Hello, world!

Hello, world!

3.41pm: Welcome back to the Guardian's hack day live blog. If you were around yesterday, you'll know that our software developers have had two days off their normal work. Instead they've been hacking and working on prototypes of what the future of the Guardian's webs site and digital services might look like.

3.44pm: The format of the presentations is as follows. Each developer or team of developers gets just ninety seconds to explain and demo what they've spent the last two days working on. So far it looks like 25 hacks have been registered. If the URLs are available on the wider web, not just internally, we'll be sharing the links on here.

3.45pm: Why have hack days? Well, firstly they are fun. But secondly, they provide the opportunity to prototype new ideas. Next week we'll have a Star Chamber meeting to assess the viability of the ideas. The best ones will get assigned to a Product Manager, and may end up in production.

3.49pm: I've actually rushed back across London, where I've been at news:rewired, a conference about journalism and technology. There were quite a few Guardian staff talking, including Alastair Dant talking about puzzles and games, Simon Rogers teaching people about data journalism tools, and John Domokos talking about video. I was talking about the Guardian Facebook app.

3.52pm: Also at the event was Nicola Hughes, who has joined us as part of the Knight-Mozilla news fellowship programme. She tells me her hack will be finished over the weekend, and wrote this blurb for it:

How Far Have We Come - measuring the sporting achievement of the human race

What would happen if you lined up all the track and field world record holders and got them to perform their sporting achievement back to back from your front door? How far would they go and how long would it take them?

We can all read world records and go oooh, but do we really comprehend the speed, the distance and how useless we are in comparison? For that we need spacetime relativity! In fact, we just need a hack.

I have repurposed code that makes videos of routes from Google Street View images. Instead of creating a video it builds a website where you can scroll through the images. I call it the Street View Flipbook. Code can be found here.

The idea is to build finer grained flipbooks from iconic locations and make the athletes relay (heading towards the Olympic site) where every time the Olympic torch is passed on you get information on that particular record, the locations they traveled from and in what time. There should be a a map of them going along the route and a time clock that expands where hovered over. And that can all be done by linking the JQuery events to the scroll position. Like on this page.

The ultimate hack would be to embed it in a site as an iframe and build the scroll bar to look like a video player where the play button is set to scroll through the events.

3.55pm: Jonathan and Joanna will shortly join me in live blogging. It is incredibly hard to keep up with continuous 90 second presentations. Last time we tried to do this we ended up posting a huge number of mistakes - spelling colleagues names wrong and outputting broken mark-up. So bear with us. And also, as a non-professional journalist, expect crimes against the Guardian Style Guide

4.04pm: Brilliant. The first hack is called "Live blogging bug fix"

4.10pm: Matt Andrews, a Guardian Hack Day veteran, is up next. He's asking everyone to get out their phones. I sense a big crowd participation moment coming here. We've been directed to a bit.ly url called 'Guardian Worm', here. Wow! The worm is a live voting tool. You can register our approval - or otherwise - of an event in real time. Clever, pretty, simple. This one has potential.

4.10pm: Next up is Ivan our dapper developer sporting 3D glasses. He's the first victim of Matt's live voting system.

Ivan has turned our Sport front page 3D. We've only got one pair of glasses though so I'm not sure what the effect is yet… I'll let you know when I get my turn!

4.11pm: Rob Phillips and Andrew Mason have produced a variation on a hack that Matt Andrews did in October last year - it takes football data and plots the players on a pitch. Users can then share a URL to show their friends their squad picks. Rob has also added the ability to add Championship Manager style tactics on top of the squad.

4.16pm:Rupert Bates is next - he wants to make live football coverage better on mobile. On a tablet, he's demonstrating an app which lets you find out about today's matches, switch between different leagues - British, and European, and get current score and other match data from the Guardian API. Neat!

4.16pm:Rupert Bates is next - he wants to make live football coverage better on mobile. On a tablet, he's demonstrating an app which lets you find out about today's matches, switch between different leagues - British, and European, and get current score and other match data from the Guardian API. Neat!

4.19pm: Stephen Wells, otherwise known as "Swells" is now presenting his "Backchannel" (now, don't be cheeky!)

Actually it's a "second screen" app for when you're watching the telly. It brings together Twitter, Guardian live blogs and user comments on a particular topic in a way that's "all lovely" Swells says. It uses Twitter bootstrap and knockout.js.

I think Stephen might be bending the hack day rules a bit by taking up two timed slots. It's a interesting project though and amazing to see how quickly the tweet stream flows!

4.22pm: Haran Rasalingam and Nat Smith are up next, with a hack called "Trackmeister". They are project managers and wanted to make the most of our reporting tools. They have tied up Pivotal Tracker with Google's spreadsheets. It reveals how on track our tech team are with their projects. [Insert your own punchline about lazy programmers here]

4.24pm: Here is Ivan modelling 3D glasses for his hack.

