Fame and Fortune await for those who play with IE8
Though I’d love to do this post in prose
I fear it would create some woes
At least for me if not for you
I shall henceforth revert to normal service
[I’m more an e. e. cummings or Charles Bukowski person anyway. Are you familiar with his early work? Why yes….]
Fortune and Glory
Oh yes, that’s what we’re talking about. I’m announcing here a brand new IE8 competition that could win you an Xbox 360 Elite. Not only that but beyond the competition there’s also a chance to have your ideas showcased across a range of Future publishing titles such as t3.com, gamesradar.com, photoradar, dcmag.com, pcplus, pcformat, and many more.
What do I do?
The official terms and conditions are here and that’s the official line on what’s required. Below is just my take to give you a flavour.
All you have to do is create an original accelerator, web slice or visual search provider for Internet Explorer 8. They’re incredibly easy to write and within no time at all you could have produced a winning entry. There are lots of resources available to help you on your way:
The criteria on which entries will be judged (eg innovative use of technology) are included in the terms and conditions.
How do I enter?
Once you’ve created your masterpiece you need to upload it to the IE Add-ons Gallery (see point 2 in the T&Cs) and send an email to fortuneandglory@live.co.uk to let us know about it. All valid entries received on or before 29th May 2009 will be considered for the competition to win an Xbox.
WIIFM?
There are 4 Xbox Elites to be given away, one for each of:
- Best accelerator
- Best web slice
- Best visual search provider
- The accelerator, web slice or visual search provider that is just the funniest / coolest / quirkiest of the lot
And there’s more! Future Publishing will be selecting 5 accelerators, 5 web slices and 5 visual search providers from the IE Add-ons Gallery in early June so you have a great opportunity to be picked. Future will be asking their readers to vote for their favourites and will reveal the winners of each category in August (note that the Future Publishing activity is not directly linked to our Xbox competition)
Please don’t…
One last point to keep in mind – please use public APIs or your own website. If you’re not sure about this, please ask a responsible adult. We don’t want any nasty screen-scraping. You wouldn’t like it if someone did it to you, would you?
Some ideas
Finally, a few ideas (some silly, some not so silly) you might like to consider or might get your creative juices flowing:
- Shared research: Perhaps use an accelerator to search Flickr, then add to a bucket (web slice) that I can share with others
- Use Silverlight to provide some cool visualisation (like Weather, football scores etc)
- Dumb - Whack-a-mole type stuff
- Practical - How about a nice currency converter or similar
