# Fight creative block with Oblique Strategies 🎨 Glide App **URL:** \ **Category:** Project Showcase\ **Created:** [June 6, 2020, 3:12pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406 "2020-06-06T15:12:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2020, 3:12pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/1 "2020-06-06T15:12:25Z")
Hi there, been using Glide for a couple of months and I love it 😍! Just wanted to share my first app that provides random user-specific content. So …are you stuck with a creative block? Try my Glide App version of **Oblique Strategies** , a card-based method for promoting creativity created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt [(wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies). > **[Oblique Strategies](https://i6uw9.glideapp.io/)** > > Get rid of your artist block! Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. ![Screenshot_20200606-164428](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/uploads/glideapps/original/2X/7/79c0d4b41d41081d44f26c9637a6a45452b0dbb6.png) ![Screenshot_20200606-163011](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/uploads/glideapps/original/2X/e/ed66fbb8f821d3c81ed707d192f289c9c7f25bc7.png) Special thanks to @Robert_Petitto for the user-specific and random content tutorials! > **For the curious...** > > …here’s the recipe: > > - Bulk imported card ids and text from this API: [http://brianeno.needsyourhelp.org/info](http://brianeno.needsyourhelp.org/info) > - Followed [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLur9db8NM&) by @Robert_Petitto to make the card inline list user-specific > - Followed [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBQKi3JZorE) by @Robert_Petitto (again! 😆) for the randomic generation of cards > - Followed [this Cloudinary blog post](https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_to_overlay_text_on_image_easily_pixel_perfect_and_with_no_css_html) to overlay the card text into a simple white rectangle picture > - Created a macro that erases a row on _card requests_ spreadsheet triggered by Google Apps Script every _x_ minutes so I don’t exceed the 500 rows free app limit (there are \>450 cards in here!) Hope you like it. Let me know what you think! Thanks ---
**Author:** ![sardamit](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/sardamit/32/263_2.png) [@sardamit](https://community.glideapps.com/u/sardamit)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2020, 3:18pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/2 "2020-06-06T15:18:58Z")
I love how simple this is. ---
**Author:** ![Robert\_Petitto](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/robert_petitto/32/25193_2.png) [@Robert\_Petitto](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Robert_Petitto)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2020, 4:19pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/3 "2020-06-06T16:19:53Z")
Very nice. Clean and simple. My favorite part is the basic table you have at the footer of the page in the about screen. What did you use for the blank space? An empty image? A text component with return characters? HTML? ---
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2020, 4:33pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/4 "2020-06-06T16:33:45Z")
Thank you Robert! For the blank space I used the same white rectangle image i used for card background 🙂 At first I tried with a rich text component using markdown and return characters, but I did’nt manage to get it work. Don’t know if there is a clever way to do that! ---
**Author:** ![Krivo](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/krivo/32/5363_2.png) [@Krivo](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Krivo)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 7:43am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/5 "2020-06-07T07:43:12Z")
Simplicity my friend 👍. Cool. I noticed a blank card. My third can was blank. ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/uploads/glideapps/original/2X/c/c9398e6940cefcaeb40fa55d0e8f7c45c6b59490.jpeg) ---
**Author:** ![sardamit](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/sardamit/32/263_2.png) [@sardamit](https://community.glideapps.com/u/sardamit)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 7:59am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/6 "2020-06-07T07:59:44Z")
Same here. Must be a minor bug. ---
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 8:06am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/7 "2020-06-07T08:06:43Z")
Thank you @Krivo! I also experienced that issue a couple of times and at first I thought it was something related to cloudinary call frequency limit or something like that …but guess what? You spot a bug! 🪲 Looking more closely I found the real issue here, your third card text should have been: > Are there sections? Consider transitions The “?” is the bad guy here, not beeing encoded it brokens the cloudinary URL: [https://res.cloudinary.com/{{my\_account}](https://res.cloudinary.com/%7B%7Bmy_account%7D)}/image/upload/w\_550,c\_fit,l\_text:Roboto\_24:Are%20there%20sections **?** %20Consider%20transitions/{{image\_path}}/white\_card.png I’ll try to fix using search&replace on my spreedsheet and [this reference table](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP) by W3Schools Thanks again for taking your time to try my App 🙏 ---
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 8:26am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/8 "2020-06-07T08:26:46Z")
Okay, it should be fixed now 🙂 For those who will encounter this special characters encoding issue using cloudinary text overlay, I had to replace these special characters: `? ( ) , ` So, for example, i replaced `?` with `%3F` Actually, it seems that you don’t need to encode these special characters `; ! - ' [] * .` ---
**Author:** ![Krivo](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/krivo/32/5363_2.png) [@Krivo](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Krivo)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 8:27am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/9 "2020-06-07T08:27:22Z")
@Vicio_Sciascia I suppose you can just encode the text you want to send to cloudinary [https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9199778?hl=en](https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9199778?hl=en) ---
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 8:33am UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/10 "2020-06-07T08:33:15Z")
Much much better solution, it works like a charm. I can also preserve card text readability on my spreadsheet. Thanks for share @Krivo! ---
**Author:** ![Vicio\_Sciascia](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/vicio_sciascia/32/4940_2.png) [@Vicio\_Sciascia](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Vicio_Sciascia)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 5:03pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/11 "2020-06-07T17:03:26Z")
I still run into problems with commas `,` my friend! According to [this support thread](https://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/200788162-Using-special-characters-in-Text-overlaying-) commas - even encoded commas - cannot be used in text overlays because collide with cloudinary-specific syntax. As suggested in the thread above, i had to double-encode commas by replacing `,` with `%2C` and then using the `ENCODEURL()` function. Hope it helps ✌ ---
**Author:** ![Krivo](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/community.glideapps.com/krivo/32/5363_2.png) [@Krivo](https://community.glideapps.com/u/Krivo)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2020, 6:47pm UTC](https://community.glideapps.com/t/fight-creative-block-with-oblique-strategies-glide-app/10406/12 "2020-06-07T18:47:47Z")
Thanks for sharing. It could be beneficial for implementations later on👍