4.27pm: It's Andrew Mason's turn. He wants to give readers something to do in between the gaps of live blog updates. (Readers, something for you in the next break, perhaps. OK maybe not quite so fast...) We're being pointed to a liveblog url on our mobiles...and...we're looking at a live visualisation of all the readers of this url (in this room) interacting with the page. It's amazing. It feels...very real-time, very participatory. Surely an application, somewhere, during live events, with a little more testing.

4.28pm: Now we have Martyn Inglis with "Annotate This" which takes the minute-by-minute on our football section and lets readers comment on each entry.

That means you can debate that foul 13 minutes into the game for the remainder of the match.

4.31pm: Two of our front-end devs are presenting now. Luca De Angeli and James Gorrie. Last hack day I got Luca's name wrong on the live blog, and he graciously waited a couple of days before pointing out I was an idiot.

This is a real-time view of comments being left on the articles in the sport section. The page has all the current stories, and then you can see as the comments are added by users in real time. You can scroll through entire threads as well, next to the stories.

It also featured a monkey wearing a sandwich-board saying "Keep it real". I have no idea.

4.34pm: Abdul Karim is up next - he's looking at sporting predictions, and in particular, how accurate Guardian journalists have been. He digs back through the season predictions for different years, aggregates them, and then sees how they went. For the 2010-11 season, we got 4 right. An improvement on 2009-10, where we seem to have only called 2 correctly!

4.35pm: Front end developer Chris Cross presents his "Olympic Grid" - a way of making sense of the 650 events that are taking place during the 2012 Games.

Each event is colour coded to show whether it's a men's or women's event and it appears on a timeline to show what time of day it's taking place.

4.36pm: Micheal Brunton-Spall, who organises our hack days, has just suggested everybody have a toilet break whilst the next demo gets set up. "He's like our dad", Lynsey Smyth from the UX team says.

4.39pm: Andrew Mason presenting his real-time mobile hack

4.44pm: A short pause so that we can sing "Happy Birthday" to one of our heads of product who has joined us via Skype. The atmosphere is nothing if not jovial...

4.45pm: Jenny Sivapalan and Sheena Luu are personalising Guardian content for you. You can like individual tags that are applied to stories and appear next to the image in an article (this one, for example, is tagged with things like software and programming), and next time you come back to the site a small component shows the latest content that matches those tags that you've liked. They picked 'Wildlife' as one of the tags, so now we've had our first sheep on screen, following the unexpected monkey earlier.

4.50pm: Robbie Clutton was the most prolific hacker last time around. Since then he has left us, moved to New York and joined Pivotal Tracker. "Which sucks", says Michael Brunton-Spall. I tell you what sucks even more - he's sent us a video of a couple of hacks he has done remotely in the US, and we can't get the video to work. Boo!

4.53pm: OK, the video is up and running. Robbie has built a dashboard which allows us to spot the most recommended comments in threads and go straight in there and respond. He thinks there is a real power in journalists going below the line and recommending and responding to users. Below the line is not a euphemism. Robbie has also scraped the comments from all the articles written by Charles Arthur, and converted them into an RSS feed reader so that Charles can subscribe to them and follow. The video finishes with a joke at the expense of the British weather.

4.54pm:Phil Wills has written a Chrome script which integrates with our authoring tools so that YouTube videos and comments which reference a particular hashtag can quickly be pulled into the draft version of an article. The journalist can then confirm or otherwise the videos' inclusion before launching the article. Looks like a handy addition to the CMS.

4.57pm: You're down the pub at 9.30pm on a Saturday and you're trying to decide if you should go home to watch Match of the Day.

But how can you tell without looking up the scores and ruining it all?

Well, Jerry Bate has an answer with "Watch or Not?" which takes stats and shows you total goals scored in a match; offers up a "watchability rating" based on attacks on goal and a "shock rating" using (I think) the likely predicted outcome versus the actual outcome.

If you're desperate to be put out of your misery, you can click and get the scores too. Nice.

5.01pm: Abdul Karim who works for our websys team is looking at football predictions. He doesn't care whether his predictions are right or not, but he wants to build a league table based on the predictions he has made during the course of the season. As the weeks go by, the league table builds up. Karim's prediction has put Liverpool top of the table. This hack is clearly flawed.

5.06pm: Michael Brunton-Spall (you know, the chap that's a bit like our dad) is now up to demonstrate… A ROBOT!!

Not quite sport-related, but robot was an earlier project aimed at trying to program it to avoid objects, unfortunately the result was "it tries for a bit and then just steams through the object".

