crafted URL, letting you create all sorts of text displays you can “distribute” to browsers on other devices with a simple link. So, for example, if you wanted to let everyone see what your favorite website is, you need only point the browser on your phone or laptop to https://bigwords.page/#Hackaday. As the image at the top of this post shows, you can also change the font and text colors by adding a few more values.
It’s an easy enough style of markdown that you can manually throw together links without much trouble, but there’s also a visual editor that will spit out a finished link once you’re happy with how it looks. Beyond simple text strings, you can also show images, create countdown timers, and even produce animated presentations that work across multiple pages of information.
The project is released under the MIT license, and the documentation includes instructions for self-hosting your own version. For most folks, that’s probably not necessary, but we can see it being useful if you want to support a number of displays on a local network without having each one connect to the Internet.
If you’re looking for a similar concept on a smaller scale, we recently covered a clever technique for pushing your own content out to a cheap desktop notifier.
Genuinely could find this really useful in a ton of situations. Love the simplicity of it.
Kudos to the creator for allowing offline and storing the data in a URL so it’s private. No spyware I see yet. Cheers. No sign-ups either.
Please… Information is stored in the URL’s FRAGMENT. Obviously the URL is sent to the server, since that’s how HTTP works. That’s only the fragment part that’s only kept in your browser.
heh i love how the most rudimentary use of html can produce a valuable result
though i went to “bigwords.page/#these words are big” and they weren’t really. it fit it onto the screen using the biggest font that didn’t introduce a line break. with the line break, spreading those words over 2 lines, you can use a much larger font. oh well. the thing is, i actually wanted the feature :)
i happen to have implemented a display that does scale text that way (the largest font that fits the box, including generated line breaks), but it uses imagemagick instead of html and i’m not sure the convenient way to size fonts like that in html or css or javascript. sigh.
Did you try reading the page?
https://bigwords.page/#these words%0Aare big
^Seems like this is what you want?
no i didn’t try reading the page. i don’t want to manually insert line breaks. like i said, i actually want a convenient big words interface :)
On my KaithemAutomation project I did something similar, except you can upload videos and it will play them and switch between them on the output URL, and you can combine multiple URLs into one display with four corner transforms for projection mapping.
I don’t have any internet support though, just LAN (or bringing your own proxy), and this has more text editing features. The visual logic editor has a few UI bugs but I have those fixed in the GitHub version.
Really nice project!
What fun. Reminds me of FOAAS (F-off as a service, also url driven) – cripes, its still there.. https://foaas.alexraskin.com/ and also lmgtfy which used to get mad use on the old coding forums.
if it stores the url in a local database, allowing you to refer to its message_id via some query string parameter, then it could also be used produce complex pages from minimal URLs
oh i see, in this version the message is always beyond the hash symbol, so it never goes to the server, so it could never be saved in a db. in a version one could make, though, it wouldn’t have to be so privacy-minded and then it could do that
Just use any tiny-url service on the resulting URL. But what’s the point? When would you write something like https://bigwords.page/?id=8085313 by hand anyway?
Internationalisation. Store multiple language texts for a given message, and provide the correct one based on the browser language.
Combine this with a NFC tag and that lets you set up custom signs quickly and easily.