"Not unlike some football players," someone in the audience suggests.

So, "after a surprising amount of trigonometry" Michael has had a second attempt. The robot scans the local area and stores a map.

It then calculates the best route around the object.

We've been waiting a bit longer than 90 seconds...

AND IT'S OFF!

Errr… backwards.

5.08pm: Jonathan Richards has done something with the 100 years of data that the Olympics 100m men's final has produced. He plotted the times of winners on a graph but that is a bit dull and rubbish. Instead he has made an animated thing where you can pit little running men against each other so you can see, for example, the difference between the times achieved in the 80s and Usain Bolt. He then consulted a zoologist to find out how fast a cheetah can cover 100m from a standing start, and you can add a cheetah into the mix. Spoiler alert: The cheetah wins.

5.14pm: David Vella presents his "Live Album" - a tool to make our community coordinators and moderators lives much easier.

It's designed for readers to submit photos to us in a simple way and then displays them in a lovely way for us (and maybe you) to see them all in a timeline. It also does some very cool things with the metadata in the pictures too.

5.16pm: Martin Belam is taking time out from the blog to demo his own hack - a way to read long-form articles in a more readable format. From a menu a reader selects articles of a type that they like (tagged 'Sport' etc.), and these are displayed in a less cluttered format in the browser. As a bonus, there's a readability widget which can send the articles to be read offline on your Kindle. Neat. And all this from a non-developer. Champion effort!

5.16pm: Wow. Here's omniscience for you. Grant Klopper and Graham Tackley seem to have found a way to track every click on every element, of every page on the entirety of the site. On each page in the app there's a box above every element showing its rank in a list of current clicks on that page. It's a little like the 'click heat map'-type application, only they've built it in 24 hours, and there's probably all kinds of customisations that can be explored. Brilliant.

5.17pm: Martin Reddington presented a hack last time around called "The Guardian Book of the Dead" - which was an iPad app based around our obituaries page. This time around he has worked with our fantastic designer Andy Brockie and the mysterious "Roger" to make an iPad app version of the "New band of the day" series. It includes the ability to play YouTube videos and Soundcloud uploads by the band. And you can go through to iTiunes to buy tracks and contribute to "the mobile software developers holiday fund."

5.21pm: Marc Jones and Iulia Alexandrescu want a way to come up with get better football predictions. Their hack trawls through historical results, does some buffin-y sums, and comes up with (hopefully) a more accurate sense of the result ahead of time. Applied to the last 4 weeks' games, their engine has correctly predicted between 3-5 games out of 10. Shows potential. Particularly if it invited readers' predictions alongside...

5.22pm: If you are a developer, and you've been enjoying reading about our hack day - you could be involved in the next one. Seriously. We are hiring. Our software team is 40-strong, but we are still looking for more. Not only do we need software developers, but we also have roles for product managers and technical project managers. More details here.

5.24pm: Developer Matt Andrews presents the Tour de Guardian, a project he has been working on with Alastair Jardine from our UX team.

They posted a topic on the Guardian Bike Blog asking what they should do for their hack. Most of the responses were related to tracking live races.

So the Tour de Guardian allows you to to hover over an update on the live blog and find our more detail about each cyclist in the race and the live positioning of the cyclists.

It needs a bit more data from race organisers to make it work, but it's a really amazing concept.

5.25pm: David Vella is up with hack 2. (How on earth has he done this as well as his excellent reader picture upoader?) It's a gorgeous, revolving picture wall which pulls images in from the API. The wall can either atomise a single picture into hundreds of parts, or pull in hundreds of different pics in thumbnails. Readers could also customise their own galleries and then share them. Fantastic.

5.27pm: Away from the room, Dan Catt has made a 24 hour drone voice radio station that automatically reads out our headlines, and marries it with ambient music. It is currently broadcasting live.

5.28pm: On Twitter, our mobile editor Subhajit Banerjee informs us that the mysterious "Roger" is one of our brilliant iPhone app developers, Roger Moffatt. I'm embarrassed to confess I've never met him.

5.30pm: Bill Thompson, once of this parish, and frequent writer on tech for the BBC and many other places, has gate-crashed the presentations. Michael Brunton-Spall apparently bumped into him randomly on a train this morning and invited him. He reminds us that the Guardian website used to be in a box on his desk.

5.36pm: Right, Martin here signing off for the day. Live blogging is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. The presentations are over, and the developers have headed off to the pub for a well-deserved beer. I hope you got some sort of sense of what a hack day is like, and will join us again for the next one...

5.37pm: Right, Martin here signing off for the day. Live blogging is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. The presentations are over, and the developers have headed off to the pub for a well-deserved beer. I hope you got some sort of sense of what a hack day is like, and will join us again for the next one...